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Lawmakers and experts warn subsea cables, satellites are critical single points of failure
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Summary
At a Senate Commerce hearing, witnesses told senators undersea cables carry the overwhelming majority of international traffic and are vulnerable to tampering; they also flagged satellitesas an expanding attack surface requiring encryption, supply-chain scrutiny, and redundancy investments.
Senators used the Commerce Committee hearing to press witnesses on the physical and cyber vulnerabilities of subsea cables and satellite systems and on options to improve resilience.
"Undersea cables carry more than 95% of international Internet traffic," Jamelle Jaffer told the committee and warned that repeated cuts or interference could leave the United States significantly degraded. Jaffer and other witnesses said landing stations and repair capabilities are also potential targets and highlighted concerns that much repair and maintenance capacity lies with foreign entities in the Indo-Pacific region.
Daniel Gudzinski of Comtech said satellites provide important failover capacity but generally offer far less throughput than cable links. He urged encryption be enabled end-to-end and wider adoption of secure-by-design practices for hardware and software components: "Most of the operators are not vertically integrated... it's important that we extend the threat sharing information and the opportunity down into the supply chain and ensure that we're building the right secure-by-design subsystems with flexible encryption protocols," he said.
Committee members and witnesses discussed practical measures: add cable diversity and redundancy; increase U.S. capacity to repair and maintain subsea cables; install better casings and surveillance for vulnerable routes; and adopt encryption and zero-trust principles for satellite links. Several senators urged treating intentional cable sabotage as a national-security incident and developing deterrence doctrines and protocols.
The witnesses did not propose immediate votes or new regulations at the hearing but identified several areas for legislative oversight and potential funding, including targeted grants or procurement incentives to increase domestic ownership and repair capacity for critical infrastructure.
