What’s in it for Sunak?
In the 1990s, Rene van Kessel worked at Van Oord Offshore, a Netherlands-based marine contractor, which built rock installations to protect undersea cables, power lines and oil pipes. At the time, fishing boat-related accidents were damaging so many cables and pipes that Kessel would joke with his bosses that they could rent a fishing boat, drag it over the cables, sever them and then do rock installation work for a profit.
“I know where the cables are. It’s public information. So we could have earned more money,” he says. “Of course we never did that.”
Kessel is a marine industry veteran with decades of experience. He and many others like him have watched with concern as the issue of protecting cables from fishing boats has gradually turned into a matter of national security.
Late last year, the Russian research vessel Yantar, tracked by the Royal Navy near UK waters, caused an uproar in London. British officials, including then defence secretary John Healey, were concerned that Yantar was a spy ship sent to map undersea cables, leaving the country’s internet access vulnerable.
But industry people like Kessel insist that the location of cables is public information and anyone can easily figure out a cable’s location.
“I think defence organisations and companies see a threat because they want to sell their products,” says Kessel.
“Cable sabotage has never been proven. But all these defence companies jump in and say they have a solution, which is not the case. You cannot avoid damage to cables,” he says.
“The military boys like their toys.”
In May 2026, the AUKUS security alliance between the US, UK and Australia announced that it will develop and deploy unmanned submarines for the protection of fibre optic cables. The UK alone will contribute $201 million for the project.
Rawle, the fibre-optic cable consultant, says that one of the first high-ranking officials who raised the possibility of an attack on cables was former British prime minister Rishi Sunak.
Sunak was an MP from Richmond, Yorkshire, in 2017, when he authored a report Undersea Cables: Indispensable, Insecure. The report highlighted the vulnerability of the cables and the threat posed by Russia, which he accused of causing an internet blackout in 2014 when it was annexing Crimea.
“I don’t know what Rishi’s motivation was in the first place, but that to me is where governments started to get aware that these cables actually carry 99 percent of the world’s internet traffic,” says Rawle, the consultant.
“It was really designed to get more budget for the British Navy, and it succeeded in the end. The British Navy actually now has a couple of vessels stationed around the North and Baltic seas to try to prevent sabotage.”
Over the years, several attempts have been made to cut the cables and extract copper, which fetches good money in the scrap market. In 2013, Egyptian authorities arrested three scuba divers who tried to steal a section of SEA-ME-WE 4 cable and a few years earlier, fishermen scooped up 80 tonnes of cable off the coast of Vietnam believing everything that lies in the water was up for grabs.
But these innocuous incidents have completely gone off the radar of politicians and military officials.
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Manufacturing a sabotage
The US and UK lawmakers have held multiple hearings on this issue and published detailed reports. What’s interesting is that experts who have come to testify have stated the same facts: it is not sabotage but fishing boats and accidental anchor-drag incidents, which tend to damage cables.
For instance, in November 2025, Tim Stronge, the Chief Research Officer at TeleGeography, which works with telecom companies, told the US House of Representatives Committee that cable networks experience around 200 faults a year.
“It is critical to understand that the vast majority of cable damage is accidental, not malicious,” he said in his written response.
Similarly, ESCA’s Vice Chair Peter Jamieson told the UK Parliament in February last year: “There is no evidence, publicly available, to say that Russia (or anyone else) is deliberately targeting cables. That’s not to say the threat doesn’t possibly exist.”
Experts say there’s no denying that the Russian military has used brute force against Ukraine and created a sense of insecurity for Europe’s eastern flank. Moscow has also been accused of cyberattacks on key installations in Norway and other European states.
However, they warn that too much emphasis on something that has never happened complicates the work of companies, which are building fibre-optic and power cables in the waters.
“We, in the submarine cable industry, used to complain that governments weren’t paying enough attention and weren’t setting up regulatory regimes that protected the cables,” says Rawle.
“And now we’re in a position where we’re actually a bit worried that there’s going to be government overreach.”
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