This article discusses the increasing threat to undersea cables, highlighting recent incidents and the challenges of protecting this vital infrastructure.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an adviser to Disruptive Industries, a threat intelligence company. It’s not just the two cables mysteriously damaged in Swedish waters in November or the cables cut in the Gulf of Finland a few days ago; harm is being visited on many undersea installations. Nato has already launched a Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network tasked with monitoring pipelines and communications cables.
Owners and operators, too, are increasing surveillance, as are national governments. But surveillance is only one step. Far more difficult is what happens when operators or armed forces do detect malign activity on the ocean floor. What then? Punishing such sabotage with military power could be decidedly risky. The smooth operations of the globalised economy would not be possible without undersea cables, which carry everything from electricity to financial transactions. The internet itself is powered by nearly 550 of them. But the premise of both globalisation and our complicated undersea infrastructure is peace — which is no longer guaranteed. In November, a perpetrator cut two undersea cables in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone. The incident followed a similar one just over a year previously, affecting an undersea cable and one pipeline in the exclusion zones of Sweden, Finland and Estonia. In February 2023, Chinese merchant vessels severed the two undersea cables connecting Taiwan’s Matsu Islands with Taiwan proper. Nord Stream 1 and 2, in turn, were sabotaged in Sweden and Denmark’s EEZs in September 2022. And on Christmas Day, several cables in the Gulf of Finland were cut by a shadow vessel, Finnish authorities say. No wonder surveillance is being beefed up. up. In response to the Christmas Day incident, Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte tweeted on 27 December that it “will enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea.” But monitoring is only the first — and the easy — par
Undersea Cables Cybersecurity Nord Stream Geopolitics Military Presence
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