Only 60 cable repair ships exist worldwide with 2-4 week response times to deep-water breaks

When a submarine cable breaks, repair requires a specialized cable ship that can locate the break, grapple the cable from the ocean floor (up to 8,000m depth), splice the fiber, and relay it. Only ~60 such ships exist worldwide, most owned by a handful of companies (SubCom, NEC, Alcatel Submarine Networks). After the 2024 Red Sea cable cuts, repair ships were booked 8-12 weeks out. A coordinated adversary attack on multiple cables could exhaust global repair capacity for months. This persists because cable ships cost $200-400M each, take 3 years to build, and the commercial incentive to maintain excess repair capacity is zero because cable breaks are rare enough that operators treat repair as an insurance cost rather than a wartime necessity.