Thanks to technological innovation and the strategic importance of critical infrastructures laid on the seabed such as gas pipelines, oil pipelines and internet cables, the underwater domain, o underwaterhas become a frontier of great importance in the competition between states, renewing and expanding the terms of submarine military operations. It will be discussed on May 30 in webinar “Italy, the enlarged Mediterranean and the underwater domain”.
Underwater infrastructure: vital and vulnerable
The global economy and the well-being of Western societies largely depend on the functioning of a large and growing number of critical submarine infrastructures, starting with underwater cables for the internet and telecommunications, gas and oil pipelines. Not to mention that the sea is obviously an essential source of nourishment for billions of people and, for thousands of years, has hosted the most important communication routes for the exchange of goods.
To date, more than 97 percent of global internet traffic passes through more than 400 fiber-optic cables resting on the seabed, for a total length that exceeds million kilometers. Furthermore, about 30 percent of hydrocarbons are extracted from offshore platforms, while a portion significant of all hydrocarbons is transported by sea by oil, gas or ship before reaching the consumer. If underwater cables and submarine pipelines have been in use for more than eighty years and have always suffered from a certain degree of vulnerability – especially in shallow and coastal waters – historically they have been able to count on the opacity and inaccessibility of the sea as a first line of defence.
Today, seen the growing dependence of European economies – including the Italian one – on these infrastructures and thanks to both the technological innovation that makes i depths and the most accessible great depths to civilian and military operators, they become strategic targets and therefore more vulnerable than ever to sabotage. In other words, it can be said that in recent decades there has been a gradual convergence between the operational capabilities available and the willingness of various actors to hit these targets, as demonstrated in 2022 by the sabotage of the gas pipelines Nord Stream in the Baltic Sea.
Among the major powers, Russia is the one that has invested the most in the ability to sabotage in depth, acquiring specialized means in some unique cases. Moscow’s approach to this domain is part of a doctrine that places great value on the difficult attribution of attacks located in the ‘grey zone’ between war and peace. Attacks that are hardly new looking at the history of submarine warfare.
A century and a half of submarine warfare
On February 17, 1864, in Charleston, South Carolina during the American Civil War, a submarine it struck and sank for the first time in history a ship. HL Hunley was designed and built by Confederate forces in a desperate attempt to break the US Navy’s blockade of major breakaway ports. Unable to face the US Navy, in conditions of absolute naval inferiority, it was understood that a submarine operating under the surface of the water and in the dark of night could have gotten close enough to the enemy ships to be able to hit them with an explosive charge. The boat was twelve meters long and moved by ‘muscle’ propulsion, thanks to the arms of its crew acting on a long crankshaft connected to the propeller. Despite the successful sinking of the enemy vessel, all members of the crew lost their lives in the action. It was but obvious the potential effectiveness of exploiting the underwater domain in military operations – especially in situations of asymmetry, as in the case of the naval front of the American conflict.
A little less than a century after the action of the HL Hunley, the US Navy took delivery of the first nuclear-powered submarine, theUSS Nautilus. Nearly one hundred meters long and capable of an immersion range unthinkable with conventional submarines used up to that point, it represented a Copernican revolution in submarine warfare. If in the early years of the Cold War submarines were instruments used mainly to strike surface ships, a few years after the introduction of the Nautilus into service, the Americans successfully tested the launch of ballistic missiles from a submerged submarine.
The rapid technological progress that characterized the second half of the last century made conventional and nuclear submarines extremely complex, silent and capable platforms, also diversifying the tasks they could perform. Submarines remain an essential tool for naval deterrence since even today they maintain their characteristic elusiveness guaranteed by the inaccessibility and opacity of the sea. Indeed, it is no coincidence that with the intensification of geo-strategic competition between states, more and more navies want to equip themselves with this capability for the first time – a particularly evident in the Indo-Pacific.
Present and future innovation between emerging technologies and dual-use
In addition to the consolidated reality of submarines, among the most enabling new technologies in terms of both offense and therefore protection and surveillance of underwater infrastructures there are undoubtedly the unmanned underwater vehiclesalso better known in Italy as uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUV), which can be flown remotely (remotely operated uncrewed vehicles – ROUV) oppure autonomi (autonomous underwater vehicle – AUV). In fact, UUVs are not limited by the presence of human beings on board and therefore can descend thousands of meters below the surface without having to solve one of the most complex problems of underwater navigation, namely the protection of the crew from very high pressure.
The physical properties of bodies of water also cause communications wireless most used on the surface are impractical or at least suboptimal, making the ability to perform various tasks autonomously, without the need for a real-time connection, an invaluable capability in the field of AUVs. Research and development in both the military and civilian fields are leading to strong progress in this area, also in Italy.
However, it is clear that the effectiveness of autonomous solutions in operational contexts should advance in parallel with the application of artificial intelligence, the machine learning and others emerging and disruptive technologies useful not only from a defense perspective. The underwater domain, in fact, shares many characteristics with the spatial one, starting from the hostility to the human being. But, as in space, activities at sea see both the armed forces and civilian operators in the foreground, such as the managers of gas pipelines, extraction platforms or commercial ports. It follows that innovation in this field cannot be separated from an approach that is in keeping with the dual vocation of many of the technologies necessary to operate underwater.
In conclusion, unmanned underwater vehicles are added to the submarineswithout replacing them, increasing offensive and defensive capabilities in an increasingly strategic and contested domain.
Cover photo MARIO DE RENZIS /ANSA /JI