Reminds of the time AT&T started laying fiber optic in the neighborhood…. Cutting communication lines is what AT&T excels out when laying down fiber optics. Including water lines, sewer etc.
Houthis have transfer worthy skills and a potential employer if they lay down their scuds.
Whilst running IT company after retirement, we told our customers to not depend on only one pathway. Many options were available but the majority gave us a "nah, it won't happen to us". So while doing a data center for a large public utility, my senior data engineer calls and sez "we got a problem", and sure enough it was the ATT guy on a backhoe digging to install their fiber, and they pulled up Comcast and Knology fiber AND ATT's 256 pair old school phone/DSL cable. I think I still have that framed photo somewhere. And ATT had NoCuts out there to lay out the "clear pathway".
We called to have a gas pipeline marked because we were putting in drain tile. Contractor starts digging 15 ft. away from the flag. SCREEEECH! About 1/2 hour later comes the gas company. We'd hit their pipeline, didn’t cause a leak, but set off alarms.
The contractor had marked the no longer used pipeline.
We also took out a transcontinental phone line once. We were going to be charged for hitting it. My great-grandfather asked out deep the line was. "At least 32 inches".
"Then how'd we cut it with an 8" plow"? The cable was repaired and the reburied at the proper depth.
Locally, when a construction crew wants to dig on government owned ROW they must call in a "Sunshine One" survey. They are very quick to respond. The people who do the spotting are contractors. If they fail to mark all the underground utility runs with flags and/or paint and it gets damaged they are usually fired. Fair enough. But you are constantly getting noobs in the spotting workforce that way. /// Yup. If the utility wasn't laid in to the prescribed depth by code they're on their own when they coming crying for money to fix it. Our team paved about 250 miles of dirt road during my tenure. Most of the local utilities understand that things get cut even by the most careful and cautious excavators. They'd chalk it up as "just the cost of doing business" and fix it with no squawk. A lot depends on the rapport between the utility and the construction crew/inspector.
I can tell you for sure that aside from an unnamed major U.S. railroad the worst utility folks to deal with were AT&T. If you don't loath them then you never actually met them.
The ole SNL skit from the 70s rings true: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Even though they weren't named, AT&T probably sued. There was only one phone company, not much gray-area there. They're like DLA, their motto is, "What can't we do for you today?"
the rule at Google used to be 3 separate pathways into a datacenter. (there are a few examples of 2, but never 1). And it was just stunning how effective backhoes are at finding buried fiber in the spring (which is called "backhoe season" in communications land)
At some point you have to put SOMEBODY'S boots on the ground to run the Houthis out of the country. They are already at war with the Saudis. As usual, we'd have to kick down the door and do the hard work, but the Saudis (or partners) have to be able to supply enough men for an overwhelming security force to end all of this and just stay there. Then a rotating security force to back them up is all that should be needed..though these particular "allies" tend to get lax over time. We should do it before the Chinese get the idea to do it, get some PR and practical experience.
It doesn't help that "We" undercut them by taking the Houthis off the terrorism list and stopping military aid to the Saudis used for fighting in Yemen.
The Houthis are on an island, on one side surrounded by desert, on another surrounded by the sea. It's not hard, just need the will to starve them out.
And the will to accept, without apology, that there will be "collateral damage". If unwilling to accept that part of the task, then don't even talk about it.
Oh yeah? You and what Army? We just dropped end strength number by 24,000 to cover for recruiting shortfalls, and those now being recruited are dumber, fatter and druggier than we used to accept.
And we are $34 trillion in debt already playing cop for everyone else without even getting reimbursed for treasure (but not the blood) expended.
Time to let someone else take care of problems in their neighborhood, we got a border with millions of invaders coming across it that needs to be fixed.
Protonmail. I think that everyone who used Protonmail to hastily enlist in a militia after the last election is on some secret terror watch list now. I canxed my Protonmail account out of an abundance of caution. My original Hotmail account and its Boomer connotation sort makes me a marked man too.
Yeah, the government doesn't like it when I do my banking and personal health correspondence on a harder to intercept circuit. Never min the two dozen other reasons I'm on the list
Sounds like a fantastic opportunity to conduct an amphibious landing for real. The Marines, Navy, & CG can kick in the door, destroy everything of use to the Houthis, and promptly depart.
Call it a rehearsal for more seriously contested landings in WESTPAC. And it'll reveal a lot of weaknesses that can finally be corrected after the inevitable public outrage.
A key component of deterring undesirable activity is being able to identify the who, what, when, where, how and why the activity was carried out. Attribution helps with much of that. Details presented here are...sparse? We are told the Houthis cut the cables in the waterway recently. How? Dragging an anchor? Pretty observable, I'm guessing. Why? Piss off the oligarchs? Raise the price of oil?
Questions to be asked: If they did it, are the Houthis being used to avoid identifying who is really behind it (the why) without attribution? Doubting the Houthis level of strategic thinking here, but their willingness to do things for a price is not in question. IF they did, IMHO, little question they are being used. Obvious answer is the former Persian Empire...
Is degrading / destroying the hardline internet backbone for ALL users in the region behind the why?
As noted, we pioneered this sort of thing, other technically advanced entities have followed suit. Large detonations have taken out underwater pipelines recently, with attribution being (allegedly) inconclusive.
Occam's razor says the simple answer is right, BUT assumes you have all the relevant information about the who's etc. The WHY may be not so obvious unless you can rock solid attribute the who. But you can't rule out the obvious answer being all there is...Do the Houthis employ AT +T network engineers? Asking for a friend...(-;
Just like Vietnam. The Cong was always lauded for their ingenuity. Come on, if that was ingenuity, it included a large dose of clairvoyance. Somebody was clearly feeding them classified information (courtesy of John Walker), nobody just wakes up one day and decides to put perfectly-sized reflectors in the trees to thwart radar that is looking for trucks and personnel structures. They also don't just decide one day to crap in a bucket and hang it from a tree branch to trigger personnel-sniffers so that a large group of trees gets bombed instead of the group of camps where they're really hanging out. Same with the Houthis. They can't do any of this without somebody else equipping them and directing every move.
ah CDR, good Sir. knew this would be on the blog, the instant I got the news....via cable. such an obvious target, as "undersea cables" have been highlighted in several ways, several different venues, quite recently. If you read....you've read em.
But, made me wonder....how might India react to this more direct attack involving them? Once again, I say as I've said for decades, we should be making extra nice with India.
My favorite euphism: "active defense." Infinitely malleable justification for any action taken anywhere in the world against any parties!
If you want to understand how the USM bogged itself down in forever wars in the worst parts of the world, sacrificing irreplaceable blood and treasure, look no further than "active defense."
"Nice fiber network you got there. Be a real shame if something happened to it" sez the 3rd world ragheads fully knowing that we have zero redundancies. Give them free rein for another year and they'll be shooting down satellites.
If the Germans had bombed this nondescript little hut sitting above a picturesque Cornwall cove in early WWII, they would have severed -all- cable communications to the British Empire...
A country with no economy and a poor, uneducated population doesn't suddenly decide to go into the underwater cable demolition business. Surely, the US knows what's going on. Needless wars are good for business and for careers in the US. This is especially true during a major election year.
maybe its now time for an Iranian KILO class submarine to "mysteriously disappear?" The air and missile strikes do not seem to be delivering the deterrence message. Maybe time for some "compellence?
Reminds of the time AT&T started laying fiber optic in the neighborhood…. Cutting communication lines is what AT&T excels out when laying down fiber optics. Including water lines, sewer etc.
Houthis have transfer worthy skills and a potential employer if they lay down their scuds.
Whilst running IT company after retirement, we told our customers to not depend on only one pathway. Many options were available but the majority gave us a "nah, it won't happen to us". So while doing a data center for a large public utility, my senior data engineer calls and sez "we got a problem", and sure enough it was the ATT guy on a backhoe digging to install their fiber, and they pulled up Comcast and Knology fiber AND ATT's 256 pair old school phone/DSL cable. I think I still have that framed photo somewhere. And ATT had NoCuts out there to lay out the "clear pathway".
Yep. True “professionals”…
We called to have a gas pipeline marked because we were putting in drain tile. Contractor starts digging 15 ft. away from the flag. SCREEEECH! About 1/2 hour later comes the gas company. We'd hit their pipeline, didn’t cause a leak, but set off alarms.
The contractor had marked the no longer used pipeline.
We also took out a transcontinental phone line once. We were going to be charged for hitting it. My great-grandfather asked out deep the line was. "At least 32 inches".
"Then how'd we cut it with an 8" plow"? The cable was repaired and the reburied at the proper depth.
Locally, when a construction crew wants to dig on government owned ROW they must call in a "Sunshine One" survey. They are very quick to respond. The people who do the spotting are contractors. If they fail to mark all the underground utility runs with flags and/or paint and it gets damaged they are usually fired. Fair enough. But you are constantly getting noobs in the spotting workforce that way. /// Yup. If the utility wasn't laid in to the prescribed depth by code they're on their own when they coming crying for money to fix it. Our team paved about 250 miles of dirt road during my tenure. Most of the local utilities understand that things get cut even by the most careful and cautious excavators. They'd chalk it up as "just the cost of doing business" and fix it with no squawk. A lot depends on the rapport between the utility and the construction crew/inspector.
I can tell you for sure that aside from an unnamed major U.S. railroad the worst utility folks to deal with were AT&T. If you don't loath them then you never actually met them.
The ole SNL skit from the 70s rings true: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company." Even though they weren't named, AT&T probably sued. There was only one phone company, not much gray-area there. They're like DLA, their motto is, "What can't we do for you today?"
the rule at Google used to be 3 separate pathways into a datacenter. (there are a few examples of 2, but never 1). And it was just stunning how effective backhoes are at finding buried fiber in the spring (which is called "backhoe season" in communications land)
At some point you have to put SOMEBODY'S boots on the ground to run the Houthis out of the country. They are already at war with the Saudis. As usual, we'd have to kick down the door and do the hard work, but the Saudis (or partners) have to be able to supply enough men for an overwhelming security force to end all of this and just stay there. Then a rotating security force to back them up is all that should be needed..though these particular "allies" tend to get lax over time. We should do it before the Chinese get the idea to do it, get some PR and practical experience.
The Saudis aren’t willing to. They don’t have the society that will engage in the long term operation, and can’t hire the mercenaries.
It doesn't help that "We" undercut them by taking the Houthis off the terrorism list and stopping military aid to the Saudis used for fighting in Yemen.
The Saudis are perfumed princes, unable to do the work.....But they put on a nice parade.
Not sure they can do that well!
For the ME they're average.
it would help if the current POTUS hadnt demonized the Saudi prince when he came into office...
I prefer the Jeffersonian or Horatio Nelson phrase: ..."burn out nests of pirates..."
We have 100,000+ Marines.
I'm sure the chief of staff for the ASD for special operations won't be making any phone calls first to her good friends in Tehran.
The Houthis are on an island, on one side surrounded by desert, on another surrounded by the sea. It's not hard, just need the will to starve them out.
And the will to accept, without apology, that there will be "collateral damage". If unwilling to accept that part of the task, then don't even talk about it.
Let that collateral damage serve as a warning for anyone who is at the end of Iranian puppet strings.
Oh yeah? You and what Army? We just dropped end strength number by 24,000 to cover for recruiting shortfalls, and those now being recruited are dumber, fatter and druggier than we used to accept.
And we are $34 trillion in debt already playing cop for everyone else without even getting reimbursed for treasure (but not the blood) expended.
Time to let someone else take care of problems in their neighborhood, we got a border with millions of invaders coming across it that needs to be fixed.
Not our boots the place is a death trap.
Just go after the nerve points with a lot of missiles and drones.
Cables are a legitimate target. And I wonder where next they will be attacked.
As are satellite ground stations.
You can have a map sent to your inbox:
https://www2.telegeography.com/download-map-catalog
OhioCoastie: These are cool maps.
Drat. They won't send to a hotmail or gmail address.
Or Protonmail
Protonmail. I think that everyone who used Protonmail to hastily enlist in a militia after the last election is on some secret terror watch list now. I canxed my Protonmail account out of an abundance of caution. My original Hotmail account and its Boomer connotation sort makes me a marked man too.
Yeah, the government doesn't like it when I do my banking and personal health correspondence on a harder to intercept circuit. Never min the two dozen other reasons I'm on the list
Sounds like a fantastic opportunity to conduct an amphibious landing for real. The Marines, Navy, & CG can kick in the door, destroy everything of use to the Houthis, and promptly depart.
Call it a rehearsal for more seriously contested landings in WESTPAC. And it'll reveal a lot of weaknesses that can finally be corrected after the inevitable public outrage.
LOL, the last Commandant walked away from that mission. Marines are now all in on "stay-behind parties" and anti-shipping missiles
Punitive raids are so 1800’s….
What would Stephen Decatur do?
He would have been relieved long ago for harassment.
Or using the wrong pronouns.
Land Marines, burn them out...
B52 bomb cells from Diego Garcia... a 250lb GP in every 100 meter square.
that works. been there
Hopefully tell Lt. Bannon to get the job done, while he stays on the boat
I'm most of the way convinced that some form of this is the only serious response available at this point.
A key component of deterring undesirable activity is being able to identify the who, what, when, where, how and why the activity was carried out. Attribution helps with much of that. Details presented here are...sparse? We are told the Houthis cut the cables in the waterway recently. How? Dragging an anchor? Pretty observable, I'm guessing. Why? Piss off the oligarchs? Raise the price of oil?
Questions to be asked: If they did it, are the Houthis being used to avoid identifying who is really behind it (the why) without attribution? Doubting the Houthis level of strategic thinking here, but their willingness to do things for a price is not in question. IF they did, IMHO, little question they are being used. Obvious answer is the former Persian Empire...
Is degrading / destroying the hardline internet backbone for ALL users in the region behind the why?
As noted, we pioneered this sort of thing, other technically advanced entities have followed suit. Large detonations have taken out underwater pipelines recently, with attribution being (allegedly) inconclusive.
Occam's razor says the simple answer is right, BUT assumes you have all the relevant information about the who's etc. The WHY may be not so obvious unless you can rock solid attribute the who. But you can't rule out the obvious answer being all there is...Do the Houthis employ AT +T network engineers? Asking for a friend...(-;
Comedy gold. Russia, Russia, Russia.
https://news.yahoo.com/russia-may-just-carried-first-171928137.html
Just like Vietnam. The Cong was always lauded for their ingenuity. Come on, if that was ingenuity, it included a large dose of clairvoyance. Somebody was clearly feeding them classified information (courtesy of John Walker), nobody just wakes up one day and decides to put perfectly-sized reflectors in the trees to thwart radar that is looking for trucks and personnel structures. They also don't just decide one day to crap in a bucket and hang it from a tree branch to trigger personnel-sniffers so that a large group of trees gets bombed instead of the group of camps where they're really hanging out. Same with the Houthis. They can't do any of this without somebody else equipping them and directing every move.
ah CDR, good Sir. knew this would be on the blog, the instant I got the news....via cable. such an obvious target, as "undersea cables" have been highlighted in several ways, several different venues, quite recently. If you read....you've read em.
But, made me wonder....how might India react to this more direct attack involving them? Once again, I say as I've said for decades, we should be making extra nice with India.
The Houthis are allowing Tik Tok through the cables.
‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
- Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary August 3, 1914
Not to detract from our Houthi friends, but that Iranian ship milling about in the straits should also be looked at as a prime suspect.
Undersea cables are quite soft targets. Unlike pipelines, they are not buried or protected on the seabed.
Just like in 1898, you can drag a grapnel and find one.
Yeah, that ship should be used for target practice for our destroyers and subs.
It'd be a real shame if it met with an accident.
My favorite euphism: "active defense." Infinitely malleable justification for any action taken anywhere in the world against any parties!
If you want to understand how the USM bogged itself down in forever wars in the worst parts of the world, sacrificing irreplaceable blood and treasure, look no further than "active defense."
Stupid defense is more like it.
"Nice fiber network you got there. Be a real shame if something happened to it" sez the 3rd world ragheads fully knowing that we have zero redundancies. Give them free rein for another year and they'll be shooting down satellites.
What a surprise...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_of_Cienfuegos.jpg
If the Germans had bombed this nondescript little hut sitting above a picturesque Cornwall cove in early WWII, they would have severed -all- cable communications to the British Empire...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Porthcurno_Cable_Hut_-_geograph.org.uk_-_318569.jpg
A country with no economy and a poor, uneducated population doesn't suddenly decide to go into the underwater cable demolition business. Surely, the US knows what's going on. Needless wars are good for business and for careers in the US. This is especially true during a major election year.
I would argue Winston Churchill started the cable wars in August 1914 when he ordered the Royal navy to cut the German empire's overseas cables.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42367551
Probably covered in one of Sal's earlier historical surveys.
Indeed it was.
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2022/03/fullbore-friday_25.html
The Battle of Cienfuegos was fought (and it was a pitched battle) 16 years before....
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1931/march/cable-cutters-cienfuegos
maybe its now time for an Iranian KILO class submarine to "mysteriously disappear?" The air and missile strikes do not seem to be delivering the deterrence message. Maybe time for some "compellence?
Snapshot, tube two…