Russia is signaling it could take out the West’s internet and GPS. There’s no good backup plan.

Russia puts the West ‘on notice’

For decades, the world has depended on data carried on cables running for thousands of miles underwater. In the early 20th century, the cables carried telegraph signals, and later, telephone calls.

Robert Dover, a professor of international security at Hull University in the UK, said the cables have long been seen as potential military targets, and both the US and USSR surveilled them during the height of the Cold War.

As the world has become more dependent on the internet, the cables have become increasingly vital. The cables now span around 745,000 miles and are responsible for transmitting 95% of international data.

“The growth in electronic communications has made the undersea cables — vital for international communications, the internet, finance, and so on — a point of vulnerability for nations who use them extensively and for those who don’t publicly have an obvious fall-back position,” said Dover.

Similarly, GPS signals are increasingly vital to the airline industry. They are used to safely guide planes to their destinations and land them.

Planes do have backup navigation systems in the event that GPS fails, but Baltic officials are warning that disrupted GPS signals can still put planes in danger.

During its war with Ukraine, Russia has enhanced its already sophisticated electronic warfare capability, enabling it to remotely scramble the GPS coordinates used to guide missiles and drones.

Those capabilities are now impacting commercial aviation GPS in eastern and northern Europe. Some analysts believe that may be an accidental result, but others believe that Russia is sending a signal to the West.

“The targeting of civil aviation GPS is a means by which to undermine the surety of Western publics in aviation, in particular, and shows the reliance on satellite platforms for ordinary citizens to navigate around,” said Dover.

“It also puts governments on notice about the political risks of mass transit accidents that have a plausibly deniable cause.”

A backup plan is urgently needed, says expert

According to Foreign Policy in June, NATO has begun taking more action to safeguard undersea cables, setting up a system that would automatically warn of attempted interference.

But Garson said it’s not enough, and more government fallback plans are needed in case the systems fail entirely.

“Countries need to not only take measures to protect but also to make sure that the communications system is resilient, e.g., with robust alternatives,” said Garson.

She said satellites transmitting GPS data often lack safeguards against attempted interference, while the task of protecting undersea cables often falls on the private companies that own and maintain them.

“It’s key to visualize these strategic futures and have a clear resilience plan that accounts for potential systemic risk and to keep countries operational if key comms infrastructure is compromised,” said Garson.

In its report this month, the CSIS called for the US to increase international cooperation to coordinate a response to a potential attack on cables.

It said that the current legal and international framework for undersea-cable sabotage was “complex and fragmented, with different international legal regimes determining responsibility and punishment.”

“When cables are sabotaged in international waters, there is no regime to hold the perpetrator accountable,” it said.