Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

It's more about the cost to bury the cable at a particular depth vs. the risk of it being cut (and expected cost to repair and outage cost).

There are guidelines to determine how deep to bury cable based on risk like the Cable Burial Risk Assessment. In shallow waters like the Baltic Sea, communications cables are buried to protect against things like fishing boats snagging them. For example, the C-Lion1 cable that was cut was buried a meter down.

In deeper seas where the risk of accidental cuts is near zero, there is little benefit to burying them.

I'm aware that Apache helicopters don't carry troops. My analogy was a quick aside and should have been clearer that I wasn't suggesting Apache helicopters deploying troops at sea. I was drawing a parallel to a more familiar circumstance because some might assume that a warship confronting a freighter at sea is similar to a routine law enforcement encounter like a police officer pulling your car over in your home town - where a well-informed citizen might reasonably assert their rights if the officer exceeds their authority.

However, a naval warship isn't typically used for law enforcement like customs, harbor police or immigration. A warship confronting a freighter at sea isn't at all routine, it's extraordinary. It would be more akin to having your car pulled over in your home town by a squad of special forces backed up by attack helicopters and tanks. Any rational person would immediately realize this ain't a routine traffic stop by local cops, it's something very fucking serious. A reasonable person might conclude today may not be the day to quibble over legal technicalities and instead just cooperate, at least until they figure out what the hell is going on. That's certainly what the captain of the freighter I was on decided. And as I stared down all those guns and twitchy locked and loaded sailors on the open sea, I fully agreed with him - despite usually being quite concerned about due process when I'm going about my business in the U.S.

The point being that the captain of that Chinese freighter refusing to cooperate with those warships is not akin to a civil rights enthusiast merely asserting their rights during a routine traffic stop. It's either somebody with a cavalier disregard for their own near-term safety or a person under orders they cannot afford to refuse, possibly reinforced by phone calls from family members suddenly in custody back home. Assuming that captain was being paid to drag his ship's anchor in a certain location, I suspect he now realizes it wasn't nearly enough to become an overnight seagoing celebrity who never captains a ship again. Not to mention being detained, possibly charged and having his ship impounded. Most people who hire freighter captains prefer boring, predictable pros who ensure their owner's ships arrive quickly and safely, not detained by warships on the international news. If he's lucky he'll only lose his license and be blacklisted for life by insurers.