It seems that every day there are new articles about subsea telecommunication cables and pipelines being damaged or threatened. This heightened risk environment makes Ocean Specialists, Inc (OSI) tailored Cable Protection Services of greater value to asset owners and operators wanting to enhance their asset management.
On March 25, NBC News published a special report from the Baltic Sea on a naval demonstration coordinated by the HNoMS Hinnøy. The exercise was part of the ongoing training by a NATO patrol known as the Baltic Sentry. Their mission: to defend European subsea cables from deliberate acts of Russian aggression.
One of the Kremlin’s newest threats, according to NATO’s Mark Rutte, Secretary General, Russia is targeting undersea cables carrying vast quantities of data and power beneath the Baltic Sea to countries in northern Europe. “It is really state-sponsored sabotage, and in some cases even state-sponsored terrorism,” Mark Rutte, NATO’s secretary general, said at a recent summit.
The uptick in suspicious subsea cable disruption in the Baltic Sea—three major incidents between November 2024 and January 2025—has catapulted critical underwater infrastructure protection to the top of defense policy agendas and, as a result, the international news cycle. Networks of submarine communication cables, powerlines, and pipelines suddenly appear increasingly vulnerable to foul play. The Baltic Sea, while a relatively small body of water, is home to a significant number of high-value cable systems and pipelines, communications, and energy infrastructure that directly connects and fuels everyday life in the region.
There are hundreds of vessels transiting the Baltic Sea on any given day, and this makes providing sufficient naval protection for this distributed infrastructure a daunting and, frankly, insurmountable task. Rapidly advancing technologies designed to monitor and protect assets from above, on, or below the surface—such as unmanned vehicles and in-situ environmental sensors—have already begun to prove instrumental in bridging the gap. And this trend looks set to continue as technologies of this nature continue to scale. But technology can be a blessing and a curse, especially in the hands of bad actors.
Take a recent story published on March 22 in the South China Morning Post. This announcement caused significant ripples across the global mediascape: “China unveils a powerful deep-sea cable-cutter that could reset the world order.” Most subsea engineering efforts over recent decades, those discussed so publicly at least, have been conceived to facilitate and extend cable connections, not sever them.
The new submarine technology reportedly operates at a depth of up to 4,000 meters (13,123 feet)—twice the depth of most existing undersea communications infrastructure—and has been designed for use with both manned and unmanned submersibles. While the article suggested that the technology had been devised for scientific research purposes, it also suggested that the cutter can sever trans-Pacific cables near Guam as part of any future conflict with the United States.
Whether this news piece triggers genuine cause for concern or mere hype remains to be seen.
Either way, technology has propelled us into a new realm of critical infrastructure planning, protection, and response.
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN
Beyond the realm of deliberate sabotage, this problem of subsea asset resilience becomes more complicated by orders of magnitude. While naval patrols actively look for deliberate attacks from known adversaries, this form of concerted surveillance does very little to help mitigate the more common causes of major cable damage—accidental incidents from fishing and anchoring.
Despite the news headlines of late, targeted attacks on subsea cables make up a very small contribution (less than 1%) of the 70% of all cable failures deemed man-made. The remaining disruptions are due to a variety of environmental causes, including abrasion failures caused by tidal forces and currents acting on exposed cables and cable breaks caused by subsea earthquakes, turbidity events, and volcanic activity such as the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano eruption in January 2022 that ended up damaging a submarine fiber optic cable that took several weeks to repair.
Cable failures due to accidental human activity or natural environmental stressors are nothing new. We have been repairing cables since we began laying them across major expanses of open water in the 1850s. However, with increasing expediency in recent decades, the thing that has changed is our technological capacity to monitor, model, and understand what’s happening to the cables on the seafloor. This has enabled a degree of expert analysis in the planning, procurement, and protection of these valuable assets. There are, after all, 920,000 miles of in-service submarine cables looping the planet, carrying vast amounts of highly valuable, sensitive data 24/7/365. To put it mildly, they ensure global continuity.
ASSESSING RISK PROFILES
Offshore industries continue to invest in improving risk profiles associated with specific subsea infrastructure and identifying appropriate interventions to better monitor, protect, and mitigate potential outages. Knowing that incidents, be they planned or accidental, will occur every year (150–200 on average), owners should have the appropriate plans in place to safely service assets with rapid response techniques to help get ahead of any emergent or unexpected event, while minimizing the service and financial impact
OSI offers cable and asset protection studies and support services tailored to the owner/operators needs. The study can include Risk Analysis & Mitigation, Event Response Planning, Stakeholder Engagement and Cost Benefit Analysis, while the Cable monitoring and protection options include: Cable Monitoring (DAS and/or equivalent sensing), Site specific acoustic sensing, AIS integrated with cable monitoring, cable monitor trending for seafloor interaction, response planning and implementation etc.
Should you wish to discuss a review of your asset’s risk profiles or discuss your current monitoring and response options further, meet with the Ocean Specialists, Inc. (OSI) expert critical underwater infrastructure team at Sea-Air-Space ’25 on April 6–9, 2025, at the Gaylord Convention Center booth 650, National Harbor, Maryland.
Or contact us at contact@oceanspecialists.com.