The cables beneath the Strait of Hormuz are a national security test

In March, I sat before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and described a vulnerability most Americans do not consider: Undersea fiber-optic cables. Roughly 95 percent of the world’s data, from financial transactions to daily messages, travels through these cables worldwide. They are thin, fragile and almost entirely unprotected from either seismic activity or deliberate sabotage by bad actors. 

Taiwan itself is connected to the world by 24 of these cables, landing at just eight stations. I told the commission what our own modeling shows: Severing three key cable clusters near the Bashi Channel would eliminate nearly all of Taiwan’s digital bandwidth almost instantly. The economic damage from cutting Taiwan’s digital lifelines amounts to an estimated $55 million daily, though that figure doesn’t include the effects of a stalled semiconductor supply chain. Taiwan owns no dedicated cable-repair ship, and the global repair fleet averages more than 40 days to fix a single break. 

Such sabotage has already taken place. Since 2023, vessels flying under flags of convenience but manned by Chinese crews have repeatedly dragged their anchors across the cables linking Taiwan to its outer islands and to the world. Sometimes these cables have been cut, resulting in significantly slower communication and Wi-Fi speeds on the outer islands, such as Penghu and Kinmen. 

These acts of sabotage are part of China’s continued gray-zone warfare meant to undercut Taiwanese sovereignty through actions designed to stay just below the threshold of war, to avoid both attribution and consequences. 

This is not only happening in........

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