Comment by cabirum

Wasn't the nordstream incident mostly elucidated ?

I believe they are only wondering about details now and trying to hear the guys.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nord-stream-pipeline-explos...

https://www.intelligenceonline.com/government-intelligence/2...

https://www.france24.com/fr/europe/20240814-sabotage-de-nord...

Who did benefit most from the north stream sabotage? Not Russia, nor Ukraine, but the USA. Their gas replaced Russian gas imports.

The problem with Nordstream conspiracies was in fact that you could easily finger anyone as responsible, absolutely including Putin. The benefit to Putin (not "Russia" per se) is that it eliminated the revenue source from gas sales to Europe in the immediate term, and thus made "end the war now" less attractive to his domestic power base (because it wouldn't make them any more money for a few years).

A coup from disaffected underlings unhappy with the status of the Ukraine war is hardly a weird theory. He's fought off one already!

AKA satmarine

https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/us-navy-was-at-...

[dead]

Putin sabotaged the 3 centuries of Russia’s progress. The pipeline is just a noise here.

>he worked for a decade to get built

that is sweet of you. I just imagine Putin himself welding under water. Not the billions dollars steal by his childhood buddies what typically such Russian megaprojects are.

They have done this twice before. Russia weaponizes its energy. That has been the pattern.

Russia Georgia Energy Crisis (2006)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_...

Turkmenistan (2009)

https://www.rferl.org/a/Pipeline_Explosion_Stokes_Tensions_B...

> maritime law that allows any nation state to freely roam over important cables.

I'd like to see your version of maritime law that doesn't allow freely roaming over important cables. Your country's enemies would gladly drop cables totally encircling you and say "uh uh uh, important cables!" if you tried to leave your perimeter

It isn't either/or. Satellites and undersea cables serve different use cases. Cables are great for high bandwidth communications between fixed points but they aren't very useful to mobile military forces and they can't be used for anything beyond communications. We don't have enough ships and patrol aircraft to realistically defend undersea cables outside the littorals.

Satellites can serve multiple purposes including communications, navigation, overhead imagery, signals intelligence, weather, etc. They are also vulnerable, but it's possible to launch replacements faster than repairing damaged cables.

Inofficially Europe is already at war, whether it wants to or not. Maybe someone needs to inofficially keep a close eye on those cables and take inofficial countermeasures against inofficial sabotage acts.

The exercise left for the reader is to choose two countries that are not adjacent,

and try to plot a path between them without crossing an undersea cable:

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

We are at war. The United States guided an ATACMS missile into Russian territory yesterday. Imagine the absurdity of if China put missiles on the Mexican border and guided them into missile storage facilities 186 miles inside the border.

Kessler is often overplayed. Kessler trashes a low orbit and you wouldn't want to launch more birds into the trashed orbit. But, loads of com sats live in MEO or GEO, which is far too high for the numbers to work. They're all fine.

You will even see Kessler cited as some sort of barrier to leaving, which is nonsense.

Imagine there's a 1x1m spot where on average once per week, entirely at random and without warning a giant boulder falls from the sky and if you're there you will be crushed under the boulder. Clearly living on that spot is a terrible idea, you'd die. But merely running through it is basically fine, there's a tiny chance the boulder hits you by coincidentally arriving as you do, but we live with risks that big all the time. If you're an American commuter for example that's the sort of risk you shrug off.

Likewise, Kessler isn't a barrier to leaving, humans won't be leaving because there's nowhere to go. The only habitable planet is this one, and we're already here.

Not true. China has taken down 2 US satellites in the last few years.

The military is shifting toward LEO constellations for communications such as SpaceX Starshield. Kessler syndrome isn't a serious concern for those because the orbits decay fairly quickly anyway.

Could they place a giant electromagnet in space to collect debris?

Well obviously you need to have a supply of replacements in stock. From a military perspective, think of satellites as rounds of ammunition that will be expended during a conflict.

At this point it's a distinction without much of a difference. For better or worse, SpaceX has now been fully integrated into the US military-industrial complex. They have huge DoD contracts to build out the Starshield constellation, including the prompt replacement capability. The US government is going to treat attacks on our critical communications infrastructure seriously, regardless of whether the hardware is publicly or privately owned.