News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I was looking at this back around the Nord Stream stuff.
You can get off-the-shelf small UUVs for like $30k that you could use to plant explosives from a boat.
It's actually a real issue for pipelines, because there's essentially nothing by way of treaties protecting them. Companies just kind of started building them, and nobody has really gone about methodically attacking them yet.
For cables, there's some treaty from the late 19th century, I think signed in Paris, that covers them. Which some countries have signed.
googles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Submarine_Telegraph_Cables
Yeah, 1884.
And even if the Houthis would consider themselves bound by it, Yemen isn't a party to the treaty.
I always hear about how cheap and easy it is to buy aerial drones, but really nothing about UUV's.
$30k seems doable for the Houthi, but prob not something they could mass replicate. And they're pretty limited as to which sections of the pipelines are viable targets.
googles too
I found a small one for $5600 with a 330 ft depth rating. It's tethered, but you could prob extend it:
UUV
It is wild how exposed the pipelines are, and there's MILES upon MILES of them. I guess people figured their depth would protect them... But tech keeps getting cheaper, more capable, and more accessible ¯_/(ツ)_/¯
Keep in mind that it's not just reaching the depth -- that you gotta have the payload to haul an explosive package and at least enough manipulation ability to place it, and I don't think that that $5k UUV has any manipulation capability, from a quick glance. Though the payload issue isn't large, if you're gonna rely on a tether, are willing to wait, and are willing to make your explosive package roughly neutrally-buoyant.
But, yeah, in terms of vulnerability, a $30k or $5k UUV, generally-available to the public, is more-or-less identical -- like, there's no real bar to getting either. And I can imagine that $30k definitely isn't the lowest out there.
Yeah, I dunno how you'd counter it. You could have sensors and some kind of counter-UUV system down there permanently, all along the length of the thing, and at greater cost, that could maybe stop one UUV and warn authorities of trouble at that point, but I don't know whether that could be combined with other capabilities to translate into an effective defense of a whole pipeline/cable.
In WW2, we defended convoys, but that was a single point, not something always spread out along the whole ocean.
It's especially an issue for Europe, which has a lot of submarine infrastructure in shallow seas surrounding the continent. If the EU could get their politics together, they could probably do the equivalent of eminent domain, cut infrastructure corridors overland, but links to Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Africa are still gonna be submarine.
Maybe some sort of cheap buoy network outfitted with sensors, GPS, and a longterm sustainable power source
Idk how feasible that would be and can't even estimate how many buoys it would take to cover everything
But you could anchor or even connect some of them directly to the pipeline itself. If it's a network, having every few buoys connected via fiber optic to the pipeline would allow them all communicate and transmit data fast af
Might be possible to collect submarine comms too if the tether acted like an antenna haha