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South America

Tropical Currents: SOUTHCOM’s 2018 Posture Statement

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The Southern Tide

Written by W. Alejandro Sanchez, The Southern Tide addresses maritime security issues throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It discusses the challenges regional navies face including limited defense budgets, inter-state tensions, and transnational crimes. It also examines how these challenges influence current and future defense strategies, platform acquisitions, and relations with global powers.

“The security environment in Latin America and the Caribbean is characterized by complex, diverse, and non-traditional challenges to U.S. interests.” Admiral Kurt W. Tidd, Commander, U.S. Southern Command, before the 114th Congress Senate Armed Services Committee, 10 March 2016.

By W. Alejandro Sanchez

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees most of Latin America and the Caribbean, has released its 2018 Posture Statement as its commander, Admiral Kurt W. Tidd, testified before the Senate Armed Forces Committee of the 115th U.S. Congress on 15 February. In this commentary, we will discuss some of the major points brought up by the Statement regarding maritime security issues in the Western Hemisphere.

SOUTHCOM as a Low Priority

  • “… the combined impacts of defense spending caps, nine years of continuing resolutions, and insufficient spending in the diplomacy and development arenas make it increasingly difficult to sustain this regional network. Because our global security responsibilities outpace the resources available to meet them, we have had to make a series of tough choices, resulting in compounding second and third order effects. The net result is the perception among our friends—and the palpable anticipation among our competitors—that we no longer stand by our commitments, that we are relinquishing our strategic position, and that we don’t take the challenges in this region seriously.” –Admiral Kurt Tidd
ADM Kurt Tidd testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 15th, 2018. Image Credit: DoD News

Past Posture Statements have, in very straightforward manners, declared that SOUTHCOM is the lowest priority of the Combatant Commands (COCOMs) (see the 2015 Posture Statement), thus it receives limited resources. Part of the reason for this situation is that most Latin American and Caribbean nations that fall under SOUTHCOM’s area of responsibility have close and cordial diplomatic relations with the U.S. Moreover, the countries that are at odds with Washington do not pose a traditional military threat to U.S. national security.

In other words, since most governments have good relations with Washington, and the few countries that do not are not going attack the U.S. anytime soon (if ever at all), then there is little reason to assign significant numbers of assets and platforms to SOUTHCOM. Thus, the concern is that, regional allies may interpret this situation as Washington no longer being interested in supporting their own security problems, which include transnational challenges like drug trafficking. SOUTHCOM’s lack of naval platforms is an example of this situation and potential perception.

It will be interesting to see if the Fiscal 2019 defense budget proposed by the Trump administration, which requests USD$686.1 billion, will trickle down to SOUTHCOM, though this seems unlikely given other U.S. military operations elsewhere on the globe. Nevertheless, a 12 December, 2017 story in the Navy Times reports that SOUTHCOM will receive “Littoral Combat Ship and Spearhead-class expeditionary fast transport vessels,” which will be of great help for counter-narcotics and assistance operations.

The USCG

  • “I’d like to go on record to express my strong support for the U.S. Coast Guard’s efforts to recapitalize its fleet, especially its medium endurance cutters, which directly support JIATF South-led interdiction operations. As I have stated repeatedly, without U.S. Coast Guard cutters, USSOUTHCOM would have virtually no afloat maritime forces.” –Admiral Kurt Tidd

SOUTHCOM’s naval component, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/Fourth Fleet, relies on platforms that are temporarily assigned. For example, aircraft carrier USS George Washington (CVN-73) participated in the 2015 UNITAS exercises, while USS Somerset (LPD 25), USS Chafee (DDG 90) and USCGC Escanaba (WMEC 907) participated in 2017 UNITAS. SOUTHCOM does occasionally get assigned surface platforms, especially Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates prior to their decommissioning, which are deployed to patrol Caribbean waters to combat maritime crimes, particularly drug trafficking, as well as the hospital ship USNS Comfort.

A Coast Guard Cutter BERTHOLF boarding team aboard an Over the Horizon Long-Range Interceptor boat approaches a self-propelled semi-submersible vessel suspected of smuggling 7.5 tons of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, Aug. 31, 2015. The seized contraband is worth an estimated $227 million. (U.S. Coast Guard photo)

With that said, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) is arguably the cornerstone enabler of SOUTHCOM maritime operations, particularly as employed by Joint Inter Agency Task Force South (JIATF-S) in the Greater Caribbean region. Indeed, there is a regular stream of reports about drug smuggling vessels being successfully interdicted by USCG platforms, like USCGC Tahoma (WMEC 908), which successfully interdicted over 1,800 kilograms of cocaine during a two-month tour in 2017. USCG platforms have also carried out humanitarian assistance in the Caribbean region, including, interestingly, in Nicaragua – via USCGC Northland (WMEC-904) in early 2018.

The LCS and SOUTHCOM

  • “I’d also like to express my unqualified support for the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), which we can leverage for multiple mission sets, including D&M, SOF support, partner nation capacity building, and potentially HA/DR response and medical engagements…My view is that the sooner we can deploy these ships in theater, the greater the impact we can have on interdicting the flow of illicit drugs into our country.”–Admiral Kurt Tidd

Admiral Tidd’s support for the LCS program is not surprising since, as previously mentioned, a number of them will hopefully be deployed to SOUTHCOM this year to help combat maritime crimes. The US Navy has reportedly decided not to re-activate its Perry-class frigates to support SOUTHCOM operations, thus all eyes are on the LCS and the Spearhead-class vessels for these operations.

Medical Diplomacy and HA/DR

  • “From a goodwill and engagement perspective, operational funding for the Navy’s hospital ship COMFORT has been a proven game-changer for USSOUTHCOM. We ask for the COMFORT every other year, but the Navy has been unable to source its employment due to the ship’s maintenance challenges.”
  • “We are working to transition future iterations of UNITAS from a traditional scripted exercise to an actual humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HA/DR) capable force that can exercise at sea against real world, unscripted missions.” –Admiral Kurt Tidd

As previously mentioned, USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) has participated in several HA/DR operations in the Western Hemisphere in recent years. As the author explains in a 16 January commentary for CIMSEC, “Comfort was deployed to Puerto Rico to assist those in need after Hurricane Maria hit the island. The vessel also traveled to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to assist with the relief and support efforts as part of Operation Unified Response.” The platform has also operated in initiatives like Partnership for the Americas and Operation Continuing Promise.

It could be argued that Comfort should be permanently assigned to Fourth Fleet so that it could be deployed more regularly to the region, but logistics, the ship’s age, and the fact that there is only one other hospital ship in the fleet, USNS Mercy (T-AH-19), make this highly unlikely.

It is worth noting that after Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti in 2016, Comfort was not deployed to the Caribbean island, but rather USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7) and USS Mesa Verde (LPD-19), which provided humanitarian relief. Given recurring natural disasters, the general lack of inter-state warfare (maritime or not) in the region, and not being able to deploy the Comfort with much regularity, it makes sense that future multinational naval exercises, such as UNITAS, focus on disaster response so that regional countries can also provide relief services quickly when the next disaster occurs.

China and Russia

  • “China, Russia, and Iran are courting some of our most strategically important Latin American and Caribbean partners and supporting authoritarian, anti-American regimes.”
  • “Expanded port and logistics access in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela provide Russia with persistent, pernicious presence, including more frequent maritime intelligence collection and visible force projection in the Western Hemisphere.”
  • “China’s commercial and diplomatic advances move it closer to its larger strategic goal of reshaping global economic and governance architectures… Increased reach to key global access points like Panama create commercial and security vulnerabilities for the United States…”–Admiral Kurt Tidd

China and Russia’s presence in Latin American and Caribbean waters is quite limited. The most significant deployment, in terms of numbers, occurred in 2008, when a small Russian fleet traveled to Caribbean waters to carry out military exercises with Venezuela – some of the vessels included “nuclear-powered Peter the Great cruiser and anti-submarine warship Admiral Chebanenko.” Nevertheless there have been some recent incidents, like in 2017, when intelligence ship Viktor Leonov docked in Havana, Cuba, and also traversed international waters off the East Coast of the U.S.

Russian AGI Viktor Leonov enters the bay in Havana, Cuba,on March 24, 2015. Image credit: Desmond Boylan / AP, file

Meanwhile, China is known in the region for the 2011 and 2015 deployment of its hospital ship Peace Ark (866 Daishan Dao), a Type 920 hospital vessel. There have also been sporadic visits of Chinese warships to the region, like the 2013 visit to Argentina, Brazil and Chile of destroyer Lanzhou, frigate Liuzhou and supply ship Boyanghu.

It is conceivable that, in a more challenging scenario, Chinese warships could be invited by Latin American and Caribbean states to participate in naval exercises in the region, particularly as most of them have diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, not the Republic of China (ROC/Taiwan). The Posture Statement’s reference to the Panama Canal is likely tied to the fact that the government of Panama switched from having relations with Taiwan to China in 2017.

Maritime Crime

  • “Criminal networks move drugs and engage in a wide array of illegal activity, including weapons trafficking, chemical importation, poppy and coca cultivation, fentanyl smuggling, and illegal mining.”
  • “Naval Special Operations Forces in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Panama are now among the most competent and responsive counternarcotic (CN) units in Central America, integrating with air assets, effectively responding to JIATF South “cues,” and executing numerous joint and individual interdiction operations”
  • “We also supported our partners in the Dominican Republic to improve maritime interdiction in the Caribbean through the establishment of a Joint Task Force that combined SOF-trained CN units with Dominican naval aircraft.”
  • “We see great opportunity to build on the multinational cooperation that characterizes these international interdiction efforts, especially the successful inter-institutional coordination of last year’s Operation KRAKEN, in which the United States, Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica targeted illicit maritime pathways in the Central American littorals.”–Admiral Kurt Tidd
Drugs produced and imported into South America follow numerous routes through the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific (not depicted) in order to get to market in the United States. Image credit: The Economist

Over the past year, U.S. platforms, whether from the Navy or Coast Guard, have successfully interdicted several vessels in Caribbean waters carrying narcotics. Additionally, U.S. allies in Central America and the Caribbean are modernizing and expanding their naval forces. Fortunately, they have also enjoyed successes, for example the naval force of El Salvador’s seizure of over 700kg of cocaine aboard a suspicious vessel in January 2018.

Certainly, and tragically, these accomplishments are only slowing down the flow of drugs from south to north, as production continues in the former and there is still a market for drugs in the latter. The successes of SOUTHCOM and its regional allies against drug trafficking must go hand-in-hand with more comprehensive strategies to address this problem.

Final Thoughts

  • “We seek to mobilize and organize the unique strengths of each of our partners and Allies, to expand information sharing and collaboration, and to align security, development, and capacity building activities that allow us to translate short-term successes into long-term gains, sustained by an adaptive and inclusive regional security network.”–Admiral Kurt Tidd

In spite of being the lowest priority COCOM, SOUTHCOM has achieved various successes in maritime security in recent years, including a plethora of successful interdictions of suspicious vessels that were transporting contraband, particularly drugs. Humanitarian missions via USNS Comfort and other vessels are also a great achievement toward strengthening relations with regional states and exercising soft power.

SOUTHCOM benefits from the fact that most Latin American and Caribbean nations have cordial relations with the U.S. and would actually welcome greater U.S. defense assistance. Obviously, SOUTHCOM cannot do everything itself, hence it is important for it to promote the professionalism and modernization of the naval forces of partner nations. (While this commentary has focused on SOUTHCOM’s operations, other branches of the U.S. government, namely the State Department, should continue to work together with this COCOM to promote U.S. national interests in a region full of U.S. partners.)

SOUTHCOM’s 2018 Posture Statement demonstrates that while the U.S. continues to enjoy a network of allies in the Western Hemisphere, there are plenty of clear and present dangers and concerns that warrant greater support from Washington for this region.

W. Alejandro Sanchez is a researcher who focuses on geopolitical, military, and cyber security issues in the Western Hemisphere. Follow him on Twitter: @W_Alex_Sanchez.

The views presented in this essay are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author is associated.

Featured Image: A U.S. Air Force Special Operations Forces Airman with Special Operations Command South secures an airfield with Panamanian security force counterparts Feb. 1, 2018, during a culmination exercise in Colon, Panama. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Osvaldo Equite/RELEASED)

Drones

Self-Driving Ships Will Soon Raise the Stakes at Sea

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The following article originally appeared on the Kennedy School Review and is republished with permission. Read it in its original form here.

By Cameron Lindsay

While Amazon continues to pilot its fully autonomous drone delivery system, Amazon PrimeAir, an autonomous delivery system millions of times larger is occurring at sea. And whether you are the passenger on-board a cruise ship or you hire a shipping company to transport your belongings overseas, in a few years, you will increasingly be at the mercy of a self-driving ship.

The prevalence of self-driving ships, or in more technical terms, autonomous surfaced vessels (ASV) or unmanned surfaced vessels (USV), which operate either remotely or completely independent of humans, is growing. And while for centuries mariners have sailed in awe of the ocean’s size and reverence of its might, the emergence of the self-driving ship ushers a new era of commercial economic opportunity as well as maritime security risks of miscalculation.

Similar to self-driving cars, most of the technology necessary for the development of a self-driving ship is mature and available at reasonably low cost. Using state-of-the-art computer algorithms within advanced radar, navigation, acoustic, and optical sensor payloads, self-driving ships are expected to operate more efficiently and safely than those operated by humans.

Self-driving ships present the opportunity for the commercial maritime industry to significantly increase profits through the reduction of costs associated with crew salaries, nourishment, fatigue, insurance, and decision bias. As described by the President of Rolls-Royce Marine Mikael Mäkinen, “autonomous shipping is the future of the maritime industry. As disruptive as the smartphone, the smart ship will revolutionize the landscape of ship design and operations.” While Rolls-Royce is vying to build the first autonomous smart ship with Google, other companies like the Norwegian company Yara seek to be the world’s first remote controlled and then totally autonomous electric cargo ship in 2020.

However due to the technical complexity, lack of legal precedent, and political hedging associated with self-driving ships, one can expect the wave that brings higher commercial profits to also lower the propensity for international consensus on their use. Self-driving ships present challenges like those faced by federal and state governments today in implementing safeguards when introducing self-driving cars to the public. Yet unlike self-driving cars, these policies will need to address centuries-old maritime legal constructs, sovereignty protections, and universally established rules for how vessels interact on the high seas. The necessity of these policies to accommodate the commercial interests of ships longer than the height of the Empire State Building and communal practices of family owned fishing trawlers will be a significant challenge to policy makers.

Unlike driving your car on a well-regulated interstate highway system, moving further away from a given nation’s coast corresponds with the transition of sovereign territorial waters to an international patch work of treaty obligations under the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Law of the Sea and regulatory organizations, notably led by the International Maritime Organization (IMO). With its UN mandate to promote safe, secure, efficient, and environmentally sustainable shipping, the IMO has an opportunity to advance maritime safety, security, environmental protections, and economic opportunity through its embrace of technological innovation.

While the impact of self-driving ships will be a severe disruption to the commercial maritime industry, the technology will also punctuate a new era of maritime security strategy. Historically, the vast distance of the warship’s Captain from his state served to strengthen professional restraint while simultaneously weakening the temptation of jingoism. Using a command and control structure analogous to cyber and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), an artificiality to the context of conflict engagement will exist between state authority and state actor. Development efforts underway today have already produced machines that can replicate some of the functions of fighter pilots and sentries, among others, and it appears inevitable that military system capabilities will continue to expand into areas traditionally the domain of human operators.

Nations seeking to capture a maritime strategic advantage may see the application of self-driving ships as a force multiplier to maritime search and rescue, mine clearance, and offensive operations. Conversely some nations may view the application of self-driving ships as their relief valve to unusually high operational demands resulting in accelerated personnel fatigue and vessel deterioration. When coupled with future advances in sustainable energy sources (solar, nuclear, and lithium-ion battery), self-driving ships will become an attractive investment alternative for global powers in extending their ability to project power by sea. Undoubtedly this regional and global great power competition will heighten the risk of miscalculation and unintentional conflict escalation as evident in the December 2016 seizure of an American unmanned oceanographic survey ship by Chinese naval forces.

For international maritime bodies, such as the IMO, International Seabed Authority, and International Whaling Commission, self-driving ships offer a low-cost approach for monitoring and reporting nation-state and private violators of maritime conventions. Through member nation financial support, the UN application of self-driving ships could respond to sustained maritime humanitarian crises while depoliticizing involvement and the risk to entrapment by member nations. This may serve as a pretext for the establishment of a sustainable internationally recognized unmanned maritime peacekeeping mission with the capacity to actively investigate illegal fishing off Somalia’s coast, resource exploitation near Fiji, environmentally damaging practices to the Great Barrier Reef, or freedom of navigation within the disputed South China Sea.

However, before the rewards of self-driving ships can be realized, their challenges must be acknowledged, accepted, and addressed through a combination of active diplomacy, smart policy, and visionary thinking.

Cameron Lindsay is a Master in Public Administration candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School and U.S. Navy Politico-Military Scholar. He is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. The views and opinions expressed are the author’s alone and do not represent the official position of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of Defense, or U.S. Government.

Featured Image: Autonomous ship concept (Rolls Royce)

Cyber War

Protecting the Maritime Shipping Industry from Cybercrime

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By Nicholas A. Glavin

Introduction

The American maritime shipping industry is one of the most vulnerable critical infrastructures (CI) to ransomware and other forms of cybercrime. Maritime shipping accounts for 90-94 percent of world trade; any disruption to this sector will adversely affect the American economy and international trade more broadly. The July 2017 NotPetya ransomware attack that affected Maersk, a Dutch maritime shipping company, prompts timely action to protect American maritime infrastructure as the industry is ill-prepared to prevent and respond to attacks of this sophistication and scale. The recommended course of action encourages the U.S. Government to subsidize cybersecurity and training horizontally and vertically across the maritime shipping industry through the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG).

Cyber Assaulting Maritime Commerce

Any disruptions to global shipping companies, sea lanes of communication, or maritime chokepoints will have potentially disastrous implications for the economies and the supply chains of the U.S. and the global community. The economic impacts of cyber disruptions and damage to ships, ports, refineries, terminals, and support systems is estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Moreover, the second- and third-order effects of a cyber attack are not limited to the maritime sector of CI; if more than one port is disrupted at the same time, a greater impact is “likely to occur” for the Critical Manufacturing, Commercial Facilities, Food and Agriculture, Energy, Chemical, and Transportation Systems of the nation’s CI.

Ransomware attacks eclipsed most other cybercrime threats in 2017.  The July 2017 NotPeyta ransomware attack highlighted the vulnerabilities of the maritime shipping industry to cyber disruptions. One of the most high-profile victims of this ransomware attack included the Dutch maritime shipping company Maersk. The company estimates upwards of $300 million in losses from the attack, the majority of which relates to lost revenue. Maersk continued operating for ten days without information technology (IT) until its networks were back online, despite ships with 10,000 to 20,000 containers entering a port every fifteen minutes. NotPetya shut down several ports worldwide, reduced Maersk’s volume by 20 percent, and forced the company to handle the remaining 80 percent of its operations manually. Maersk was forced to replace 45,000 PCs, 4,000 servers and install 2,500 applications.

The maritime shipping industry is highly vulnerable to cybercrime – in particular, ransomware – because of its lack of encryption, increased use of computer services, a lack of standardized training in and awareness of cybersecurity among crew, the sheer cost of defending the maritime IT enterprise, and industry-wide complacence towards cybersecurity. Several navigation systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Automatic Identification System (AIS) are neither encrypted nor authenticated, thus being a soft target for cyber criminals. Jamming or spoofing of these systems can ground ships or make two collide, which can close a port or shipping channel for days or weeks depending on the severity of the incident. Disruptions to Industrial Control Systems (ICS) can lead to injury or death, release harmful pollutants, and lead to extensive economic damage across the maritime shipping industry.

Course of Action A: Federal Subsidies for Mandated Cybersecurity Awareness and Training

A Federal Government-enabled focus on prevention and response would proliferate horizontally and vertically across the maritime shipping community. This approach subsidizes the buy-in for industry to approach cybersecurity as a cost-effective asset. Simultaneously, this educates lower echelons of the workforce on digital hygiene to understand the transmission of ransomware and other forms of cybercrime. A positive consequence is the mitigation of industry lacking robust cybersecurity capabilities due to complacence and overhead costs. This is highly probable due to NotPetya’s wake-up call to industry and the existing public-private cybersecurity partnerships.

As the lead agency responsible for maritime cybersecurity in the U.S., the USCG issued a cybersecurity strategy in 2015 to identify best practices and voluntary measures. However, others may argue it is not the place of the U.S. government to subsidize cybersecurity best practices, facilitate compliance, and serve as the arbiter of how industry should train and defend against ransomware and other forms of cybercrime, thus opting instead for only industry-led approaches.

Course of Action B: Leverage Manual Operations and Dated Communications Technologies

This no- and low-tech approach encourages the use of manual navigations operations and older long-range navigation (LORAN) systems to circumvent disruptions to navigational and operational systems. A positive consequence of this approach is the standardization of backup operations for seamless continuity of operations on land, while also mitigating the overreliance on technology at sea. This is a probable course of action given the existing LORAN infrastructure and Maersk operating at 80 percent capacity during the NotPetya attack. A negative consequence is a proliferation in ransomware attacks deliberately targeting this industry since the approach would be passive in nature. This is also probable in occurring given the interconnectedness of the maritime sector to other CIs. However, others may argue that manual training and a functional secondary means of communication mitigates adverse costs from future ransomware attacks.

Conclusion

Course of Action A provides the highest return on investment to address the ransomware threat to the American maritime shipping industry. This prevention-focused and proactive approach will induce a top-down, lateral, and public-private approach to address maritime cybersecurity. While Course of Action B identifies the existence and use of alternative approaches to circumvent – or, at worst, mitigate the consequences of – a ransomware attack, it fails to place a premium on industry-wide digital hygiene  which is arguably the most cost-effective, scalable, and fastest approach to ransomware prevention.

Nicholas A. Glavin is a candidate for a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy (MALD) from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He previously worked as a researcher at the U.S. Naval War College’s Center on Irregular Warfare and Armed Groups (CIWAG). The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent those of the U.S. Government. Follow him on Twitter @nickglavin.

Featured Image: Albert Mærsk in the 70s (Wikimedia Commons)

Capability Analysis

Seabed Warfare Week Concludes on CIMSEC

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By Dmitry Filipoff

Last week CIMSEC published a series of articles focusing on the seabed as an emerging domain of maritime conflict and competition. This topic week was launched in partnership with the U.S. Naval War College’s Institute for Future Warfare Studies who drafted the Call for Articles. Authors assessed the legal frameworks related to seabed operations, the operational flexibility that can be exercised through this domain, the challenges of protecting critical seabed infrastructure, and more. Below is a list of articles that featured during the topic week and we thank the authors for their excellent contributions.

Fighting for the Seafloor: From Lawfare to Warfare by LTJG Kyle Cregge

“…the United States will have to determine how it will shape its own law-based national security strategy considering America’s failure to ratify UNCLOS. At the operational  level, seabed UUVs will likely lead to an arms race given all of the discrete tactical opportunities they offer. In an inversion of land warfare, control of the low ground will grant victory on the high seas.”

Forward…from the Seafloor? by David Strachan

“One such operation experiencing a kind of renaissance is mine warfare which, when combined with unmanned technologies and key infrastructure based on the ocean floor, transforms into the more potent strategic tool of seabed warfare. But even the concept of seabed warfare is itself in transition, and is on track to be fully subsumed by the broader paradigm of autonomous undersea warfare.”

Establish a Seabed Command by Joseph LaFave

“A Seabed Command would focus entirely on seabed warfare. It could unite many of the currently disparate functions found within the surface, EOD, aviation, and oceanographic communities. Its purview would include underwater surveying and bathymetric mapping, search and recovery, placing and finding mines, testing and operating unmanned submersibles, and developing future technologies that will place the U.S. on the forefront of future seabed battlegrounds.”

Undersea Cables and the Challenges of Protecting Seabed Lines of Communication by Pete Barker

“Deep below the waters, travelling at millions of miles per hour, flickers of light relay incredible quantities of information across the world, powering the exchange of data that forms the internet. From urgent stock market transactions to endless videos of cats, undersea cables support many aspects of twenty first century life that we take for granted. A moment’s thought is sufficient to appreciate the strategic importance of this fact. As a result, any discussion of future seabed warfare would be incomplete without a consideration of the challenges presented by ensuring the security of this vital infrastructure.”

Dmitry Filipoff is CIMSEC’s Director of Online Content. Contact him at Nextwar@cimsec.org.

Featured Image: Project Baseline’s Nemo submersible shines its lights on U-boat U-576, sunk on July 15, 1942, lying on its starboard side and showing the submarine’s conning tower and the deck gun in the foreground. (Image courtesy of John McCord, UNC Coastal Studies Institute – Battle of the Atlantic expedition.)