The race to secure the ocean floor

Companies and governments are increasingly waking up to the fact that the future of warfare isn’t just in the skies, but also on the ocean floor.

Nations and corporations alike are devoting attention as well as piles of cash to new technologies designed for underwater use, as concerns grow about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure like connectivity cables and energy pipelines traversing the seabed.

It comes amid growing concerns of so-called hybrid warfare, a broad term which can include cyberattacks, energy sabotage, disinformation, and economic pressure, with or without being accompanied by conventional military methods.

“It’s the changing threat environment that’s brought this to the fore,” Katja Bego, senior research fellow at Chatham House, told CNBC.

At the same time, rapid advances in artificial intelligence, drones and autonomous technology are making new approaches to underwater surveillance possible, she said.

From autonomous underwater vehicles to sensors attached to subsea cables, governments and military alliances are exploring ways to better monitor the infrastructure that underpins the global economy.

“Our whole economy is built on top of this,” Bego said.

In September 2022, months after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, explosions ruptured the Nord Stream gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea. Investigators determined the pipelines, built to deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany, had been deliberately sabotaged.

The incident, alongside damage to subsea infrastructure in other parts of the world like the Arctic and near Taiwan, has focused governments’ attention on vulnerabilities that received little attention in the decades following the Cold War, according to Bego.

“This has been neglected for quite a long time, so it’s quite a lot of catching up to be done,” she said.

More than 1.5 million kilometers of submarine communications cables are in service globally as of early 2026, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm that tracks global subsea cable networks.

Alongside telecommunications cables and oil and gas pipelines, a growing network of subsea power cables also connects electricity markets and carries electricity from offshore wind farms to land.

Meanwhile, the widespread deployment of aerial drones during the war between Ukraine and Russia has shown how autonomous systems operated from afar can change the nature of warfare. Bego described the maritime environment as “the next logical domain.”

Defense companies are now positioning themselves for that shift.

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