Fiber Conflict: The Undersea Cable Competition

The conflict between the authoritarians and the democracies for control over global development encompasses the information domain in a major way.

You have heard of cyber war but we are also undergoing fiber war, or the conflict over controlling the means of delivering information.

This encompasses the challenge of protecting the undersea cables which your nation and its allies are currently using.

Protecting is certainl a major gray zone area of conflict, as the Swedes are confronting with the Chinese.

A Chinese commercial vessel is accused of deliberately cutting undersea cables in the Baltic Sea.

This incident highlights the importance for China of the use of civilian assets in gray zone conflicts, an area where the West has a difficult time finding a credible way ahead, leaving a yawning gap in its security net.

But the fiber war also encompasses the competition to lay undersea cables as well.

Recently, a Wall Street Journal video provided an update on this competiton.

Last year, I conducted an interview with a leading European expert on the challenge of defending the West’s undersea infrastructure.

This is what I wrote in that September 2023 story:

Events like the destruction of Nord Stream II or the threats to North Sea Oil rigs or wind farms remind us of the central significance in today’s security and military calculations of infrastructure protection. Conflict is no longer focused simply on direct military action, but on so-called gray zone areas which are entailed in adversaries degrading the infrastructure of their competitors.

No area is of more importance in todays’ information age than undersea infrastructure in support of the movement of communications and data. Yet the focus to date of the maritime autonomous systems which work undersea issues has largely been confined to the oil and gas industry and to the question of repairing undersea infrastructure in support of that industry.

But now infrastructure protection and warfare includes undersea cables of various sorts, notably critical choke points in moving data, communications and information. And the role of maritime autonomous systems in supporting a security and warfighting effort in this area are critical in delivering mission success.

At the DSEI show in London, I was able to meet with Christopher Lade, Head of Marketing and Sales (Maritime) at SAAB UK, to discuss both the challenge and SAAB’s contribution to this area of security and defense.

Lade noted: “The relevance and vulnerability of undersea infrastructure has become apparent in the various examples you mentioned. The scale of the problem is significant because of how much infrastructure is on the seabed. For example, for the UK, more than 90% of our communications pass through undersea cables.”

The size of the infrastructure makes protecting it all virtually impossible. Lade underscored: “We need to focus on the critical choke points where all the cables come together.”

He argued that we needed to focus not simply on undersea infrastructure protection but upon what he referred to as “undersea infrastructure operations.” And such operations needed to encompass both defense and offense – if an adversary has decided to attack your undersea infrastructure, clearly one needs to consider offensive operations as well.

This is very much the same path as cyber operations has followed by the liberal democracies in considering that defense alone is not enough is this domain of security and defense operations.

The challenge among the European nations, for example, is to have shared data and to be able to operate on that data,

In terms of SAAB systems, Lade noted that SAAB’s Seaeye Falcon, their smallest Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicle or ROV can be used to provide information with regard to change detection, to identify where targets have been laid and then “we will go down and neutralize those targets and recover them.” Other SAAB systems which would participate in such an effort are their Sea WASP and the COUGAR.

But these are early days in shaping what Lade referred to as “undersea infrastructure operations” which he prefers to the term seabed warfare.

The challenge is to pull a maritime domain awareness picture together that includes the undersea seabed, not just the surface. The question though is whose responsibility is this nationally or within international organizations such as NATO or the EU? Sorting out who is in charge is critical in determining the requirements to be met by the underwater maritime autonomous systems to deliver the performance required for the mission.

This is clearly a work in progress but one in which maritime autonomous systems will provide critical capabilities to mission success.

This month NATO and Portugal are holding exercises in which maritime autonomous systems are being coordinated to deal with new ways to do maritime operations, including seabed operations.

And NATO has paid more attention as well to this challenge.

As a 28 August 2024 article notes about NATO focus:

Economic logic indicates that undersea infrastructure will remain vital for both global commerce and security into the foreseeable future. However, mitigating risk by finding secure alternative transit for these undersea supplies entails complicated economic and logistic predicaments. For example, Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is often more expensive to transport and manage via container freight than natural gas transported in pipelines. Similarly, governments and industry frequently discuss uploading more data traffic to satellites, but progress in this area has been slow. NATO members will continue to develop these alternative pathways, but in order to maintain the security of data and energy supplies, they must focus on reinforcing the protection of critical undersea infrastructure…

While expanded undersea infrastructure transforms the Baltic Sea region, similar projects are also ongoing in the Black Sea. Russia has long aimed to control Black Sea infrastructure with undersea pipeline projects and data cables supplying other states in the region. These attempts to dominate through dependency are now being challenged. An undersea Black Sea electric cable and adjoining data cable linking Romania with partners Georgia and Azerbaijan is being planned.

President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has affirmed that the project will provide “clean, affordable and secure energy sources” for Black Sea countries.

Expanded Black Sea infrastructure connecting Ukraine with EU and NATO members is likely to feature in plans for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction.

Like scenarios in the Baltic Sea, expanding undersea infrastructure under EU auspices increases connectivity to strengthen liberal political and economic order.

It nevertheless creates new questions on how vulnerabilities are to be secured.

Maritime security challenges are more severe around the Black Sea as its regional politics is less stable than in the Baltic region or North Atlantic.

The NORDIC Warden exercise has focused specifically on the challenge of security undersea infrastructure.