Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly post where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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Psychologist Dan Simons does work in an area he calls change blindness. You might have seen some of his experiments. In one, you watch a 60-second movie of six people passing a basketball and you are instructed to count the number of times the people wearing white shirts pass the ball.
Since the people are constantly moving, you need to focus to count the passes. At the end, you give your correct answer: 15 passes. Then the video prompts:
Did you see the gorilla?
Wait, whaaat? Halfway through the video, a man in a gorilla suit strolls through the weaving players passing basketballs. Most people who take the test never see it. (Now that you know the real test, it won’t work on you.)
While the world watches with increasingly fixed horror on the continuation of Mr. Putin’s Unnecessary War in Ukraine, we’re going to lift our heads up and partake of some situational awareness.
Pop quiz: how do you prepare for an invasion?
Practice, of course.
Practice comes in many flavors. War games, for example, or combat air patrols pushing the boundaries of territorial air space. Maybe a little cyber harassment.
And then there's the Gray Zone, the in-between place where things happen accidentally on purpose. The “accidents” are disruptive but never rise to the level of requiring a response.
One such gray zone activity is happening right now in the waters between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland. The title of this recent article in Foreign Policy, says it all “China is Practicing How to Sever Taiwan's Internet.”
When most people think of the Internet, they think high-tech. They envision their emails and cat videos bouncing off satellites in space. Longtime readers of the two Navy Guys Debrief will know that's not true.
More than 95% of intercontinental Internet traffic flows over submarine cables.
The ocean is a tough environment and accidents happen, but when it comes to Taiwanese cables, accidents seem to happen a lot more often than normal and they seemed to happen when Chinese ships are around.
…it’s striking how often Chinese vessels have damaged the undersea cables connecting islands in recent years. It’s especially striking because it’s no mystery where the world’s 380 undersea cables are located. On the contrary, there are maps detailing their location to ensure that fishing vessels don’t accidentally harm them while dragging their nets. By and large, this works: The International Cable Protection Committee reports that each year there are between 100 and 200 cases of damage to the cables and only 50-100 of those incidents involve fishing vessels…The incidents involving damage to the cables connecting the Matsu Islands are, in other words, disproportionately frequent.
We did a deep dive on undersea cables (pardon the pun) in Counter Strike, our fictional account of the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. In that book, we drew on what is possible using modern submersibles and melded that with the famous Ivy Bells operation from the Cold War when the US spied on Russia for nearly ten years by tapping a submarine cable in the Sea of Okhotsk.
What is going on in Ukraine is a tragedy of historic proportions. The brave Ukrainian fighters deserve all of our physical and moral support, but they don’t deserve all of our attention.
Let’s make sure we spot the man in the gorilla suit.
If you like what you’re reading, why not share it with a friend? The more the merrier!
Speaking of Ivy Bells, longtime reader and reviewer Ken let us know about a significant passing in the submarine community.
Tommy Cox was a legend from the Cold War era of US-Soviet cat-and-mouse submarine games. After a twenty-year career as a US Navy submariner, Tommy went back to sea in submarines working for the US intelligence community.
What does that mean? If a submarine was deploying near the Soviet Union, they carried extra crew for signals intelligence purposes. (We called them “spooks.”)
Beyond his extraordinary service, there was a creative side of Tommy that makes him unique. From his obituary:
Tommy’s passion was his music. He created a unique genre of music honoring the U.S. Submarine Service producing three albums of military music and one spiritual album; he wrote and published a book entitled “Tango Charlie” regarding this music. He sang professionally for fifty years.
Unfortunately, Tommy was before David’s time in the Silent Service, but his legacy lives on. And now, in honor of Tommy Cox, here’s Big, Black Submarine.
On his radio show, National Security This Week, host Jon Olson and Professor Ryan Gingeras from the US Naval Post-Graduate School discuss the many facets of Turkey and Greece’s fractured relationship, among other topics.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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