Tag Archives: Taiwan internet cables

The End of Taiwan? The End of U.S. and Europe Combined

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Prosecutors in Taiwan indicted  in August 2025 three people in a case about sensitive chip technology, alleging they stole information from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) to help one of TSMC’s top equipment suppliers, Tokyo Electron, win more orders…Taiwanese officials say the theft of trade secrets has grown over the past decade and point most of the blame at China. Over the past couple of years, Taiwan’s investigation bureau has probed more than 120 cases involving trade-secret theft. “If Taiwan’s technology hub falls or its technologies are lost, the impact will extend beyond Taiwan to the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world,” Sun Chen-yi, deputy director general of the investigation bureau at Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice, said in an interview before his retirement in July 2025.

Excerpt from Yang Jie et al., Three Accused of Stealing TSMC Chip Secrets to Aid Japanese Supplier, WSJ, Aug. 28, 2025

The Shadow War: Cutting Underwater Data Cables

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) mounted its first coordinated response to the suspected sabotage campaign against critical infrastructure, after another underwater data cable was severed in the Baltic Sea in 2025. NATO vessels raced to the site of a damaged fiber-optic cable in Swedish waters on January 26, 2025 where a trio of ships carrying Russian cargo, including one recently sanctioned by the U.S., were nearby. All three vessels are now being investigated as part of a probe into suspected sabotage of the fiber optic cable.

The incident is the latest in a string of alleged underwater attacks in the region that prompted NATO to announce earlier this month the formation of a surveillance mission called Baltic Sentry. It includes regular naval patrols, as well as enhanced drone, satellite and electronic surveillance of Baltic areas that are crisscrossed by critical infrastructure such as data and power cables, along with gas pipelines and offshore wind farms…Under international maritime law, a ship in international waters is under the jurisdiction of the country of its registration and can be boarded by foreign enforcement officials only with explicit permission of its owner or flag country. The captain of the Pskov, one of the ships suspected to have cut the undersea cables, cited the international law of the sea when he argued against an official request to steer his ship into a port in Finland…

In December 2024, Finland detained a vessel called Eagle S, an oil tanker belonging to Russia’s shadow fleet that is registered in the Cook Islands, on suspicion that it had deliberately used its anchor to cut a power cable connecting Finland and Estonia. In a midnight raid, Finnish special forces dropped from a helicopter onto the deck of Eagle S and captured the ship and its crew, which have since been detained in a Finnish port. 

In November 2024, an investigation was launched against a Chinese bulk carrier called Yi Peng 3, which cut two data cables in the Baltic after dragging its anchor for several hours, according to investigators. The vessel was loaded with Russian fertilizer. The probe continues. 

Excerpt from Bojan Pancevski, Suspected Sabotage of Deep-Sea Cable Triggers First NATO-Led Response, WSJ, Jan. 27, 2025

Who is Ready for War with China in 2027: Venture Capitalists

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Anduril Industries—named after a magical sword from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels—is central to Silicon Valley’s quest to take on weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has raised $3.7 billion in venture funding, incl The newcomers’ hope is that the Pentagon will eventually kill off what Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, calls “old legacy zombie programs,” like expensive jet fighters and attack helicopters, and instead buy autonomous weapons, like drones and uncrewed submarines. The U.S. military, Luckey and others say, needs large numbers of cheaper and more intelligent systems that can be effective over long stretches of ocean and against a manufacturing and technological power like China. 

Many teams inside Anduril are building only weapons that can be completed by 2027—the year Chinese President Xi Jinping has said his country should be prepared to invade Taiwan. The fictional sword for which Anduril is named is also called the “Flame of the West.” For decades, the U.S. government funded defense companies, like Lockheed Martin, to develop new weapons, ranging from stealth aircraft to spy satellites. But as the private-sector money available for research and development has outstripped federal-government spending, particularly in areas like AI, a new cohort of defense startups is using private capital to develop technology for the Pentagon. The amount of private capital flowing into the venture-backed defense-tech industry has ballooned, with investors spending at least 70% more on the sector each of the past three years than any prior year. From 2021 through mid-June 2024, venture capitalists invested a total of $130 billion in defense-tech startups, according to data firm PitchBook. The Pentagon spends about $90 billion on R&D annually.

The Pentagon is credited with helping to create Silicon Valley by plowing money into tech companies in the 1950s and ’60s, investing in electronics and buying microchips used in nuclear-missile guidance systems, satellites, and computers. That investment, says Paul Bracken, an emeritus professor of management and political science at Yale University, led the Defense Department to become, in effect, the “mother of all venture-capital firms.”

Excerpt from Sharon Weinberger, Tech Bros Are Betting They Can Help Win a War With China, WSJ, Aug. 9, 2024

Planning for the Invasion: Taiwan

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If China were to invade Taiwan, it might start by severing the 14 undersea internet cables that keep the island connected to the world. Taiwan is adding cables and planning how to defend their landing points. But it is also testing antennae in 700 locations, including some outside Taiwan. These would be able to send and receive signals by means of satellites in low orbit, like the ones Starlink uses. The goal is to make the antennae “as mobile as possible” to survive an attack…China has the capability to shoot down satellites. But Starlink developed by SpaceX (Elon Musk) is made up of over 4,000 of them and aims eventually to have tens of thousands…Unsurprisingly, Taiwan is looking to reduce its dependence on others including Starlink. Its space agency is developing its own low-orbit communication satellites. The first is expected to be launched in 2025.

China’s low-orbit ambitions are much larger. In 2020 the government filed papers with the International Telecommunication Union, a UN body, for a 12,992-satellite constellation. A year later the government established China Satellite Networks Group Limited and tasked it with developing satellite internet. At least seven state-owned and private Chinese companies are building satellite factories, with the expectation that they will soon be able to produce several hundred small communications satellites per year.

Officials in Beijing have developed a space-race mentality. Specific orbits and radio frequencies are “rare strategic resources” that Starlink wants to “monopolize”, warned the Liberation Army Daily in 2022….The Liberation Army Daily complains that there is only room for 50,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit and that Starlink may eventually take up more than 80% of that space. But the calculation is not that straightforward, says Juliana Suess of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in Britain. Imagine low orbit as a highway, she says. What needs to be calculated is how many moving cars that highway can safely accommodate. Much will depend on the size of satellites and their trajectories.” But at this moment, there is lack of norms surrounding traffic in low orbit.

Spacex has an important advantage. Satellites in low orbit don’t last very long, so the company replaces them on a regular basis. That entails a large number of rocket launches. Spacex has the world’s best system for that, the partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket. Now it is working on a much larger, fully reusable spacecraft called Starship which could launch hundreds of satellites at a time. Some Chinese companies appear to be trying to build knock-offs.

Excerpts from China in Space: A New Mandate in the Heavens, Economist, May 20, 2023