The idea was floated during a media briefing with a senior NATO official at the combined ‘REPMUS’/‘Dynamic Messenger’ uncrewed systems exercises that have been taking place at Troia, southern Portugal, across September. “I foresee the results of [the exercises] potentially feeding into the ideal ingredients for a mission module that would help us react to an incident affecting CUI,” the official said.
CUI security – covering principally, but not exclusively, seabed oil and gas pipelines and data and power cables – has been a long-standing strategic concern for NATO and its member states. However, the political spotlight on this concern has sharpened in the wake of a steady increase in underwater military activity across the Euro-Atlantic theatre over the last decade, and a spate of more recent incidents (since 2021) relating to CUI security, culminating in explosions in September 2022 at the two Nordstream gas pipelines dissecting the Baltic Sea.
NATO has responded to this increased CUI focus in several ways. It has established strategic- and operational-level stakeholder coordination cells, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and NATO Allied Maritime Command in Northwood, UK, respectively. Operationally, it has boosted standing naval forces’ presence around CUI sites. In exercises, it has honed focus on developing the technologies, plus the tactics, techniques, and procedures, for conducting tactical-level CUI operations.
The latter development is being demonstrated at ‘REPMUS’/‘Dynamic Messenger’, where underwater warfare including CUI security has been one of four operational themes (alongside anti-submarine warfare [ASW], mine counter-measures [MCM], and rapid environmental assessment). For underwater – and especially seabed – warfare, the exercises focused on uncrewed systems’ role in building maritime situational awareness, plus providing operational capability for detecting and dealing with CUI threats.
In a technology demonstration conducted for senior officers and officials during the exercises’ Distinguished Visitors’ Day, uncrewed aerial systems (UASs) were deployed to surveil a suspect surface ship operating in ‘dark’ mode (with its automatic identification system switched off) near to a CUI site. The UASs also deployed sensors into the water to monitor underwater activity. Uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) were deployed to observe, identify, and track the suspect ship. One USV, along with the UK Royal Navy’s experimental vessel Patrick Blackett, then deployed uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) to surveil seabed CUI to search for signs of interference.
For over a decade, NATO and its member states have been developing technology and integration standards for container-based modules to support different capabilities and missions, the senior NATO official told the media briefing. Primarily, these mission modules have supported MCM tasks, but have increasingly been developed for other tasks across the operational spectrum, including ASW and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR). Incidentally, Danish company SH Defence recently unveiled a modular seabed warfare system.
In some operational areas, NATO has developed collective capability, for example in ground surveillance or airborne early warning. Regarding whether mission module capability for CUI security could be developed at national levels across NATO, collectively within the alliance, or ‘pooled’ for the alliance, the official said there had not been much discussion about collective CUI capability development.
“What I would say is more likely is, when we figure out the most effective recipe or ingredients of that CUI mission module, it will come into the [NATO] defence planning process as a target to those countries that can achieve it, in terms of fair burden sharing.”
Senior NATO official
Citing a similar example, the official noted that NATO previously had targeted 11 member states to provide harbour protection modules, with requests made to national defence ministries during the defence planning process.
As regards CUI, the official continued, “I would suggest that, once we figure out a ‘best mix’ for the mission modules, there will be a decision taken by NATO’s defence planners as to whether they target countries to provide that capability into NATO, at a certain readiness as well.”
