What could be more calm and obscure than the bottom of the deep blue sea? But in March, communication cables lying on the bed of the Red Sea were cut, disrupting 25 percent of data traffic between Asia and Europe. How the cables were cut is uncertain, but the waters have become a war zone as Yemen’s Houthi militants targeted civilian vessels and U.S. Navy ships plying the international sea lane.

Targeting infrastructure has long been a tool of war, recently revived in epic scale in June 2023, when the Russian military evidently destroyed the 100-foot-high, two-mile-wide Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast, violently flooding communities and farms downstream and causing incalculable deaths and economic damage.

But even simple accidents can have harrowing results. In March, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore was knocked out, after being unintentionally rammed by a container ship. The repair of the key vehicular link is projected to take four years.