The response to submarine sabotage is a dangerous business

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The writer is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an advisor to Disruptive Industries, a threat intelligence company.

It’s not just about the two cables mysteriously damaged in Swedish waters in November or the cables cut in the Gulf of Finland a few days ago; Many underwater facilities are suffering damage. NATO has already launched a Critical Subsea Infrastructure Network in charge of monitoring pipes and communications cables. Owners and operators are also increasing surveillance, as are national governments.

But vigilance is only one step. Much more difficult is what happens when operators or armed forces detect malignant activity on the ocean floor. So what? Punishing such sabotage with military power could be decidedly risky.

The smooth operations of the globalized economy would not be possible without undersea cables, which carry everything from electricity to financial transactions. The Internet itself runs on almost 550 of them.

But the premise of both globalization and our complicated underwater infrastructure is peace, which is no longer guaranteed. In November, a perpetrator cut two submarine cables in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone. The incident occurred after a similar incident just over a year earlier, which affected an undersea cable and an oil pipeline in the exclusion zones of Sweden, Finland and Estonia. In February 2023, Chinese merchant ships cut the two undersea cables connecting Taiwan’s Matsu Islands to Taiwan proper. Nord Stream 1 and 2, in turn, were sabotaged in the EEZs of Sweden and Denmark in September 2022. And on Christmas Day, several cables in the Gulf of Finland were cut by a shadow ship, say Finnish authorities.

It is not surprising that surveillance is being strengthened. above. In response to the Christmas Day incident, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte tweeted on December 27 that it will “enhance its military presence in the Baltic Sea.” But tracking is only the first (and easy) part. What happens if more suspicious acts are identified?

Of course, affected countries may argue that submarine sabotage today is geopolitically They are linked and should be treated as a hostile state activity, not a criminal act. In fact, given the expanded surveillance, they are bound to uncover many suspicious activities that seem highly unlikely to be the work of common criminals.

However, detecting these politically motivated perpetrators would force countries to respond powerfully for fear of appearing weak in the eyes of their citizens and hostile states. “If you catch a ship red-handed damaging your infrastructure, then you have to take action,” says retired Rear Admiral Nils Christian Wang, former head of the Danish Navy.

That’s the dilemma. Prudence requires greater surveillance of underwater infrastructure, but avenging sabotage with military power would risk war. And although NATO has the military power to harm other countries, it would have difficulty – legally and politically – justifying such a response to submarine sabotage.

Furthermore, it is questionable whether countries have the right to use military power against saboteurs in their economic exclusion zones, much less on the high seas, where much of the submarine cables and pipelines are located. These facilities are not national assets but private property. “That makes it even more difficult to use military means to avenge the attacks,” Wang says.

Therefore, we must think carefully about what we want to happen when wrongdoing is discovered. “If you don’t want to use force, it’s better not to know what’s happening,” as Wang says. Instead, countries should focus on what is possible. Its navies and coast guard can patrol sensitive waters. They can monitor suspicious ships and crews, highlight ship owners, flags and crew nationalities. Holding shady sailors accountable would be far less dangerous than risking war.