Cutting a cable costs you just a few tens of thousand dollars while fixing a cable costs millions. If you can just claim it’s ‘just an accident’, you can basically do it without consequence.
It also forces internet and possibly military communications to reroute, possibly over channels that can be intercepted.
It might also let you install a tap elsewhere on the cable without causing an obvious interruption. If it’s already cut, your tapping won’t be noticed. And if you see slightly worse signal quality when it’s repaired… well that’s probably just due to the quality of the repair work, I’m sure.
What do they even get out of cutting these cables? How does this benefit china in any way?
Cutting a cable costs you just a few tens of thousand dollars while fixing a cable costs millions. If you can just claim it’s ‘just an accident’, you can basically do it without consequence.
It also forces internet and possibly military communications to reroute, possibly over channels that can be intercepted.
It might also let you install a tap elsewhere on the cable without causing an obvious interruption. If it’s already cut, your tapping won’t be noticed. And if you see slightly worse signal quality when it’s repaired… well that’s probably just due to the quality of the repair work, I’m sure.
Your assuming that once it’s cut it can be spliced back together. I’m not sure how true that is after water ingress.
These repairs are relatively common. https://hackaday.com/2024/07/30/undersea-cable-repair/