Germany tried to starve the British by cutting them off from North America and the empire that fed it.
We, more successfully, did all we could to cut Japan off from its energy sources.
The next global war will have some things in common with the past, but with a few updates.
Now and then little warnings come up. Dots, breadcrumbs, however you want to describe them … in hindsight they were there.
In what some are calling the “Cognitive Age” – information is a commodity our entire economy and military rely on. It’s a topic I touched on in 2017 and last month at the homeblog, time to bring it here.
I won’t do the commenting though, I’ll let a man everyone here knows do it for me.
From over at Bloomberg, Admiral Stavridis, over to you;
As the West considers the threat posed by China’s naval ambitions, there is a natural tendency to place overarching attention on the South China Sea. This is understandable: Consolidating it would provide Beijing with a huge windfall of oil and natural gas, and a potential chokehold over up to 40 percent of the world’s shipping.
But this is only the most obvious manifestation of Chinese maritime strategy. Another key element, one that’s far harder to discern, is Beijing’s increasing influence in constructing and repairing the undersea cables that move virtually all the information on the internet. To understand the totality of China’s “Great Game” at sea, you have to look down to ocean floor.
There it is;
380 submerged cables … carry more than 95 percent of all data and voice traffic between the continents. They were built largely by the U.S. and its allies, ensuring that (from a Western perspective, at least) they were “cleanly” installed without built-in espionage capability available to our opponents. U.S. internet giants including Google, Facebook and Amazon are leasing or buying vast stretches of cables from the mostly private consortia of telecom operators that constructed them.
But now the Chinese conglomerate Huawei Technologies, the leading firm working to deliver 5G telephony networks globally, has gone to sea. Under its Huawei Marine Networks component, it is constructing or improving nearly 100 submarine cables around the world. Last year it completed a cable stretching nearly 4,000 miles from Brazil to Cameroon. (The cable is partly owned by China Unicorn, a state-controlled telecom operator.) Rivals claim that Chinese firms are able to lowball the bidding because they receive subsidies from Beijing.
Just as the experts are justifiably concerned about the inclusion of espionage “back doors” in Huawei’s 5G technology, Western intelligence professionals oppose the company’s engagement in the undersea version, which provides a much bigger bang for the buck because so much data rides on so few cables.
Read it all, and then think two layers deeper.
