NATO militaries have grown increasingly concerned about Russia's underwater capabilities, worrying that Moscow's attack and ballistic-missile submarines and special-purpose submersibles could be used to menace or attack their economic and military infrastructure.
French President Emmanuel Macron is the latest leader to warn about the threat, stating the importance of underwater security in a speech to the French military on January 20.
Macron wished for his country to "acquire a capacity to control the seabed" to depths of 19,600 feet, citing "military reasons" and the protection of "critical underwater infrastructure" as the imperatives behind his call, without explicitly mentioning Russia.
Methane gas leaked from the Nord Stream pipelines boils the surface of the Baltic Sea. Danish Defense Command
France's has numerous overseas territories that give Paris the world's second largest exclusive economic zone, which refers to an area extending 200 nautical miles from coastline where countries have exclusive rights.
This creates an "immense benefit" but also an "immense responsibility" to protect infrastructure and territory, Macron said.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in late September highlighted longstanding concerns about the "vulnerability" of underwater infrastructure, the chief of the British naval staff said after the pipelines were damaged.
Officials have not been able to prove that Russia was behind the Nord Stream attacks, but the incidents have only added to NATO's concerns about Russia's underwater capabilities. This week, NATO announced that it would set up a "coordination cell" to help militaries and industry work together "and boost the security of Allied undersea infrastructure."
Allied concern
An undersea fiber-optic cable emerges near the Spanish Basque village of Sopelana in June 2017. Ander Gillenea/AFP/Getty Images
Concern about Russia's expanding underwater capabilities and the danger they pose to critical underwater infrastructure has risen since Russia seized Crimea in 2014.
Since then, Russian submarines have deployed more often and for longer and their activity close to critical undersea infrastructure has increased. "We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don't believe we have ever seen," the US Navy admiral in charge of NATO's submarine forces said in 2017.Protecting that infrastructure is feasible in relatively shallow waters and close to naval bases, conditions that exist in the Baltic and Nordic seas, if sufficient submarine-detecting sensors are placed in the right areas, said Tuomas Pöyry, vice president of Image Soft, a Finnish company that develops underwater surveillance systems. However, the North Atlantic, through which many such cables pass, "is such a deep and wide area" that even if cables were protected with sensors and an approaching threat were detected,