A top NATO commander is issuing a dire warning about Russia's newly developed ability to disrupt the international community's global communications systems, according to a report.
Europe and North America are at risk of "undersea hybrid warfare" with Russia amid the nation's development of the capability to sever cables responsible for maintaining online communications, Vice Admiral Didier Maleterre of the Security Alliance's Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM) said to the Daily Mail.
"More than 90 percent of the Internet is under the sea. All our links between the US, Canada, and Europe are transmitting under the sea, so there are a lot of vulnerabilities, " Maleterre said, adding that, "Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy, through cables, internet cables, pipelines... That's a very important concern because it's a security issue for nearly 1 billion NATO-nation civilians."
The Vice Admiral's blunt forewarning comes on the heels of a British think tank, Policy Exchange, publishing a report urging government ministers to develop a strategy for "seabed warfare."
In a foreword to the report, Air Chief Lord Peach wrote that Moscow has already begun probing the Atlantic undersea infrastructure as the weak underbelly of our national security.
A global network of undersea fiberoptic cables connecting across the ocean floor is responsible for carrying roughly 97 percent of international communications.
According to the Policy Exchange report, '99 percent of the UK's digital communications with the outside world depend on this cable network.'
Should these cables be damaged or disabled, everything from agriculture and healthcare to military logistics and financial transactions would crash, effectively pushing the country into an unprecedented depression.
A similar incident occurred in October last year, when a gas pipeline and several telecom cables connecting Estonia with Finland under the Baltic Sea were damaged by an anchor.
Investigators have yet to determine which ship was responsible for the damage, but they revealed a Russian-flagged ship and a Chinese-owned vessel were in 'close proximity' to the site of the incident.
Many of these networks were developed by private tech companies but not designed for protection against military threats.
"They didn't know that such hybrid warfare would develop so rapidly," Maleterre said.
"And it's very difficult to have permanent surveillance of every cable; it's not possible," he added.
The concern over the security of undersea cables has been around for decades and was brought to the public's attention amid the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in September 2022.
Some US and European officials implied Moscow had blown up its own pipelines, an inference deemed 'idiotic' by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rather, Putin has blamed the U.S., U.K., and Ukraine, while the White House rejected a blog post by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersch claiming Washington was behind explosions as "utterly false and complete fiction."
Investigators have yet to determine which party or parties were behind the attack on Nord Stream.
However, fears intensified last year when NATO's intelligence chief, David Cattler, stated Russia was likely mapping Western cable networks.
"There are heightened concerns that Russia may target undersea cables and other critical infrastructure in an effort to disrupt Western life and gain leverage against those nations that are providing security to Ukraine," Cattler told reporters in May 2023.
