Critical lifeline. Undersea cables and energy pipelines have become the backbone of daily life.
Cold War contrast. Back then, the only real underwater threat was ballistic missile submarines, and there was relatively little infrastructure on the seabed. Today, after years of incidents and attacks, the issue is a fixture of the global security agenda.
Airpress spoke with Elisabeth Braw, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of The Undersea War, which explains how the seabed is turning into a new battlefield.
Q: What led you to write this book, and why now?
A: My publisher and I decided on it in the summer of 2024. By then there had already been several cable incidents in the Baltic, the North Sea, off Norway and near Taiwan.
- The Taiwan case, to which I devote a chapter, was particularly dramatic, yet it received little attention at the time. Ships were behaving strangely, cables were being damaged and there was very little anyone could do. It was dramatic and mysterious, and that’s when I realized something had changed.
Q: This is a new strategic scenario compared with the past. What has changed since the Cold War?
A: During the Cold War there was a structural standoff between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, including between their submarine fleets, and we were always close to nuclear war.
- I remember the first time I read a newspaper, in 1981. It was about the Soviet submarine that ran aground off Sweden, and I remember the photo of the commander standing on the hull waiting for rescue. The Swedes didn’t know what to do: put them on trial or let them go?
- Yet nobody talked about cables or pipelines, because there had been no incidents of that kind. They kept working even though they could have been sabotaged, despite the world being one step from nuclear Armageddon. It’s a paradox: they could have been hit, and they weren’t.
Q: Today, though, the seabed is far more crowded.
A: Exactly. There are more data cables, more power cables (rare in the 1980s) and more pipelines. But the real difference is our dependence. In the 1980s, if someone had damaged a few cables, ordinary people would barely have noticed. Today we would notice the moment it happened. Cables work so well and carry so much traffic that they have become indispensable.
Q: Let’s imagine a scenario: if undersea cables were hit today, what would happen to everyday life?
A: Take Italy, which is connected by numerous cables. If one were damaged, little would happen, because another would absorb its traffic. With three or four cables out, you would notice a slowdown. But if every cable connecting the country were hit, daily life would grind to a halt.
- You leave the house and want to take the bus, but your credit card doesn’t work and you can’t buy anything. Your phone is unusable, and so is the television. Maybe you still have the radio, if you own an old one. You can’t contact anyone or go online.
- It wouldn’t just be an individual problem. Companies, being digitally dependent, would have to suspend operations. Hospitals and governments have backup satellite connectivity, but satellites carry only a tiny fraction of what travels through cables, so it would barely cover the most critical services.
- The financial sector has no alternatives and would shut down completely. It’s a scenario almost too big to imagine.
Q: Many people talk about the need for more redundancy. Would laying more cables be enough?
A: Many say so, but who would do it? We’re talking about enormous investments and very large infrastructure. Cables belong to private companies, which can’t be forced to lay more except through legislation.
- They decide on commercial logic, and each will conclude that its own risk isn’t high enough to justify a new investment. They would have to be almost certain that one of their cables would be damaged. From a national security standpoint, having more would certainly be desirable, but the private sector reasons by other criteria.
Q: In the book you also explore the legal and regulatory problems of protecting undersea infrastructure.
A: Yes. Unlike land, the oceans are a global commons. Only a 12-nautical-mile belt belongs to the coastal state. Beyond it lies the exclusive economic zone, where states have rights over resources but not jurisdiction, and then international waters.
- That’s where cables run, between one country and another, so they depend on everyone respecting the rules, because outside territorial waters coastal states have no authority. The system has worked so well that the world now depends entirely on undersea cables.
- But what would we do if someone stopped respecting the rules? We’re in no position to pass new global treaties. We can’t agree on anything, let alone a treaty to protect cables. UNCLOS exists and protects them, but the question remains what to do about those who ignore it.
Q: And what can states do to protect this infrastructure?
A: It’s very hard to say, because cables and pipelines are safe only in peacetime, or at least when countries behave. A new treaty couldn’t be passed. The Baltic countries are doing the most they can: they patrol the cables through a NATO unit, CTF Baltic, hoping that presence alone makes a difference. It seems to work, but it wouldn’t help against anyone truly determined to damage the cables.
- That’s the most unsettling aspect: states can’t do much more than they already do.
- The Baltic countries are ahead of the others in thinking about it, but even the best minds don’t know what more could be done.
Q: What role will the seabed play in future crises?
A: The situation is already difficult. We’re not at war, even though some say we are: we face continuous attacks, against infrastructure and beyond. It’s a dirty war, but not a real one. But what would happen in a kinetic conflict? Cables would be an obvious target.
- The most worrying thing is that Russia has very few undersea cables. It’s the largest country in the world and is connected over land, so it doesn’t need them.
- It can threaten our cables, while we could not threaten its, because they barely exist.
Q: So deterrence is missing.
A: Exactly. We can’t even say, “If you damage our cables, we’ll damage yours.” Even if we wanted to, there would be very few to hit.
Q: Can subsea drones and new monitoring technologies reduce this vulnerability?
A: Many companies are trying to sell these technologies to NATO and national governments, and that’s the market at work. But in my view we don’t need more surveillance. Thanks to ocean monitoring systems, especially in the Baltic but not only there, we already have an excellent understanding of when a suspicious ship approaches a cable.
- The problem isn’t understanding the threat; it’s knowing what to do once we’ve established that something is about to happen. We could have all the drones in the world monitoring cables, but the question stays the same: what do we do if we spot suspicious behavior?
- The coast guard can ask the ship to move away. If it doesn’t, the navy can be sent, but it would have to attack the ship, and the state behind that ship would react in turn. It’s very complicated, and monitoring doesn’t solve it.
- If technology were the answer, fine, but it only adds clarity about things we already know.
Q: One last thing. In the book you recount several real-life experiences. Why?
A: I think this book is a story about people. It’s a fascinating subject and I’d like readers to understand that. In many countries, people work hard every day to watch over the seabed, in industry and in institutions.
- They are silent heroes, because their task is almost impossible, yet they carry it out. We don’t know how much work lies behind it, but we should be very grateful to those who protect and defend the seabed every day.
