Co-operation between maritime industry, navies, and key other commercial and government stakeholders is crucial to building deterrence and wider security for critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) protection, according to the head of the Royal Norwegian Navy (RNoN).
In the keynote address at the annual Undersea Defence Technology (UDT) conference – held this year in Oslo, Norway – Rear Admiral Oliver Berdal said CUI protection sits high up on security agendas for good reason, following a spate of incidents involving damage and disruption to CUI networks including in the Baltic and Norwegian seas.
Incidents in waters off Lofoten and Svalbard, Norway occurred in 2021 and 2022. The Baltic Sea has seen several incidents since 2022, starting with the rupture of two Nordstream gas pipelines.
CUI networks, which comprise oil and gas pipelines, power and data cables, and other seabed nodes, are critical to how the world works, with security being a multi-stakeholder responsibility, Rear Adm Berdal explained.
“Threats to CUI are not a pure military problem, and there are no pure military solutions,” he said.
Off Norway, there are approximately 8,800 km of oil and gas pipelines. Norway hosts more than 400 electric power plants; this power network is connected to Denmark, Germany, and the UK, to share wind and hydro-electric energy. Fibre-optic cables – what Rear Adm Berdal referred to as “the central nervous system of the global economy” – carry around 98 percent of all global communications, a figure that may grow as artificial intelligence generates more data that must be exchanged, the admiral explained. Even the growing satellite networks cannot replicate this data transfer volume, he added.
“This infrastructure is owned by industry; it’s established and put down on the seabed by industry; it’s inspected and monitored by industry; and if it’s broken, it’s repaired by industry. If a pipeline is broken, it’s not going to be the police or the military that’s going to repair it: it’s going to be private sector companies with the knowledge, experience, resources, tools, and equipment to fix it.”
Rear Adm Berdal, Chief of the Norwegian Navy
The national and multi-national responses to the September 2022 Nordstream incident underlined how protecting CUI is a multi-stakeholder matter, Rear Adm Berdal explained, adding that Norway’s own response demonstrated how such co-operation can generate rapid reaction to a CUI incident.
“In Norway, we’ve been quite successful. Immediately after the Nordstream incident, various government agencies came together, and with industry – the owners of CUI: oil and gas companies, telecom companies etcetera – and we quickly established something we have named the Maritime Security Network,” said Rear Adm Berdal.
The co-operation included the exchange of expertise, he explained. “We were assisting them; they were assisting us …. We had military experts sitting with the major oil and gas companies, when they were inspecting their pipelines after the incident, to assist them in assessing different objects on the pipelines and whether they were harmful or not.”
Highlighting the significant capacity within Norway’s commercial maritime sector to deploy, use, and maintain seabed CUI, Rear Adm Berdal noted that around 500 oil and gas sector support vessels operate at sea every day, with these vessels carrying hundreds of unmanned vehicles collectively. “The solution is to work closely with industry, to make sure we support them with what they need from us and the other way around,” he said.
Then, there is the naval role in deterring the threat to CUI in the first place. “We need to make sure the navies are good at what the navies need to be doing, and that is warfighting – underneath the sea, in the future on the seabed, and of course on the surface and towards air and space,” said Rear Adm Berdal. “What I think [Norway] will do is invest heavily in unmanned autonomous vehicles – not necessarily a lot more ships, but putting more money into the things that can work underneath the waves.”
“We have facilities both on the civilian side and the military side …. All the red tape we had in the past has been taken away. We’re working very, very closely on a daily basis. In Norway, we really made headway,” the admiral said.
Deterring, defending against, and responding to CUI threats is all about using information. “To deal with this, you need information superiority, you need situational awareness and situational knowledge,” said Rear Adm Berdal. “That comes from the coastguard, the navy, customs, the maritime authority, the police, and all the different industry players, and is combined with intelligence from space [and] from other sources.”
Additionally, information is exchanged with partner countries. “The key to succeeding in this task is to work closely between countries, because this is not a threat to one country alone,” said Rear Adm Berdal.“We all depend on the same communications infrastructure, the same energy infrastructure, and the same freedom of navigation on the high seas that ensures we all get the goods we need for our societies.” “Co-operation is more important than ever before. In the months and years ahead, Norway will further increase co-operation with those partners and allies, because it’s the only way to succeed in a very complex future,” he added.
“We are all in the same boat, which means we need to protect this together,” Rear Adm Berdal continued. “Countries need to work together; government agencies, the military, police, maritime authority, coastguards etcetera, need to work closely together; [and] we need to work closely with industry.”
“If we work closely together, we will be quite successful in protecting our vital infrastructure,” said the Chief of Navy. “We’ve made this big ‘spider’s web’ [of co-operation]. It’s not perfect yet, but we’ve really made some headway. If we continue in this direction – and I’m still concerned about the vulnerability of CUI – I think we will be able to deal with it.”
“We’ve found a good recipe, so we will continue to improve it,” the admiral added.
You can watch the video interview with RADM Berdal at UDT 2025 here:
