Center for Maritime Security – Although UNCLOS was not adequately fabricated for irregular activities, NATO’s ability to ultimately address hybrid threat vectors solely relies on its political willingness. If adversaries suspect fissures within the alliance’s force structure, hybrid activities will escalate with grievous repercussions. Although NATO, particularly European member states, operates within a rules-based international order, allied governments must remain cognizant that adversarial states, most notably Russia, are increasingly willing to employ coercive and asymmetric maritime measures for strategic and geopolitical gain, despite being signatories to UNCLOS. Simultaneously, the United States must recognize that maintaining maritime order and alliance credibility requires operating in tandem with its European counterparts as a cohesive and perceivable hegemonic bloc, as the durability of U.S. strategic influence and the preservation of the state system’s rules-based order remain inherently connected to allied interoperability and joint deterrence.

War on the Rocks – What would happen if you woke up one morning and the internet was gone — not from a software glitch, but because someone had simply cut the wire? Threats to critical undersea infrastructure are rapidly escalating.

Covert Shores – China went operational with the world’s first underwater data centre on 15th May 2026. Placed in shallow water in the Lin-Gang Special Area off the coast of Shanghai. 

CIMSEC – To achieve true security for underwater infrastructure, maritime operational posture must transition from passive detection to active non-lethal intervention.

Defense News –  The Philippine Navy is exploring ways to monitor subsea cables as part of larger efforts to protect underwater infrastructure from sabotage and spying.

The War Zone – Finnish authorities have seized a Turkish-owned cargo vessel suspected of damaging an undersea telecommunications cable running from Helsinki to Tallinn, Estonia. This marks the first incident involving suspected sabotage of critical undersea infrastructure in the region since the creation of a NATO task force nearly a year ago to defend those cables, a NATO official told us.

Breaking Defense – Experts warned there’s no single government agency in charge of monitoring, defending and repairing the cables, and no effective deterrent strategy.

Telegeography – While new submarine cable systems are being built to expand global internet capacity, the maintenance of submarine cables has not seen the investment required to maintain these systems.

NBC News – Undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupted internet access in parts of Asia and the Middle East, experts said Sunday, though it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the incident.

Naval News – At the IDEF 2025 exhibition in Istanbul, held from July 22 to 27, Turkish engineering firm DATUM unveiled a new mini submarine concept called “Gurnard,” designed specifically for seabed warfare operations.

Telegeography – A new report details what is needed to sustain current service levels and reduce repair delays for the undersea cables that carry global internet traffic.

National Defense – NATO is establishing a center of excellence that will seek to deter, defend and defeat the sabotage of undersea cables and pipelines, a senior alliance leader said at the IT2EC training and simulation conference, held concurrently with the undersea tech conference.

(Thanks to Alain)

Center for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy – Controlling and monitoring the undersea domain is becoming crucial for the European Union, with geopolitical and economic interests at risk in specific sea regions ranging from the Baltic to the Mediterranean.

The EU’s cable security plan puts the feasibility and security of new European underwater infrastructure at risk due to the legal, political and military implications, especially given Russia’s new assertiveness.

Instead of fixed cable sensors, Europe should prioritise investing in two alternative and combined solutions: EU-funded projects for unmanned vehicles and innovative fibre optic sensing solutions.

UN – Today, submarine fibre-optic telecommunications cable systems are the backbone of our data and communications infrastructure, essential to the general functioning and integrity of the internet and the broader information and communications technology (ICT) ecosystem. While satellites and the new constellations in low Earth orbit are breaking ground, especially in terms of lowering costs and accessibility, they are still no match to the high capacity and low latency that today’s subsea cable systems provide. As more countries are connected, the security and resilience of the infrastructure becomes ever more critical.

In 2023, UNIDIR published its first report on subsea cables, entitled Wading Murky Waters: Subsea Communications Cables and Responsible State Behaviour. The initial scoping study sought to raise awareness of this essential transmission technology. Since then, a slew of new initiatives have been proposed, including at the international level, signalling both the strategic importance of the infrastructure and the need to strengthen security and resilience across all of its components.

This follow-on study sets out to understand what it means in policy and practice when governments qualify or designate subsea telecommunications cables as critical infrastructure (CI). The report draws from the CI literature to frame government approaches to security and resilience, identifying how government policy and practice interact with core CI concepts such as absorptive, restorative and adaptive resilience capacities. While subsea cable systems are generally designed and deployed with these capacities in mind, effective government action on security and resilience can contribute to strengthening them.

Defense News – Naval tech companies are sensing a new market for their equipment.

Breaking Defense – Undersea cable cut incidents will eventually spread to the Middle East, retired Vice Adm. Michael J. Connor and JINSA analyst Yoni Tobin argue in this op-ed, so the US must get ready.

BBC – Some companies are trying to monitor what’s going on in the vicinity of any cable – by using fibre optic signals to listen out for surreptitious underwater drones, or hostile vessels dragging their anchors along the seabed.

Center for Maritime Security – As U.S. policymakers seek to secure critical infrastructure, they must build resiliency in the undersea cable networks that underpin America’s national security. 

The War Zone – The deployment is part of NATO’s Baltic Sentry mission that was created after several suspected cable sabotage incidents.

BBC – How the West handles the threat of sabotage of undersea cables is just one of the many fronts on which it is attempting to deal with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

BBC – Meta has announced plans to build a 50,000km (31,000 mile) sub-sea cable across the world.

Telegeography – Cable faults were once an aspect of the industry entirely hidden from common view. Nowadays, any cable fault in the Baltic or off the coast of Taiwan is guaranteed to result in a flurry of headlines like “Another Undersea Cable Attacked in the Baltic Sea.”