Economist:After the sabotage on the Nord Stream -1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, Europe began to think about how important the underwater infrastructure is and how difficult it is to protect it, writes The Economist.
The ability to recover is the best defense.
He certainly knows. The Internet infrastructure is also under threat.On October 12, Russian President Vladimir Putin issued an ominous warning.
Energy infrastructure around the world is in danger today, he said. Putin issued this warning a month after the explosions damaged the Nord Stream -1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines laid from Russia to Europe along the bottom of the Baltic Sea. At that time, the pipelines were not used. But methane bubbles burst from the ruptures to the surface for several days in a row.
Putin's warnings are an example of outrageous arrogance. Russia does not take responsibility for the explosions. But few doubt that the Kremlin did it. By cutting gas supplies or threatening such cuts, he has been blackmailing Europe from the very beginning of his special operation in Ukraine. [...] This incident made us think about how important the underwater infrastructure is and how difficult it is to protect it.
Underwater pipelines and underwater cables have become widespread since the laying of the first such cable in 1850. In Europe, pipelines are important channels for the supply of energy resources. Some pipelines, such as the two Nord Streams, supply gas from Russia. According to others, oil and gas go from fields in the North Sea to Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. Underwater electric cables allow countries to supply each other with electricity. But there are much more Internet cables in the world than there are energy pipelines. The data analysis firm TeleGeography reports that there are more than 530 active and planned underwater communication cables in the world today. Their total length exceeds 1.3 million kilometers, and 95% of the world's Internet traffic is transmitted through them.
The leadership of Western countries is concerned, believing that this whole structure is a very tempting target for strikes by Russia and other states. Such concern appeared long before the outbreak of the armed conflict in Ukraine. "Today we are seeing such underwater activity of the Russians near sea cables, which we have not seen before," Rear Admiral Andrew Lennon, then commander of the NATO submarine forces, said in 2017. In January of this year, the Chief of the British Defense Staff, Admiral Tony Radakin, noted a "phenomenal increase" in the activity of Russian submarines compared to 20 previous years. There are no proven examples of cutting cables at the direction of state authorities. But there are a lot of rumors. In November 2021, the cables of underwater acoustic sensors were cut off the coast of northern Norway. Russian submarines often enter this area.
Of particular concern to the Western leadership is the Russian General Directorate of Deep-sea Research of the GUGI. He is subordinate to a variety of reconnaissance ships and special submarines, first of all, the world's largest submarine Belgorod, which joined the fleet in July. She has an unusually large depth of immersion. GUGI has combat swimmers, mini-submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles that can be used to cut cables. In 2019, a fire broke out in the Barents Sea on one of the mini-submarines of the GUGI Losharik, which claimed the lives of 14 Russians. All of them were officers, which means that the boat and the organization standing above it perform special tasks.
But the tricks with cables are not a Russian invention. The first military cable was cut in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, says John Ferris, a historian at the University of Calgary. One of the first operations of Britain during the First World War was the cutting of German communication cables in the Atlantic Ocean. Germany responded by cutting the Allied cables in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
In recent years, espionage has become commonplace. In 1980, the American operation "Ivy Flowers" was exposed for wiretapping Soviet underwater communication lines, including those laid in the Sea of Okhotsk. In 2013, Edward Snowden, an employee of the National Security Agency's Electronic Intelligence Agency, told about an Anglo-American project to wiretap at least 200 fiber optic cables in different parts of the world.
Other countries are also engaged in such activities. Speaking on October 11, Sir Jeremy Fleming, who heads the government communications headquarters, as the British electronic intelligence agency is called, said that China is trying to "redirect international data flows in the Indo-Pacific region to interception platforms inside the country." In 2020, the US Department of Justice recommended not to allow the joint US-Chinese venture Pacific Light Cable Network to connect America to Hong Kong. China, the ministry noted, intends to turn Hong Kong into the "main center" of traffic interception.
But after the explosions on the Nord Stream, sabotage is of much greater concern than espionage. These strikes have created incentives to develop means to identify underwater threats and respond to them (as well as to strike at enemy infrastructure, which is much less often talked about). On October 4, Britain confirmed that it would purchase two "multipurpose ocean hydrographic vessels" with state-of-the-art detection devices and underwater drones. In February, France published its strategy for the war on the seabed. As if declaring her intentions, on February 15, she sent her lieutenant underwater to a depth of over 2,100 meters to conduct a symbolic cable check. This is much more than the diving depth of conventional submarines.
But controlling the seabed is not easy. Last year, the Estonian Defense and Security Analytical Center published an article about Russian military robotics. It notes that Estonia and the other Baltic states have a very limited understanding of what is happening at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, due to the peculiarities of hydrology, lack of monitoring facilities and insufficient data exchange between countries. The conclusion there is literally prophetic: "It will be difficult to prevent Russian underwater vehicles operating in international waters from damaging critical underwater infrastructure facilities."
This does not mean that it is easy to cause such damage. Cables and pipelines can be damaged through cyber attacks, informed sources explain. But in practice, the attacker will have to approach the object. The first step in carrying out a sabotage action is to search for a target. If the purpose of the sabotage is a large and heavy pipeline, which is usually made of metal sections in a concrete shell, then it is quite easy to find it. Older communication cables are smaller and lighter, and they can shift under the influence of currents. New ones are often buried in the seabed, says Srinivas Siripurapu, head of research and development at Prysmian Group, the world's largest cable manufacturing company.
In addition, operators have more and more opportunities to detect damage and secret manipulations. According to Siripurapu, half of his company's new projects use "distributed fiber optic sensor detection" equipment, which allows detecting vibrations in the cable and changes in its temperature. But such equipment will not give an answer to the question of whether the problem is caused by some geological phenomenon, or it is the result of the work of an intrusive drone. It will also not allow us to understand which country sent this device. Establishing the ownership of underwater vehicles is a long and complicated process. The investigators could not check the pipes of the Nord Stream until the gas output from the pipes stopped. They still can't find irrefutable evidence (or any evidence at all). And sending a ship to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean to investigate the causes of failures and malfunctions will be much more difficult than doing it in the shallow waters of the Baltic.
In other words, a determined saboteur is likely to get his way. The consequences of a successful diversion can be different. There are few pipelines and underwater electrical cables. If you blow up one, it will not be easy to direct gas, oil or electricity along another route. Communication cables are another matter. The Internet is built in such a way that if one route is blocked, data can be sent along alternative paths.
And when it comes to communication between large countries, there are many alternatives. America and Europe are connected by at least 18 communication cables. Australia has 16 cables connecting it to other countries. A couple dozen cables come out of the west coast of America and cross the Pacific Ocean. This is data on known cables. But military and intelligence organizations are laying other cables, the location of which is not advertised (although cable laying vessels can sometimes be seen on shipping tracking websites).
"Many of these routes are repeatedly duplicated," says David Belson, who heads the data analysis department at Cloudflare, a large infrastructure firm that helps distribute traffic on the Internet. Redirecting traffic to another cable is quite simple. In July, when the aae-1 and smw-5 cables going from France to Hong Kong and Singapore failed, data transmission stopped for only four hours, and then everything returned to normal.
Nevertheless, many European officials say that the explosions on the Nord Stream should be a warning signal. After the explosions, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, proposed to conduct checks on the strength of the marine digital and energy infrastructure, as well as to start satellite tracking in order to detect suspicious ships. "The most important infrastructure facilities are a new front in the war," she said a few days later. "And Europe will be ready for this."
Dutch MP Bart Groothius has been studying this issue for many years and has been conducting numerous campaigns. According to him, von der Leyen's proposals are not enough. Even if companies find broken cables, he says, they don't always report it. "Now there is no collective body that would record all cases of this kind and their background. We don't have any statistics on this topic." Elizabeth Braw of the American Enterprise Institute agrees with him. According to her, this problem often turns out to be in a vacuum between the public and private sectors.
Some countries are trying to eliminate this vacuum. The U.S. Department of Energy has a regular dialogue with energy companies, says Bro. In July, the Italian Navy said it was conducting a "joint inspection and monitoring of underwater cables" with the Sparkle telecommunications company. As far as the editors of our publication know, the special services of Britain regularly contact the operators of cable systems.
The ability to recover is the best defense. After the start of the Russian operation in Ukraine, Europe hastily began to create a new infrastructure for the import of liquefied natural gas, which is delivered not by pipes, but by tankers from countries such as America and Qatar. And communication cables can be repaired fairly quickly. Phil Walker, who heads the Pharos Offshore Group company, which has laid more than 160 thousand kilometers of underwater cables, says that repair vessels can usually restore failed cables in two weeks.
The problem is that the profit from laying the cable is greater than from its repair. Because of this, the number of repair vessels has decreased somewhat. According to Walker, if a blow is struck on multiple cables at the same time, it will be felt immediately. Yes, spy ships and deep-sea drones attract attention. But in order for the underwater infrastructure to work reliably, it is necessary to have a solid supply of cable and a sufficient number of vessels to repair it. "It's kind of an art," Walker notes. "But for more than 30 years of my work in this field, little has changed in it."
