Concern over Russian ships lurking around vital undersea cables
Source: CBS News
WASHINGTON -- Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the U.S. and its allies to worry the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths. Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation?
Unsurprisingly, Russia isn't saying.
But whatever Moscow's intentions, U.S. and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival's interest in the 400 fiber-optic cables that carry most of world's calls, emails and texts, as well as $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions.
"We've seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven't seen since the '80s," Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, told Congress this month.
Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russian-ships-undersea-cables-concern-vladimir-putin-yantar-ship/
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They were in the US, and it specifically dealt with the SF consulate and known operations conducted in and near there. The ops described were from 2016 and before, not recent.
The idea is that in the event of a war, the US could be sidelined in Europe very quickly. Cut some cables, trash some satellites, and watch the C&C centers in the US be completely cut off from Europe or Asia. Much of the logistics is provided for in the US, and you wouldn't even need to cut out each and every spy satellite to make the information completely inaccessible.
A lot of the Russian thinking presumably depends on Western cowardice. We're willing to take a strong stand and sanction 30 Russians in the event of their invading and basically annexing territory and producing hundreds of thousands of refugees and crippling the local government because we're sure that if we act any tougher all hell will break lose and the other side, fearsome and brave, certainly won't bake down. In other words, we're like the person who defends a kid against a bully but says, right up front, "I'm not going to lift a finger." If you require that defensive action carry no risk, you've basically ruled out almost all defensive actions. We insist that other people pay and die for our values and are always stunned when that either doesn't work or it yields a lot of resentment. After all, we emoted! We said the right things! But as long as we can blame the right people, some good comes from those foreign policy failures.
Meh.
Here's a 5-year-old link to a rough map of where many such cables are. 
