Keep in mind that it’s not just reaching the depth – that you gotta have the payload to haul an explosive package and at least enough manipulation ability to place it, and I don’t think that that $5k UUV has any manipulation capability, from a quick glance. Though the payload issue isn’t large, if you’re gonna rely on a tether, are willing to wait, and are willing to make your explosive package roughly neutrally-buoyant.
But, yeah, in terms of vulnerability, a $30k or $5k UUV, generally-available to the public, is more-or-less identical – like, there’s no real bar to getting either. And I can imagine that $30k definitely isn’t the lowest out there.
It is wild how exposed the pipelines are, and there’s MILES upon MILES of them
Yeah, I dunno how you’d counter it. You could have sensors and some kind of counter-UUV system down there permanently, all along the length of the thing, and at greater cost, that could maybe stop one UUV and warn authorities of trouble at that point, but I don’t know whether that could be combined with other capabilities to translate into an effective defense of a whole pipeline/cable.
In WW2, we defended convoys, but that was a single point, not something always spread out along the whole ocean.
It’s especially an issue for Europe, which has a lot of submarine infrastructure in shallow seas surrounding the continent. If the EU could get their politics together, they could probably do the equivalent of eminent domain, cut infrastructure corridors overland, but links to Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Africa are still gonna be submarine.