The increase in damage to undersea pipeline and cable infrastructure supplying essential services has important implications for integrated security risk management approaches, including protective security and business continuity planning. Recent examples of suspected sabotage incidents involving data, gas and electricity interconnectors in the Baltic Sea and Red Sea exemplify how hybrid warfare can have direct real-world effects on business operations. These events occur in the “gray zone” of conflict, where infrastructure is a target in general — and subsea interconnectors in particular — due to vulnerabilities, uncertainties and ambiguities associated with outcome, location, attribution and response (OLAR) characteristics. The response to hybrid warfare given these uncertainties requires coordination between private infrastructure operators and governments for operational and strategic resilience. Despite seeming to exist in the realm of nation-state and regional security interactions, there are practical steps businesses can take to increase resilience and mitigate risk.
There are approximately 450 subsea data cables covering 1.5 million km, a global network of undersea gas pipelines and an increasing number of undersea electricity interconnectors. Smaller countries, islands and net importers of energy (such as the Baltic states and the UK) are more reliant on these interconnectors than net exporters and countries with larger land masses (such as Russia, China and Iran). Approximately 150 to 200 faults occur each year, the vast majority (70%–80%) caused by fishing activities and deployment of anchors.1 Most of these faults are accidents. Some are not. There is a fundamental difference between engineering and operational planning for faults and hazards occurring through system design limitations, natural processes and hazards, or accidents involving human factors and losses caused by deliberate, targeted malfeasance (i.e., sabotage). NATO’s Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network,2 initiated in May 2024, underscores the seriousness of the issue of sabotage of critical undersea infrastructure.
Sources:
1 https://www.iscpc.org
2 Allied Maritime Command, “NATO officially launches new Maritime Centre for Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure