Attacks on undersea cables 'threaten 1bn people in EU and US' (2024)

A top NATO commander has warned Europe and North America are vulnerable to 'undersea hybrid warfare', with Russia having developed the capability to sever cables responsible for maintaining online communications.

Vice Admiral Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of the security alliance's Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) and former submariner, said: 'More than 90 per cent of [the] Internet is under the sea. All our links between the US, Canada and Europe are transmitting under the sea, so there are a lot of vulnerabilities.

'We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy, through cables, internet cables, pipelines...That's a very important concern because it's a security issue for nearly 1 billion NATO-nation civilians,' he told The Guardian.

V. Adm. Maleterre's stark warning comes just weeks after British think-tank Policy Exchange published a report urging government ministers to develop a strategy for 'seabed warfare'.

The 60-page report, backed by the likes offormer UK defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon, Air Chief Marshal Lord Peach and former First Sea Lord Admiral Lord West, said a plan to guard subsea assets 'must be incorporated into the Royal Navy's maritime doctrine at the highest order of priority'.

In a foreword to the report, Lord Peach wrote: 'Moscow has already begun probing Atlantic undersea infrastructure as the weak underbelly of our national security.

'Regular sightings of suspicious Russian activity in nearby waters, mysterious cable-cutting incidents, and the growing concern amongst our friends and allies about undersea infrastructure vulnerabilities, all signal that we have arrived in a new era of undersea warfare.'

A global network of undersea fibreoptic cables crisscrossing the ocean floor is responsiblefor carrying roughly 97 per cent of international communications.

The UK relies on such cables snaking across the Atlantic from the US and on to Europe.

According to the Policy Exchange report, '99 per cent of the UK's digital communications with the outside world depend on this cable network'.

If some of these cables were to be damaged or disabled, it would not just prevent Britons from accessing the Internet on smartphones and laptops.

Everything from agriculture and healthcare to military logistics and financial transactions would crash, effectively plunging the country into an unprecedented depression.

But as world powers, particularly Russia and China, continue to develop highly capable nuclear submarines and unmanned marine drones, these vital subsea networks are becoming ever more susceptible to sabotage.

And in shallower waters, such technology is not required - a ship could simply drag an anchor along the seabed to rip the cables apart, passing it off as an accident.

An incident of this nature unfolded in October last year, when agas pipeline and several telecoms cables connecting Estonia with Finland under the Baltic Sea were damaged by an anchor.

Investigators have not yet concluded which ship was responsible for the damage, but said that a Russian-flagged ship and a Chinese-owned vessel were in 'close proximity' to the site of the incident.

V. Adm. Maleterre explained that huge parts of these networks were developed by private tech companies, and as a result are not designed for protection against military threats.

'They didn't know that such hybrid warfare would develop so rapidly,' Maleterre said. 'And it's very difficult to have a permanent surveillance of every cable - it's not possible.'

But the difficulty of surveilling and monitoring thousands of miles of undersea cabling is just one vulnerability, according to Policy Exchange.

'The current tactical, operational and technological landscape affords outsized advantages to the aggressor over the defender,' the report concluded.

'Ease of access, and the near-impossibility of attributing intentional interference, combines with the difficulty of monitoring and policing such a vast area to an extent unparalleled by other infrastructure targets.

'The strategic benefits of disrupting these transnational digital connective systems makes hostile action, both below and above the conflict threshold, an immediate and future threat in emergent seabed warfare.'

Concerns over the security of undersea cables have endured for decades, and were thrust into the public consciousness amid the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022.

Some US and European officials initially suggested Moscow had blown up its own pipelines, an interpretation dismissed as 'idiotic' by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Instead, Putin has blamed the US, UK and Ukraine - all of which deny any role - while the White House dismissed a blog post by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersch alleging Washington was behind explosions as 'utterly false and complete fiction'.

Investigators are yet to conclude which party or parties were responsible for the attack on Nord Stream.

But fears were heightened one year ago when NATO's intelligence chief David Cattler declared Russia was likely mapping Western cable networks.

'There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Western life, to gain leverage against those nations that are providing security to Ukraine,' Cattler told reporters in May 2023.

'The Russians are more active than we have seen them in years in this domain,' he said, adding they were patrolling more throughout the Atlantic than in recent years and had also stepped up activities in the North and Baltic seas.