BRF-02·
Severed Above and Below
Subsea cables and LEO satellite ground stations have become a single convergent communications-risk domain, with AI accelerating both attack and defense across the seam between them.
Severed Above and Below argues that two systems usually studied in isolation — the subsea cables carrying the overwhelming majority of intercontinental data and the low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations increasingly used as resilient backhaul — have converged into a single communications-risk domain. Threats to one now propagate to the other, and the ground stations where orbital and terrestrial networks meet form a concentrated and under-defended seam.
The paper maps the physical and cyber exposure of this domain: cable landing stations with predictable geography, repair fleets that are few in number and slow to mobilize, and satellite ground segments whose IT and operational-technology systems present a familiar attack surface. It shows how a determined state actor can combine kinetic, cyber, and grey-zone pressure to degrade connectivity while preserving deniability.
A central theme is the double-edged role of frontier artificial intelligence. AI accelerates defensive capabilities — anomaly detection, automated rerouting, and predictive maintenance — but it equally accelerates the reconnaissance, targeting, and coordination available to an attacker. The analysis frames the contest as a race along the seam between orbit and seabed, where whichever side integrates AI more effectively gains disproportionate advantage.
The brief recommends treating subsea and satellite infrastructure under a unified risk framework, expanding repair and reconstitution capacity, hardening ground-station cyber posture, and building cross-border agreements for rapid response to convergent failure. It is published through SSRN as part of an ongoing series on critical communications infrastructure.