Filenews 12 March 2024 - by Marc Champion
Yemen's Houthis believe they are at war with the West. With the news that three undersea fiber-optic cables were cut off the coast of Yemen and that one of the ballistic missiles they launch cost lives for the first time when it hit a container ship, it's time to acknowledge that we are at war with them. The much more difficult question is how to fight such a kind of asymmetrical enemy.
Challenges
What the Houthis demonstrate is that the developed West faces growing challenges on two fronts, from weaker enemies, ranging from non-state actors to cases like Iran and Russia. And for all the extraordinary power of U.S. aircraft carriers and helicopter carriers, the response to these challenges cannot always boil down to a tough response, drawing red lines, and consolidating deterrence — that is, Washington's standard strategy.
The first challenge is that progress in missile and drone production has "democratized," that is, expanded the availability of extremely powerful weapons that until recently were only available to wealthier nations. The suicide vest and improvised explosive device are replaced by the suicide drone and precision missile.
The second is a growing asymmetry of vulnerabilities. The Houthis prove in real time how goal-rich developed countries are. Rich, complex societies like the U.S., which had a Gross Domestic Product per capita of over $76,000 at the end of last year, have far more points to attack (and much more to lose) than a country like Yemen, with a GDP per capita of $650. In a globalized economy, much of the infrastructure that supports all this wealth creation is offshore.
So when the Houthis disrupt about 12 percent of global shipping, which runs through the Bab al-Mandab strait between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, it affects consumers in Europe and manufacturers in Asia, but not Yemen. If oil tankers have to switch to longer, more expensive routes from the Suez Canal, pushing up the price of gasoline at American pumps, the Houthis will be much less affected. The same goes for attacking dozens or more of international submarine data cables passing through the same strait. Meanwhile, if the Houthis kill U.S. military or civilians, that's a political problem for the Biden administration. If the US kills Houthi civilians, this is a political gain for the Houthis – as Hamas has recently demonstrated in Gaza.
The importance of cables
It is not yet clear how the three Red Sea cables were damaged. The Ministry of Telecommunications in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, denied Houthi involvement. The U.S. said the most likely explanation was that the Rubymar, a British-owned container ship that floated adrift after being hit by a Houthi missile, likely dragged its anchor to the cables last week before eventually sinking.
Either way, this is a teachable moment. Submarine cables are often damaged by trawlers or weather and repaired quickly. What is typical in this case is the difficulty operators face in putting $60 million worth of repair ships into the sea to restore connections in a war zone.
While risks can be overlooked – there is a lot of redundancy in the system – intercontinental data cables are critical infrastructure. Trillions of dollars pass through these small fiber-optic "highways" every day, not to mention the communications and data that the most sophisticated militaries rely on to operate. The incident in the Red Sea merely gave a glimpse of what could happen if they were wiped out by a determined enemy in a war context, just as Britain did when it attacked Germany's undersea telegraph cables at the start of World War I.
"At this point you see how the interests of the industry and the people involved in security differ," says Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank and CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington-based consulting firm. Almost all submarine cables are laid and operated by private companies that focus less on maximizing safety and more on minimizing costs. There's nothing wrong with that – it's the commercial motivation that led to the creation of the cables.
... and their security architecture
The result, however, is that cables tend to be laid in bundles. The places they return to land are public and are often also highly concentrated to reduce costs. Security is usually minimal. All of this is perfect for anyone thinking about causing a catastrophic disruption. It may not have been confirmed that an enemy state has cut someone else's cable connections in recent years—these things are hard to prove—but as long as countries believe they are at war, it will.
What is striking with the maps of undersea cables about 1.6 cm long. Mileage in the world is what they mean for relative dependencies. As a major continental power stretching from Europe to the Far East, Russia has only a handful of rather short-haul undersea cable connections. Yet for years it has been developing one of the world's largest surface and underground naval capabilities to approach and track them – or potentially strike and destroy them. Russia has, of course, many fiber-optic cables of its own, but these are located on land.
A smart move is to reduce our vulnerabilities. In the case of submarine cables, this means increasing durability by increasing their number. Enhance security at stations where cables reach land, as well as web-based surveillance programs – and therefore subject to the risk of hacking – used by commercial – private operators. Governments should also develop legal frameworks to push companies to more include "safety" in new cable systems. All of this has been known for years – British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote a paper on the subject in 2017, when he was an ordinary MP.
Cost
Meanwhile, the U.S. should resist the temptation to escalate its battle with the Houthis. The temporary loss of the Suez Canal shipping route until the Gaza war is over is a cost that the global economy can survive on. Targeting mobile rocket launchers has always been a difficult game, unlikely to act as a deterrent to the Houthis, as the attack by the "Great Satan" works positively for them politically. They even claim that, since the start of Western attacks against them, they have been flooded with tens of thousands of recruits.
To have a real chance of ending the Houthi threat to international shipping — or even cables — the U.S. Navy would have to target Houthi command and control centers in Sanaa and other urban areas, inevitably causing civilian casualties that would only add problems to existing U.S. ones in the Middle East. To achieve credible deterrence would require a full-blown invasion. Neither option would be worth the cost.
