Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
How to Break the Internet
1.5k Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we discuss the security of deep-sea internet cables with Dr. Bruce Jones. Bruce Jones is a senior fellow with the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution; he also works with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies, and is a consulting professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. His current research focus is on U.S. strategy, international order, and great power relations. His most recent books on the topic are “To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers” (Scribner, 2021); “The Marshall Plan and the Shaping of American Strategy,” (Brookings Institution Press, 2017); and “Still Ours to Lead: America, Rising Powers, and the Tension between Rivalry and Restraint” (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). Dr Jones has extensive experience and expertise on intervention and crisis management. He served in the United Nations’ operation in Kosovo, and was special assistant to the U.N. special coordinator for the Middle East peace process. He was also a senior advisor to Kofi Annan on U.N. reform and served as deputy research director to the U.N.’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, as well as lead scholar for the International Task Force on Global Public Goods. Dr Jones holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics, and he was the Hamburg fellow in conflict prevention at Stanford University.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. In each episode, we'll sit down with leading experts to discuss dangerous activities. From assassinations and airliner shootdowns through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the Dangerous Act to seeking to conduct these operations and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them. In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions.
00:00:34
Speaker
However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Hosts and Guest Introductions
00:01:05
Speaker
I'm Louis A. Prisant, the founder and co-editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm a researcher in the field of intelligence and espionage with a PhD in intelligence studies from Loughborough University. I'm an adjunct professor in intelligence at Science Pro Paris, and in my day job, I provide geopolitical analysis and security focused intelligence to private sector corporations.
00:01:26
Speaker
I'm Cormac McGarry. I'm an Associate Director at the Global Specialist Consultancy Control Risks, where I help companies from every sector understand the implications of global geopolitical issues on their business.
00:01:41
Speaker
So today we're discussing how to break
Topic Introduction: Subsea Cables Vulnerabilities
00:01:43
Speaker
the internet. And this topic is timely as at the time of recording accusations of subsea data cable sabotage have emerged following the severing of cables in the Baltic Sea in mysterious circumstances. Roughly an hour before recording, the Swedish government announced that at least one of these incidents was caused by an external force or tampering. So to discuss this topic and all of the various politics around it, we're joined by Dr. Bruce Jones.
00:02:08
Speaker
Dr. Jones is a senior fellow with the Strobe Talbot Center for Security, Strategy and Technology in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. He also works with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies and is a consulting professor at the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.
00:02:25
Speaker
His current research focus is on US strategy, international order, and great power relations. His most recent books on the topic are To Rule the Waves, How Control of the World's Oceans Shapes the Fate of Superpowers, and The Marshall Plan for the Shaping of American Strategy, and Still as to Lead America Rising Powers and the Tension Between Rivalry and Restraint.
00:02:46
Speaker
We'll put links to those books in the show notes. Dr. Jones has extensive experience and expertise on intervention and crisis management. He served on the United Nations operation in Kosovo, was the Special Assistant to the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process,
00:03:01
Speaker
He was also a senior advisor to Kofi Annan on UN reform and served as deputy research director to the UN's high-level panel on threats, challenges, and change, as well as lead scholar for the International Task Force on Global Public Goods. Dr. Jones holds a doctorate from the London School of Economics, and he was the Hamburg Fellow in Conflict Prevention at Stanford University. Well, Dr. Jones, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here.
00:03:27
Speaker
With a really interesting background like yours, fascinating bio there, the question we'd like to ask our guests to start with is how did you get into your line of work for young students thinking about getting into a similar field? How did you get in there and any advice you'd share with them?
00:03:43
Speaker
The oldest way in history, I followed my father's profession. My father was a diplomat. I spent my first undergraduate years doing artificial intelligence, maths, and anything other than would take me in my father's footsteps and then naturally gravitated to them anyway and studied international relations.
00:04:05
Speaker
I was in Tanzania at the time of the Rwandan genocide and got extremely interested in that. That led me into a career on civil war management, peacekeeping, and the like.
00:04:16
Speaker
After 9-11, I started looking more broadly at international security questions, terrorism, American foreign policy, and I was at the UN in the wake of the Iraq War when the, quote unquote, rising power started to assert themselves in international affairs and I became interested in the kind of changing dynamics of international security and eventually began to understand that the maritime space was a crucial space in which that was playing out and that led to the book, To Rule the Waves.
00:04:45
Speaker
And the conclusion of that book brought me to this question of the undersea domain, which I think is absolutely crucial to what's about to happen in world affairs.
Importance and Vulnerabilities of Subsea Cables
00:04:55
Speaker
So Bruce, broadly, the topic we're going to discuss is the question of how to break the internet, but specifically, what are the vulnerabilities around subsea cables and communications infrastructure with regard to the idea of breaking the internet?
00:05:11
Speaker
I guess in popular parlance, there's this conception that there might be like a single point of failure somewhere under the Atlantic and you can deploy some sophisticated weaponry to break it. You know, so just to kind of get the conversation rolling here, how reliant is the internet actually on subsea cables? Is there a single point of failure or are we kind of exaggerating how reliant the internet is on this subsea infrastructure?
00:05:40
Speaker
So first of all, I want to say that if we look at the subsea infrastructure, it's not only the internet. And I think it's a very important part to point to start with is we're looking at the internet. We're looking at the flow of global financial data. We're looking at the flow of every kind of data, including military communications and some key instances.
00:06:00
Speaker
And we're also looking at energy pipelines. So the subsea space is transfixed with subsea cables, not just for the internet, much wider uses, especially global finance. There are hundreds of them, I think 552 at last count, crisscrossing the globe, the vast bulk of them in terms of volume, like North America to Europe and North America to Asia.
00:06:24
Speaker
There is a lot of redundancy in that. But there are critical points of vulnerability. So could you snip one cable and thereby bring down the internet? No. But is this a point of vulnerability to international finance and to the west for large? I think the answer to that is yes. And to be honest, I'm actually more concerned by the energy infrastructure than I am by the internet structure because it is unidirectional and it's not sort of networked in the same way that the internet infrastructure is networked.
Historical Context of Targeting Infrastructure
00:06:54
Speaker
So this is something that's been getting more and more attention. As I mentioned in the introduction, it's something that in recent weeks in particular has been brought to the fore. But is this a new tactic or is this something that's been done before the targeting of subsea infrastructure? Well, in the modern period, this is new. Obviously, there's a kind of long history of undersea warfare and the like. But in the modern period, this is new. The reliance on subsea cables has grown exponentially over the last decades.
00:07:22
Speaker
The reliance of everything we do, including this podcast on the global flow of data has grown exponentially. And so the vulnerability has grown, right? Because these are, I would argue, simultaneously globalization's most important connective tissue and their most vulnerable.
00:07:43
Speaker
And so then what we've seen in recent years is the changing geopolitical pattern, meaning that there are actors out there, particularly Russia, and potentially China, although China's a more complicated question, that may have an interest in damaging the West, or in the case of Russia, certainly does have an interest in damaging the West, and is looking to find points of vulnerability where it can use a range of hybrid or gray warfare tactics. And the vulnerability of energy cables and of internet cables
00:08:12
Speaker
Pro is certainly one of those so i think this is new we've seen damage internet cables before happens all the time but that tends to be accidental the actual deliberate severing of cables as a part of a wider strategy of a hybrid warfare is new to this to this moment.
00:08:31
Speaker
And can you damage subsea cables anywhere? What I mean by that is if I imagine a cable, let's say running from North America to Europe, can you drop whatever weapon or you have anywhere along that cable or are there specific nodes that would be targeted? So until fairly recently, the only country capable of
00:08:58
Speaker
deploying submarines at great depth to listen to or otherwise interfere with cables at real depth was the United States. But one thing that we've been watching our last over the years is the development of pre-sophisticated Russian capabilities.
00:09:11
Speaker
Russia now has a submarine, triple titanium hull submarine that, sorry, it's actually seven pieces of titanium hull together, but they can operate at around 20,000 feet. We don't know everything about the capabilities of that deep sea submarine, at least not in the unclassified space.
00:09:30
Speaker
But obviously, it can tap and it can probably damage submarine cables at virtually any length. Obviously, the shallower the cable, the easier it is to damage it, but also the easier it is to protect it. I would say in the last several years, a lot of the focus has been on landing stations. These are very well guarded in the United States. They're entirely unguarded in other parts of the world, in some parts of the world. So there are points of vulnerability in the landing stations.
00:09:59
Speaker
When you look at cables as they are close to shore, then you have Coast Guard capabilities and other sorts of defenses.
00:10:06
Speaker
I think where it gets really interesting is a couple of miles out to sea where you're still on a continental shelf, still relatively accessible, but you might be outside of the range of normal Coast Guard operations on a day-to-day basis. But if we look at what just happened to the Baltics, the damage to the energy cable connecting Finland and Estonia and the data cable connecting Finland and Estonia,
00:10:29
Speaker
The damage occurred sort of, you know, reasonably deep water. It's not – and Baltic is pretty shallow overall. But these were not at the landing stations. These were sort of offshore damage, so to speak. And I think that we're – that's the real concern here is the ability of Russia in particular, potentially China too.
00:10:47
Speaker
to operate in ways that risk those pieces of undersea infrastructure. Again, both data cables and energy pipelines at greater depths, which just hugely amplify the difficulties of protecting them.
00:11:02
Speaker
Then in terms of noticing an impact like this, as we've discussed, this has been happening in recent months, but we're here on the internet recording this episode. My question really is, how many cable cuts, how much sabotage would we need to see for average users to notice? Then related question you alluded earlier to this being a particular problem for the finance sector, where do those thresholds sit relative to one another?
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, so this depends a lot on geography. Volcanic activity close to Tonga severed the principal cable that connects Tonga to the rest of the internet and basically I don't know internet access for months. So this can be quite a severe issue for relatively isolated countries, island countries or, you know, countries with limited
00:11:54
Speaker
cable connectivity. If you're asking about the United States and the United Kingdom, you've got literally dozens of cables connecting these countries to every part of the world. You'd have to damage quite a lot of them simultaneously to really seriously impact the internet.
00:12:12
Speaker
That being said, even relatively moderate damages go to slow transmission or cause rerouting. And when you're in the world of global finance, remember that a financial firm operating financial transactions on a global basis, we're talking about trillions of dollars here, they're measuring the speed of their transmissions relative to their competitors in microseconds.
00:12:32
Speaker
And so delays and rerouting and things like that can have real consequence. You and I are not going to feel it, you know, watching YouTube, but financial actors certainly will. And if they're sort of done at scale, it could be consequential. I'm less honestly, the last worried about
00:12:49
Speaker
large-scale cuts to the main internet cables that connect the United States with Europe and Asia, in part because Russian oligarchs in Putin keep their money in Western banks. China is heavily reliant on the global financial system. You can't
00:13:07
Speaker
several of these things without doing hugely consequential damage to yourself in the case of both China and Russia. I am worried about more targeted, more focused attacks on communications cables, Taiwan.
Gray Zone Tactics and Infrastructure Vulnerabilities
00:13:21
Speaker
You could see some substantial risk to Europe and the energy pipelines that come from Norway to Europe. You know, there's a lot of disruption that can happen, a lot of damage that can happen. Again, I think the energy infrastructure is probably more vulnerable to really significant disruption than the internet, than the data cables. Bruce, that's really interesting for our audience. And of course, geopolitics is at the center of our podcast.
00:13:52
Speaker
So it's really interesting that you say you're less worried about these large, grand scale attacks that could, you know, totally shut down communications. It seems therefore that a lot of what we see is potentially, you know, gray zone posturing. It's countries that you've already mentioned saying this is something that we could do, you know, if we came to blows. So we're giving you a taste of what we could do. So how much of that is currently in that gray zone area?
00:14:22
Speaker
And am I correct in saying that that's what we're seeing? I think what we just saw in the Baltics is one step beyond that. I mean, this takes energy flows into Estonia offline for several months. There are alternatives in the short term. There are some floating capabilities. There are some onshore reserves, et cetera. But it's pretty significant. And that was, I think, you know,
00:14:43
Speaker
We don't entirely know what happened. This is in the classified space and even in the intelligence space, the investigations are underway, but it is certainly noticeable that Russia had warned Finland that if it were to join NATO, it would suffer consequences and there were hints of attacks on critical infrastructure.
00:15:03
Speaker
In 2002, Russia released a new maritime strategy that explicitly refers to attacks on the undersea infrastructure as part of a hybrid warfare against the United States. So I'm trying to point to a subtlety here which is that in my view, Russia already believes that it is in a hybrid war with the West.
00:15:23
Speaker
The West hasn't really incorporated that view into our own thinking about Russia. We're sort of trying to deter Russia and we're dealing with the Ukrainian case, but we don't think of ourselves as at war with Russia. But I do really believe that Putin and the people around him think of themselves as in a hybrid war with the West. And so it's not just posturing that we could do this in the case of the Baltics. They just did do this, or at least caused it to happen.
00:15:49
Speaker
I think a really crucial question that we don't really have an answer to is, what would be one step up from that? If Russia were to damage the energy pipelines that flow through the North Sea, connecting the adjacent seas, connecting Norwegian gas to Europe,
00:16:07
Speaker
a really significant blow to Europe? Is that in the target set of Putin? I think so. Is he going to do that now? Or would that be the kind of thing he's going to threaten if we escalate? We don't know that. But these kinds of attacks, which they fall slightly short of a military attack, but they're certainly a lot more than just illegal activity. That's already happening. Bruce, I want to stay with that geopolitics theme
00:16:37
Speaker
in that gray zone area and maybe go to a country, which if anyone can tell by my accent is quite close to me, it seems, you know, going back, I think just two or three years ago, there was an incident where Russian,
Hybrid War Threats to Western Defenses
00:16:50
Speaker
uh, you know, air, air quotes, research vessels were, uh, hovering over subsea infrastructure off the Southwest coast of Ireland. And the answer from Ireland was, you know, some fishermen.
00:17:04
Speaker
from the local fishing community came out and basically stopped. Sorry, they weren't research vessels. They were actually military vessels about to do some drills. And it was fishermen that basically put a stop to it because clearly Ireland maybe didn't have the diplomatic clout to do anything really about it and certainly didn't have the naval resource to go and have a face off at Russian vessels. And then I guess more recently, it was those research vessels which appeared off the coast of Ireland again over that subsea infrastructure.
00:17:34
Speaker
I believe the Irish Naval Service couldn't even crew a single vessel to go out there. And they did send the Air Corps to take some, take some photographs, but there was effectively no force that could be put out there to kind of, you know, have a, if use that word loosely, a face off with the Russian Navy. So my question here is, in what you're saying, Russia already is engaged in that kind of hybrid conflict with the West.
00:18:02
Speaker
is it therefore looking at countries like Ireland, which, you know, is historically militarily neutral, as a vulnerability in the West to pick at? And are there any other countries in the world that you could think of similarly? Yeah, Ireland is a particularly interesting case, because of course, if you, you know the geography, but if you're a listener, it's sort of envisage a map of Northern Europe.
00:18:25
Speaker
And you think about the role of the city of London as a global hub of finance and then land cables which go out to landing stations on the western coast of Britain and then outwards into the Atlantic just south of Ireland.
00:18:41
Speaker
nautical space south of Ireland is one of the highest concentrations of extremely important cables in the world. The city of London still plays a hugely outside-size role in global finance. And again, we keep on referring to them as internet cables, but they're a lot more than the internet. They flow through those cables. And the data associated with global financial flows is probably the most important piece of this puzzle. There's also military communications that happen on these cables as well.
00:19:09
Speaker
So Russia is going to be trying to listen in the same way that the United States used high-end submarines to tap cables to listen to Russian traffic during the Cold War. That's it. By this point, that's a well-known Cold War secret. Russia is clearly developing the capability to try to do the same thing.
00:19:29
Speaker
in terms of whether they would sever those cables. Again, I think the real challenge there is not just cut off your nose to spite your face. If you're Russia, it's also sever your arteries. To attack the global financial system is incredibly complicated in terms of
00:19:50
Speaker
the extent to which China and Russia are going to be willing to do that under these sort of short of full-blown war circumstances. But yeah, this is a vulnerability. It's also there are vulnerabilities of law here, right? Russian hydrographic vessels and research vessels can legally sail through the Baltic and the Atlantic unfettered and untrammeled. We don't have any legal grounds to stop them. Of course, if they engage in
00:20:14
Speaker
semi-military activities that puts them into a different category and then you have to have the capabilities to interfere or block or at least track and that requires substantial Coast Guard and enable capabilities.
00:20:28
Speaker
So one of the one of my obsessions right now is on the need to really I think fairly dramatically increase the scope and scale of naval and Coast Guard capabilities that the West has. We are so reliant on the movement of
00:20:45
Speaker
goods, energy and data by sea. And in the last 34 years, we've sort of thought about that as a kind of global public good, you know, global economies growing, or is cooperating, etc. But when we realize the vulnerabilities here, we just haven't invested in the scale that we're going to need to, to protect that, that infrastructure and Ireland's a key case in point. I don't think there are others that are in that exact same position, that's a little bit
00:21:14
Speaker
But the other place where there's just a huge cluster of cables that could be very disruptive are in the South China Sea and the East China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. And there we've already seen China threaten and sort of posture the ability to cut.
00:21:29
Speaker
Taiwanese connectivity, Taiwan again as an island is a little bit more on the Tonga position, right? There are some cables that connect Taiwan to the United States directly that are going to be very hard for China to cut and those are military communication cables primarily. But Taiwan's connectivity is pretty reliant on a handful of cables. The landing stations are under secured.
00:21:54
Speaker
very shallow waters, it would not be hard for China to cut connectivity to Taiwan in the event of an escalation there. Of course, the United States has the potential to similarly cut connectivity to China in that circumstance and we have advanced submarine capability to do that.
00:22:13
Speaker
But there we run into the same problem I mentioned with the Chinese. If we sort of do too much to sever Chinese connectivity, the financial consequences for us would be very severe. So we get into wider issues of financial and economic interdependence here.
Impact on NATO and Military Communications
00:22:28
Speaker
The subsea cable network is kind of symbolic of as well as the operational piece of global financial connectivity.
00:22:36
Speaker
I want to stay on that topic slightly there. Given this idea of, I really like the way you put it, you're not just cutting off your nose here, you're cutting your arteries. If you were a hostile actor, and as you say, potentially a hostile actor who believes they're already in a hybrid war with the West, how would you exploit this vulnerability? How would you act to cause the most chaos while doing the least damage to yourself?
00:23:00
Speaker
Well in northern europe this is where i worry about the energy cables because this is said these are one way flows right norwegian gas flowing into dutch terminals.
00:23:13
Speaker
You cut those off and it's really only Europe that suffers. It may have a knock-on effect in terms of price, but it doesn't have a knock-on effect in terms of supply. So you can do serious damage to one target by a relatively limited set of cuts or damage to a limited set of pieces of it under the infrastructure. Probably my biggest worry actually is the energy infrastructure around northern Europe.
00:23:39
Speaker
There are similar vulnerabilities in Asia. You know, Japan is hugely dependent on undersea energy pipelines. I mean, there's shipping pipelines too. I mean, surface ships as well, but the energy pipelines are real, but not nearly so dependent as Europe has become on the connectivity of pipelines, both in the Mediterranean and the Baltic, bringing energy in from Africa and from Norway.
00:24:03
Speaker
So that's a very real vulnerability and doesn't have these wider spillover effects that the internet and financial stuff does. So if I were sitting in Putin's inner council, I would be, as they are, sailing hydrographic vessels and ships capable of supporting and carrying deep sea submersibles and undersea vehicles and I'd be investing in deep sea.
00:24:27
Speaker
underwater and manned vehicles, which they are, and I'd be posturing to be extremely threatening to the West in that space of which they are. And I think we have underestimated the extent to which Russia still poses a peer-to-peer threat in the undersea space. Land warfare capability is rather degraded. It's cyber capability doesn't match ours.
00:24:50
Speaker
But in the undersea space, Russia is a genuine peer to the United States. And we are more reliant than they are on that undersea infrastructure. They're not without their reliance. And again, I come back to this point that they couldn't.
00:25:05
Speaker
They couldn't really deeply damage the internet and financial networks without also damaging China. And given the China-Russia relationship, I think that is a buffer against some of the most disruptive potential Russian behavior. That could change in the context of acute hostilities between the United States and China, of course. So a lot of what we have seen is that kind of gray zone posturing threatening that we can do this and we can exploit it more.
00:25:35
Speaker
if we come to blows. So in that, as you said, in your opinion, Russia does still pose a peer-to-peer threat. So if that does manifest, and we actually see this being deployed in open conflict, how does it impact, let's say, NATO's ability to actually go to war?
00:25:59
Speaker
So we're talking about subsea infrastructure and targeting there, but how does it impact the weapons were more traditionally familiar with like the tanks on the ground, the airplanes in the sky, the troops in the boots? Are they linked? I mean, only in some ways they are. There are pretty important parts of military communication that travel on these cables, right? So you think of an American commander in Norfolk giving orders to
00:26:28
Speaker
a NATO asset operating in Europe at one point or another along a communication chain, that information is flowing on under C cables. Now again, I'm a little less worried about the dense network of cables that connect Europe and the United States. They're pretty well guarded at the point of the landing station in the US. The vulnerability is recognized.
00:26:52
Speaker
it would be pretty challenging for Russia to interrupt enough of that at the same time to really make a meaningful difference to America's ability to communicate in those kinds of circumstances. So again, I think it's really, it's much more heavily the energy infrastructure. It could do serious damage to Northern Europe.
00:27:11
Speaker
It's threatening, as you said, it's posture and threatening to do this wider damage if things escalated. And remember, I know that we're focusing here on the undersea infrastructure, but the undersea space itself, Russia now has UUVs, nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable UUVs, which could be extraordinarily damaging and are frankly already rather destabilizing its Poseidon weapon, which is a very large format.
00:27:36
Speaker
unmanned, underwater vehicle, nuclear-powered, capable of detonating at least a two-kiloton weapon off the coast in the United States to cause radiological tsunamis. I mean, this is a very, very, very destabilizing weapon. So I do think this is partly in the – or perhaps primarily in the psychological space. If you know that there are these underwater vehicles out there, you know, there's this potential threat, very hard to track.
00:28:04
Speaker
In Russia's mind, I think that is designed to deter the United States from a larger set of escalations than it currently contemplates. So Russia believes it is engaged in a hybrid war. I do not think it is seeking to escalate to conventional war or as yet to nuclear war, hopefully. So it's in that hybrid space. The psychology matters here. And then, as I said, some of these very vulnerable
00:28:29
Speaker
Specific energy linkages or short-term disruptions to signal what they could get done could be a real challenge. And that just say nothing of nuclear submarines and you know submarine launched nuclear weapons submarine launch hypersonic vessels with missiles and an awful lot happening in the subsea space it isn't just the sea bed infrastructure.
00:28:50
Speaker
If we can stay on this topic of attribution, you mentioned earlier the use of hydrographic vessels, these kind of stealthy subsea vessels. How does attribution work with these kind of incidents? The reason I'm asking this is in recent hours, this information that's coming out around the Baltic Sea incident seems to point towards a Chinese vessel, which seems to further complicate the situation given that the focus on the region was very much on Russia. How does that work? How do they detect potentially who's responsible for
00:29:20
Speaker
at this kind of incident.
Attribution Challenges in Cable Sabotage
00:29:22
Speaker
So at first, we're saying that the Chinese vessel, the Nunu Polar Bear, great name, Nunu Polar Bear, this is a reinforced container ship that can sail through Arctic ice and traveled its entire route in parallel with a Russian hydrographic vessel. I checked its position just before I came on this podcast. It's now anchored at a container base near Archangel in the Russian high north.
00:29:49
Speaker
I think we should be clear there are limits on what we can know, but it seems to me it's highly unlikely that this Chinese commercial ship was just happened to be floating around through these waters and happened to be moving in parallel with a Russian hydrographic vessel through its entire route and they just happened to be spotted together at the scene of both of these incidents and they happened to be spotted together on the Norwegian coast.
00:30:17
Speaker
It seems very unlikely that this was just a purely commercial Chinese operation. There was more going on here. One thing that seems to me is that
00:30:28
Speaker
NATO and or other affected countries are going to have to start doing, is simply shadowing these ships more or less full time. And that can be done with a combination of air assets, unmanned vehicles, and cutters, Coast Guard ships, etc. You know, there's nothing illegal about a Russian or Chinese hydrographic vessel sailing through the central waters of the Baltic. But there's also nothing illegal about NATO members shadowing them.
00:30:53
Speaker
and watching their operations. To the extent that the Russians or the Chinese want to do things in the hybrid space, attribution is critical. Deniability is critical. If you have a Coast Guard vessel or an undersea, an unmanned vehicle or a drone or a plane following these vessels, seeing as they stop, seeing what activity they do,
00:31:15
Speaker
You could have an underwater drone filming what's going on beneath the surface of these vessels. We're not talking about hundreds of ships here. We're talking about a handful of Russian hydrographic vessels and a handful of Chinese. We know where they are at any given time with AIS and satellite, etc. So the minute they begin to enter water is where we have concerns. They could be shadowed.
00:31:36
Speaker
real-time monitoring, I think, is key to this. So long as the Russians and the Chinese want to be operating in a diable or hybrid space, they can't do things if we can see them doing it. Or at least this is significant deterrence. So real-time monitoring of these vessels strikes me as the key to limiting their ability to play these hybrid roles. Now, that requires some assets we don't currently have in large volume. We're only beginning to develop fleets of unmanned underwater vehicles.
00:32:05
Speaker
But even things as simple as a Coast Guard vessel or a shipping vessel trailing alongside these as they sail with some GoPro would be sufficient to create a very plausible story of their involvement in incidents even if it takes post-incident investigation to determine the precise nature.
00:32:27
Speaker
If you have live video showing the vessel in question, stopping at the point in time when the incident occurs or the geography, you know, it becomes extremely hard to deny your involvement.
Countermeasures and Increased Security
00:32:39
Speaker
So real-time monitoring of these vessels strikes me as key. Russia will propose to do the same? Fine. I mean, you know, that's in the nature of competition.
00:32:50
Speaker
you know, military vessels is a different story. But hydrographic vessels that are ostensibly civilian in nature have no basis for complaining if another civilian or Coast Guard vessel is shadowing them as they move through vulnerable geographies. We're discussing the risk of subsea cable sabotage with Dr Bruce Jones. After the break, we'll discuss how to mitigate this threat.
00:33:23
Speaker
You have been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. If you like this show, don't forget to check out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica, which you can find at howtogettontawatchlist.com, where you can find our analysis on various geopolitical issues, as well as reading lists covering topics like those discussed in the podcast.
00:33:48
Speaker
Please also consider subscribing to the podcast on your streaming platform of choice, giving us a rating and joining our Patreon. Bruce, we left the first segment with you explaining how, I guess, Western nations
00:34:17
Speaker
One of the methods they can deploy to counter what we're talking about is simply shadowing the assets that are being deployed against their infrastructure. First of all, I guess that's a question of where do those assets come from? And go back to the Ireland issue we talked about a while ago, that's where there was a critical vulnerability. I'm curious to ask, what about other countermeasures that you think are already in place or could be put in place to mitigate against
00:34:47
Speaker
subsidy infrastructure sabotage. Well, let's start with shadowing. You know, during the Cold War, we used to shadow Russian nuclear submarines sailing out of Murmansk and other facilities. And it was often either a British or an American submarine that would trail them. We could hand off to one another. We could communicate around location of these things. And that's an extremely hard business.
00:35:11
Speaker
Trilling a surface vessel like a hydrographic ship is much easier business mind that although some of the most dangerous things could be implemented by a deep sea submersible or deep sea submarine for the most part those have to be moved to their locations by a,
00:35:29
Speaker
a larger vessel, either a larger submarine or a hydrographic ship that's serving dual purpose or something that looks more like a scientific vessel or commercial ship. That's certainly the way Russia has developed its capabilities. It can't sail a deep sea submersible from St. Petersburg out to the mid-Atlantic. It has to get it there on that surface ship and then operate from there.
00:35:51
Speaker
And so we're not looking at dozens and dozens of hydrographic vessels or dual use vessels here. We're looking at a handful in the case of both Russia and China. And so it does seem to me that in terms of attribution and removing deniability, shadowing these vessels can be done by air assets, can be done by Coast Guard vessels, can be done by commercial vessels that are equipped with cameras, can be done by PAs, et cetera.
00:36:18
Speaker
That is a significant piece of the puzzle. And what we're going to have to see evolve here and real damp quick is a kind of coordinated NATO response. Now we're still waiting for Sweden to join NATO, you know, if Turkey gets out of the way. But even before that, Sweden can already start collaborating with NATO operations in a whole range of ways. And we're going to have to see the Baltic states, the Germans, the Poles, the Finns, the Swedes, the Brits.
00:36:47
Speaker
developing a coordinated mechanism, backstop by the United States and by NATO, to shadow Russian submarine and dual use vehicles operating in the Baltic.
00:37:00
Speaker
A little trickier in the very long Norwegian coastline where there's vital infrastructure, that's probably going to rely more heavily on the United States, which has substantial submarine and other naval assets in that domain. The British used to have very substantial assets here. That's been somewhat degraded. I think they recognize that they need to rebuild that capability. Unfortunately, some of these are capabilities that we let go in the post-Cold War period and bring them back overnight. It takes a while.
00:37:30
Speaker
But certainly this shadowing the surface ships is something that we could do relatively quickly with simply a coordinated NATO effort around the Baltics. This is the flip side of the new vulnerability is that Putin has put himself in a less advantageous geopolitical position in the sense that the Baltic is now entirely surrounded by NATO states or will be as soon as Sweden is a member, right?
00:37:52
Speaker
The ability to develop a kind of a mesh of observation, both subsea and surface, is substantially greater than it was a year ago, let's say, when efforts to develop anti-submarine warfare arrangements, for example, kept on stumbling across the problem of Sweden and Finland not being in NATO. That problem's been solved, so to speak, or well, very shortly. So there's more that could be done there.
00:38:18
Speaker
I do think the unmanned underwater vehicle space is going to be really important here. The ability to deploy smaller vehicles, smaller assets to track vehicles. It's not a magic bullet. These things require energy. They require a battery source. They require refueling or recharging. They can't run forever. Even the Baltics, it's one of the smaller seas out there, but it's still a big body of water.
00:38:43
Speaker
And so you need a lot of these. But it is a space that we can develop pretty quickly and then we really need to. And then there's of course also satellite and air. Again, you can't necessarily trail a small underwater or unmanned underwater vehicle by a satellite, but you can certainly trail the mother ships that are going to be deploying these things. So we're going to have to develop this mesh of observation capability.
00:39:08
Speaker
politics can get in the way here. You know, even with Finland joining and Sweden anticipated, there was already movement towards a shift in arrangements for NATO Maritime Command for the politics. But there were huge problems between Poland and Germany, political issues. The Poles sort of running anti-German campaigns during the election, which was getting in the way of picking who was going to lead
00:39:29
Speaker
These arrangements and now the polish elections may have removed that obstacle so but you know again sort of local politics and national politics. Can get in the way here but the fact is the ball tick is now a natal lake and we can we can build a mesh around harder when you get out to the atlantic right this very large space you're then really relying on american assets there.
00:39:51
Speaker
And the challenge there, I think, is that as China develops its submarine fleet, which it's doing very rapidly as it develops its unmanned underwater fleet as it's doing very rapidly, the demand on the American submarine fleet and the demand on American
00:40:08
Speaker
assets like P8s, et cetera, is really going to be to be deployed out to the Indo-Pacific Theater and the Western Pacific particularly. And if that causes American assets to be pulled off Northern Europe, you know, Europe just doesn't have what it's going to take to do this by itself. It can do some of the surface monitoring by itself, but really needs to be backed up by American submarines and American P8s. So this is sort of just one other area where European
00:40:38
Speaker
defensive capability is just not up to the new challenge that it confronts absent very substantial assistance from the United States, which could become problematic.
Private Sector Role in Maritime Security
00:40:49
Speaker
What about monitoring by the cable owners? I'm thinking about those private sector companies that operate a lot of these. Can they detect sabotage or cuts in real time? Is there room for a public-private partnership in maritime security, for example?
00:41:04
Speaker
Well, it's possible, but I have to say, having talked to a couple of these companies, what they say to me at this stage is they have, they can only do a sort of after the fact monitoring and they certainly can't do prevention, right? So it's one thing to, you know, you can detect that there's been a pressure release or a loss of connectivity someplace and you can, you know, send a drone down to find out where it happened.
00:41:32
Speaker
We're talking about thousands of miles of cable and pipeline, and right now none of these companies have the infrastructure required to monitor in real time. That would be a very substantial investment in infrastructure to do that. There are some potential solutions there. Honestly, I think they're going to have to be public-private partnerships. I don't think we're going to be able to rely on private sector entities to do that. Now, again, this is where the energy space and the data space are slightly different because in the energy space,
00:42:01
Speaker
a lot of the companies involved are either state owned or partially state owned or state invested. So for example,
00:42:07
Speaker
Equinor, the Norwegian energy major that has the major pipelines that come down bringing the rich and gas to Europe has been brought under. The Norwegian law has been passed that kind of bring Equinor underneath Norwegian state security umbrella, so to speak. And that might allow for some solutions in terms of monitoring. But it's a huge business to be – I think a different company, I won't name them, recently did a
00:42:38
Speaker
an assessment of the security risks to their cables and pipelines. And they said it took them several weeks simply due to a one-time monitor of the situation. And they had to start all over. They're just not, you know, we haven't been developing the kind of infrastructure needed to think of these as vulnerable links. So that's going to have to happen. It's going to have to happen real quick. We seem to be talking a lot about the vulnerabilities, particularly of the West. Perhaps that's just the individuals we are, we think from that perspective.
00:43:08
Speaker
What about retaliation? What about the counter offensive? Maybe NATO specifically, what is the West's capability to do this to the other side? Is it something you expect to see happening or that we're already seeing happening maybe? I'm conscious that even at the time of recording, it's still actually in the air who did the Nord Stream attacks, right? So we kind of work on the assumption that it was one
00:43:35
Speaker
country versus the West, but actually it's kind of undecided who it was. My own mind is not a huge amount of doubt about North Stream, but that's easy to say that. Look, there's no question here that the vulnerability is asymmetrical. We are more reliant on these flows that are Russia. Very different if we come to the question of China, which is heavily reliant on these
00:44:01
Speaker
on these flows. So it's a much, much more complicated question when I come to China. On the other hand, China is exposed to all sorts of issues globally where pressure could be put. Russia is hard. And I think if you look at this from the Russian perspective, they would argue
00:44:16
Speaker
We've already done that we've done it through sanctions you know we've sort of severed ties to russian energy consumption now they've been able to sell to india and other places but we've stopped buying russian energy nearly as much as we used to we've used sanctions on the financial sector review sanctions of the economic sector.
00:44:31
Speaker
So,
Repair and Response Capabilities
00:44:32
Speaker
they would argue we've already used our greater leverage in the economic, the financial, technological space to put pressure on them and now they're trying to respond by finding this point of vulnerability. So, I don't think the answer is going to lie in reciprocal tweaks to their cable or their infrastructure. I don't think that's what we're going to see.
00:44:55
Speaker
You know, NATO and its most recent sort of doctrinal developments did recognize critical undersea infrastructure as an issue where NATO had to develop responses and deterrent capabilities. We haven't seen much yet.
00:45:09
Speaker
I do think this – these incidents in the Baltic Sea are really the first major test of this. We've clearly seen deliberate attacks on two pieces of critical infrastructure. The presence of the Chinese ship, as you said earlier, may be sort of designed to complicate attribution here, but this is real.
00:45:31
Speaker
can't go unanswered. Now, then the challenge is, you know, NATO is primarily a military instrument. Is the military instrument the right response? Arguably not. Maybe you have to look at different kinds of sanctions. We're already heavily sanctioning Russia. Do you seize Russian assets equivalent to the damage caused by the attack? I mean, this gets very complicated and I don't think NATO has yet really developed either the deterrence or the response options.
00:45:58
Speaker
And again, even more complicated if this had Chinese involvement. China is much more mutually dependent on these globalized flows and China has a lot of soft points in its global exposure, its fishing fleet. There's all sorts of places that we could pressure China, but we're into a very, very complicated space now, both legally and operationally. In the event that there is a successful attack again,
00:46:25
Speaker
And I guess there's probably a separation here between the energy infrastructure and the communications infrastructure. What's the capability to just get these things repaired quickly? Yeah, with the data cables, I mean, there actually is quite a lot of repair capability out there. I mean, accidents happen, you know, I've seen 100 accidents. A ship drops an anchor at the wrong place, a ship runs aground at the wrong place. You know, there's lots of legend about shark bites. I think that's mostly apocryphal.
00:46:56
Speaker
Volcanic activity, as I mentioned in Tonga, so lots of ways these things get damaged. If it's something like a ship anchor dropping, which is I think the most common, or dragging, it's a relatively small piece of damage and so repair cables, repair ships can go down and or repair submarines can go down depending on the
00:47:16
Speaker
geography and execute a repair on a relatively small piece of cable. If a larger section were damaged or suffered that would be more severe challenge but that but that could be done.
00:47:28
Speaker
The energy infrastructure is more difficult. If you were to blow up the North Stream pipeline, for example, that can't be repaired overnight. It's a much more complicated repair that is involved. Months of work, you can just imagine the complexity of trying to repair infrastructure at depths of several hundred feet or a couple hundred meters. This is really complicated engineering work.
00:47:52
Speaker
So the capacity is there, but it's not excessive. And if this is to become a more significant area of interruption, we're going to have to invest more heavily in all parts of this deterrence, defense, response, repair, all of what we've invested in relative to how important this infrastructure is.
00:48:11
Speaker
I just want to jump to emerging technologies briefly. Are there any emerging technologies that you're concerned about in the realm of this threat?
Unmanned Vehicles and Security Threats
00:48:19
Speaker
And then the follow up question is, are there any mitigations that we can think about there?
00:48:25
Speaker
Well, I do think this is where the unmanned underwater vehicle question comes into play, right? We've seen really interesting developments in Ukraine, for example, where the Ukrainian Navy developed a specialized unit for this, have used relatively small unmanned underwater vehicles or unmanned surface drones, maritime drones to do pretty significant damage to the Russian surface fleet. Now transpose that to Norfolk.
00:48:54
Speaker
or San Diego, you know, is the US Navy, is the surface fleet vulnerable to operations by relatively small, hard to detect vehicles? Now, again, I think here the biggest deterrent to that kind of thing is those are acts of war. And then, you know, I don't think at this stage, China is trying to pull the United States into a war, right? Nor really is Russia, not in those terms. But the technological development is significant.
00:49:24
Speaker
relatively cheap, relatively easy to develop, relatively easy to operate. Munitions can pose a significant threat to very large, very expensive surface vessels.
00:49:38
Speaker
You know, that's that's a significant shift. Now, we haven't really processed what that means. I think since the start of the Ukraine war, people have been heavily focused on this question of what it means for Taiwan or what it means for China, thinking about it being Taiwan. I'm increasingly focused on this question of what does it mean for the United States? And by analogy, Britain or anybody else with a serious Navy, what does it tell us?
00:49:59
Speaker
that an actor with a less capable Navy can nonetheless pose significant challenges to a larger Navy by use of UUVs. And now think about the underwater situation. If you wanted to pose a serious threat to the energy stability of Europe, imagine pre-deploying
00:50:21
Speaker
explosive UUVs or mind-carrying UUVs all along the energy infrastructure and signaling your capacity to disrupt all of that at any given time. That would be a very serious risk and you could have quite an important psychological effect on Northern Europe and on Europe as a whole by signaling your capacity to do that again also in the Mediterranean.
00:50:47
Speaker
So UUVs is the place I think we have to be most worried about what it means. I've already mentioned Russia's Poseidon weapon. I haven't really begun to incorporate my own mind how we deal with as destabilizing a weapon as that.
00:50:59
Speaker
Are we going to develop large meshes off the whole of the Atlantic to try to defend it? I mean, it's almost inconceivable how you would do it. Almost, I can't really think through how we would track these things, detect them. Far smaller than a submarine, far smaller than a surface vehicle.
00:51:20
Speaker
It's going to be very hard to defend against these kinds of destabilizing weapons. Of course, we're developing our own versions of the same thing, but this underwater unmanned vehicle space is really one to watch. What's really interesting about the infrastructure you're describing, Bruce, is that almost all of it is owned by corporations.
00:51:43
Speaker
I work in the maritime security world and without getting into the technicalities, there's codes and international standards that apply to vessels and port infrastructure. But there's nothing that really applies to subsea infrastructure in the same way. So to what extent do you think corporations have responsibility here? And what do you think they can do to harden their infrastructure?
Collaboration for Enhanced Maritime Security
00:52:09
Speaker
Yeah, look, I think this is going to be one where, as I said before, I think we're going to end up having to look in the public-private partnership space here, right? So if Meta and Facebook lay down an undersea cable that links the United States and Asia, and we're now, you know, huge volumes of data and financial data are flowing under that cable,
00:52:27
Speaker
Is it microsoft's job or metas job or facebook's job to protect against the chinese attack i can't really see that argument holding right certainly they're gonna argue that any geopolitical threat like that is for the states to to deal with and by and large i think they're right. I can't really see us and nor would we want.
00:52:50
Speaker
meta or Facebook or Microsoft developing their own national security defenses against the Chinese Navy or anything like that. Now, where I think is a little different is in the monitoring space, right? So, it seems to me that there is an argument to be made that anybody investing in maritime energy or data transmission, whether surface or subsea, has a responsibility or could be induced to accept a degree of responsibility for
00:53:18
Speaker
Monitoring activity around them, you know, there's no reason why a Marisk vessel or an MSC vessel sailing through the Baltic couldn't be recording what's happening around them as they go sharing that information. The challenge here, I think will be in the commercial space. So many shipping companies are in so many ways dependent on China as a market as a source of shipbuilding as a final market.
00:53:46
Speaker
that we're already seeing companies being a little reluctant to be pulled into an American led or a NATO led effort to increase resilience and increase robustness.
00:53:58
Speaker
I think if things get worse, as they almost certainly will, those companies will be forced to a different posture. If you're a European company at core, no matter how big your exposure to the Chinese market is, ultimately you can't side with China over Europe in a deep geopolitical contest. But you'll certainly try to avoid being pulled to one side or another as long as you can.
00:54:25
Speaker
Nonetheless, I think we should be working with – and you said there are private – yes, but a lot of them are state-owned or state-invested or state-regulated. I think there's space here to work with companies to get them to invest or co-invest in monitoring capabilities so that the very least issues like attribution can be improved by the presence of real-time observation of the things that are happening in the maritime space.
00:54:52
Speaker
Bruce, one question we'd like to leave our guests with here is what keeps you up at night? We're talking about a pretty significant threat here. What is your worst nightmare scenario in this space that really worries you? I'll start with one that doesn't worry me as much as some of the writings, which is this notion that in an outbreak of hostilities with China, say that China would move to sever the internet or sever the financial guy. I just don't think it's realistic.
00:55:22
Speaker
And it would be used to use the images before to cover their arteries to despite their face. I mean they would be doing themselves such massive damage were they to do that deliberately that it seems to me that it's unlikely. I do worry in the context if we end up in a.
00:55:40
Speaker
maritime crisis in the Taiwan Straits or the surrounding waters that cables could be cut accidentally or part of, you know, you could see significant disruption. But the thing that really worries me is the energy infrastructure in Northern Europe. We were to see Russian efforts to sever
00:55:58
Speaker
the energy infrastructure that connects the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Baltic Sea. It could be a very serious blow to Europe and cause real escalation between NATO and Russia in ways that you could get out of control. So that's probably the issue that war is being loved right now. Bruce, thank you very much for joining us.
00:56:20
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:56:42
Speaker
If you enjoyed this show, please consider checking out our other content at Encyclopedia Geopolitica. We'd also appreciate it if you could subscribe to the podcast, leave a review, or support us on Patreon. Thanks for listening!