Modern Life Under Attack: 2024 Should Have Been the Year the West Woke up to Infrastructure Sabotage

Just how fragile is the modern world? More than most years, 2024 saw a surge of headlines about the destruction of the physical infrastructure that underpins modern life and makes our comfortable, automated world possible. Still, the question remains: is anyone paying attention?

Efficiency is at the core of so much we do now: reliable, high-speed data automates our world and brings information in real-time to billions. Sophisticated and lean logistics systems bring food and products to the consumers of the West with minimised waste and less capital tied up in massive stocks and stores. Even something as simple as living in a modest city apartment is possible based on the reassurance you never need to buy food in bulk or worry about heat in winter; the shelves are always stocked, and the power never goes out.

Yet 2024 has seen these discrete but essential systems, which many of us take for granted, damaged, taken out of service, or even sabotaged. Redundancy should exist, but the drive for efficiency and tight margins strips away fallbacks, and cascade failures can be unforeseen.

There’s a lot to talk about here. There are also some distinctions: Western governments can’t stop talking about cybersecurity — that matters very much, of course — but today, we’re going to really focus on physical infrastructure. And yes, the internet relies on physical equipment to work; we’ll get to that.

(If you want an essay on why 2024 was a big year in cybersecurity, you can ask questions directly to any Breitbart editor through the Breitbart Fight Club. Check it out)

Who Is Doing This?

What we’ve heard about a lot this year is Russia. Russian agents are waging a “staggeringly reckless campaign”, says the chief of the UK’s foreign intelligence spy agency MI6. Meanwhile, China is “pursuing access to our critical infrastructure in ways that could cripple our societies”, says the Secretary General of NATO.

This is undeniably true. But what we hear a lot less about is the growing tide of people who — we presume — aren’t taking cash from Moscow or Tehran for an emerging drumbeat of low-intensity sabotage against the life-support systems for modernity but launch attacks because of political conviction.

You may be surprised how often this happens, how often hard-left saboteurs and anarchist terrorists shut things down because they find electricity or the internet problematic or see them as an impediment to “the revolution”. Yes, really.

This is particularly worrying because, in the case of self-radicalised haters of Western civilisation, consumerism, or urbanism, there isn’t necessarily a great deal of signal traffic for intelligence agencies to intercept as a means to foil plots before they happen. Security services have had the very same problem with self-radicalised Islamists, for instance: catching terrorists before they kill so often relies on reading chat logs, and when there’s no mastermind, there’s no talk to catch.

In other cases, nobody is consciously responsible at all. The system, as constituted, can absorb a certain baseline of mistakes and accidents. Still, sometimes, a once-in-a-generation event hits an industry: think the Baltimore Bridge this year or the blocking of the Suez Canal in 2021. These take on a whole new importance if, theoretically, another such big accident occurs while the system is already stretched by relentless, low-level malicious actions of saboteurs.

Because these accidents teach us so much about what can happen and how to recover from the consequences, they are worth thinking about, too.

The Cable Cutters

This year has been, if anything, the year of the cable cutters. A story that would have been more or less ignored outside the local papers in normal circumstances gained global attention in July because it came as the eyes of the world were turned on Paris as it opened the Olympic Games. ‘Ultra-left’ terrorists are believed to have been responsible for railway signalling cables cut and burnt on several lines leading into Paris the morning of the opening ceremony.

The railways were totally paralyzed, and hundreds of thousands of travellers were stranded. The government called the attack “deliberate, very precise, extremely well-targeted… the traditional type of action of the ultra-left”. An anonymous email sent to French publications was couched in the far-left language and linked the action to the Olympics. It read: “Hey, call this a party? We see it as a celebration of nationalism, a gigantic staging of the subjugation of populations by States”.

This justification reveals a worldview so misanthropic it is absolutely astounding it doesn’t get more attention from either the press or government security services, which now as ever seem incredibly squeamish about discussing left-wing terrorism at all. Indeed, the story sunk without a trace within days, the last mention of it in French media being the authorities seeking help from the American FBI into who was behind the attacks over four months ago.

Railways are particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack because the infrastructure is so distributed that defending every yard of it becomes impossible. When it comes to operating high-speed trains, safety is absolutely critical: once the cables controlling the signals are cut or burnt out, there is simply no railway to operate; everything stops until repairs are completed.

The radical left knows this. In some cases, attacks are remarked to have been carried out by people who obviously had insider knowledge and little wonder: these networks are mass employers, and in some countries, railway unions harbour hard-left elements. An attack on Germany’s railway in 2022 had these characteristics, too.

Cables have been cut by saboteurs, again and again, for apparent political, anti-modern life reasons, including high voltage power in Italy in 2019, a radio transmitter in France, and internet cables in 2020. 5G internet equipment and even telecom company vans were burnt out in 2021. In 2022, a power station was sabotaged, and several cities were left without internet after a coordinated attack on several locations. In 2023, German railways were attacked by ultra-leftists, targeting “transport arteries of the capitalist infrastructure”. Again, the attackers would have to have “known the network”.

In Ukraine, Russia is using a sizable fraction of its GDP to take out Kyiv’s power and data networks to bring the country to its knees. In Western Europe, an enemy within does it for free, armed with nothing more sophisticated than bolt-croppers and oily rags. There is a serious vulnerability here.

And that brings us, somewhat, up to the present day, where cable-cutting takes on an even more newsworthy dimension as Russian-allied ships, it is claimed, drag their anchors on the sea bed around Europe’s coast in the hope of snagging fragile power and data cables on the sea floor.

At the time of publication, this is very much a developing story with many allegeds and accusations flying around, mainly that the instances of ships damaging cables are doing so at the behest of Moscow as part of the hybrid warfare push against Europe. Two undersea internet backbone cables were severed, it is said, by Chinese freighter the Yi Peng 3 in November, interrupting communications between Finland, Germany, Lithuania, and Sweden.

It seems there are few consequences for this type of action. While Swedish and Danish coastguards escorted the freighter after it was identified as the likely culprit, it simply left the area weeks later. The Chinese government declared it would do so, and Beijing was accused of obstructing an investigation.

There was a little more luck with a subsequent alleged attack when the Finnish coastguard boarded and seized a Russian-linked oil tanker that is said to have dragged its anchor over an international power interconnect and four internet backbone cables in the Gulf of Finland, cutting them in the process. Where the investigation leads into this ship, the Eagle S, allegedly carrying a large suite of signals intelligence interception equipment for spying on NATO navies, will be seen in 2025. Russia is said to be so upset that it threatens to use its warships to escort its merchant fleet.

While deliberate cable-cutting by state actors remains for now classified under the catch-all label of hybrid warfare for the purposes of NATO headquarters, it is the case that such action has been nothing less serious than the prelude to war in previous conflicts. And it is not the only way in which Russia, we believe, is engaging in a comparatively low-key but potentially disastrous campaign of sabotage against Europe. Consider, for instance:

GPS Jamming

This shouldn’t be a problem because aircraft should have redundant systems and the crew should be paying attention, but you still wouldn’t want to be a passenger on a commercial flight where a fully working navigation suite would have prevented a disaster.

When I wrote the first draft of this article, I said, ‘Still, it hasn’t happened yet’, and now this past week has seen Russia very probably shoot down a civilian airliner, and GPS jamming has been cited as a potential contributing factor to the loss in which 38 people died.

As it is, huge swathes of central Europe now experience GPS jamming daily, mainly civilian aircraft with a line-of-sight to where Russian jammers engaged in the Ukraine War are operating and are most vulnerable to this kind of interference.

A British government jet transporting the defence minister experienced this jamming in March, with onboard navigation and the cell phones of those abroad being rendered inoperative. At the time, a government spokesman said that jamming “puts an unnecessary risk on civilian aircraft and could potentially endanger people’s lives”.

Indeed. GPS has only been in common use for a few decades but already pervades so many areas of life, particularly where automation is prominent. It has already been proven entire passenger ships can have their course changed without the crew being aware by spoofing signals, something that should alarm anyone when very slight course deviations in narrow waterways can be fatal.

A spike in solar activity this year illustrated the fragility of this satellite-based system and how far its influence can be felt. In May, automated tractors ground to a halt at the height of planting season because their GPS-controlled navigation systems couldn’t see where to plant seeds in Minnesota. Again, the relentless push towards a more efficient, lean, automated world to squeeze every last efficiency out of our life-support systems can come crashing down so easily, in this case, in the most fundamental human system of all, agriculture.

Minnesotan farmer Patrick O’Connor was cited in one report:

O’Connor in Blooming Prairie had to stop planting after he couldn’t connect to GPS. “My tractor just didn’t work,” he said. “I had some decisions I had to make.”… O’Connor plants his corn in 30 inch rows and relies on the GPS for auto street on the tractors — basically to make straight lines and plant more seeds per acre.

Vice went with more colourful language:

…farmers who rely on GPS systems to navigate their machines through crop fields are seeing their highly advanced agricultural tech go apeshit.

Quite.

Parcel bombs

Guess what, Russia up to tricks again. We don’t yet officially know why a DHL cargo jet crashed in Lithuania in November as of yet. Still, there has been talk of sabotage, not least because of a series of parcel bombs this past year, allegedly planted by Russia in a plot to bring down large cargo jets over the Atlantic.

In recent months, incendiary parcels have started fires at sorting offices in Britain and Germany. In the case of one such fire in Birmingham, England, the parcel had already flown from Europe before igniting itself on the ground. The fact that very little information has been released on these incidents and the terse statements made lend credence to the idea that European intelligence agencies are probably taking this very seriously.

Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock publicly questioned whether the DHL cargo jet was “another hybrid incident” at the time of the accident, but speculation by public figures on this matter has since vanished. Lithuania has also warned against speculation, even as its national police say terrorism “cannot be ruled out”.

The Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 reminds us a theoretical parcel bomb attack on an aircraft doesn’t mean damage limited to the aircraft itself: wreckage from that attack killed 11 people on the ground as pieces of the jet landed on a small Scottish town.

Yet the impacts can go further, again impacting the discrete systems that keep the economy efficient.

Businesses free up vast amounts of working capital with ‘just in time’ stockholding and logistics. It’s very efficient, but it’s also very fragile: the shock in confidence and delivery delays after 9/11 saw companies start to hoard supplies, overturning years of that ‘just in time’ progress and absorbing billions from the economy, causing serious macroeconomic effects.

Arson

Yet far less difficult than building small, difficult-to-detect magnesium-based parcel bombs, getting them onto jets and detonating them at the right time is simply setting fire to buildings. This is back at the cable-cutting level end of sophistication, which makes it so concerning, as anyone with a grudge and a lack of impulse control can be a threat.

We know Russia is already offering cash payments—surprisingly small cash payments, in fact—to anyone willing to give it a go. It’s a worry if someone in the Kremlin decides that, compared to the high cost of a single technologically sophisticated cruise missile, paying malcontents to set fires across Europe at €200 a pop is more disruptive to the Western way of life at a fraction of the potential cost in escalation.

This year, a young man has been in court in the UK for allegedly taking cash to burn down a warehouse in London associated with a Ukrainian business. In Germany, two were arrested for allegedly planning arson attacks against “military infrastructure and industrial sites”, intended to “undermine the military support provided by Germany to Ukraine against the Russian war of aggression”.

So what next?

It is not without purpose that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has shocked some by suddenly talking about the U.S. exerting more influence over the Panama Canal and Greenland. This is all infrastructure, and if 2025 is to be the year where infrastructure sabotage does truly land in the mainstream, it’ll be proven that President-Elect Trump was merely months ahead of the curve.

The West is on the verge of really being seized, it seems, by intense feelings of vulnerability when it comes to infrastructure security. The vulnerability comes not just from a world that is less secure, meaning the likelihood of sabotage is higher, but also from Western states becoming considerably less competent at massive engineering projects, meaning the consequences of such attacks can be higher.

The new head of NATO, Mark Rutte, while warning China is “pursuing access to our critical infrastructure in ways that could cripple our societies”, also directly links industrial capacity to war readiness. Indeed, having industries capable of winning wars through superior production is a key element of deterrence, he says.

In other words, the incentive to target—say, for instance—power grid transformers is considerably higher if replacing them takes months, not days. However, hardening infrastructure, deep strategic reserves, civil defence, and intelligence work are all exceptionally expensive, and the argument for domestic security is hardly being heard.

Meanwhile, in many cases, cable cutters do their work totally free from personal consequences. We live in interesting times: good luck!

Happy New Year.