ADM Berdal’s calls come amid a growing number of sabotage attacks on CUI in the Baltics.

As sabotage of critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) continues to rise, Norway’s local authorities, NATO partners and private sector companies must collaborate to maximise its protection, Rear Admiral (RADM) Oliver Berdal, Chief of the Royal Norwegian Navy, told DSEI on 3 March.

“One of the most important things when it comes to protecting our critical underwater infrastructure is working very closely with industry”, RADM Berdal said. “That is, of course, the major oil and gas companies which own the pipelines and fibre optic cables that crisscross the North Sea, as well as the companies that own and operate the electrical interconnectors that connect UK and Norway, Germany and Norway, and then their markets”.

RADM Berdal’s calls come as NATO’s ‘Baltic Sentry’ initiative deploys frigates, maritime patrol aircraft, and a small fleet of naval drones to monitor CUI in the Baltic Sea following a spate of recent sabotage attacks.

A series of sabotaging events

Speaking ahead of his keynote address at the UDT expo in Oslo on 25 March, RADM Berdal emphasised that CUI sabotage “is not a pure military problem” and “there are no pure military solutions”.

“I think that the most important piece of this very big puzzle is government and private sector working together”, RADM Berdal said. “Even though critical underwater infrastructure has been in the media over the last three years since the Nord Stream incident, it’s always been vulnerable”.

This is an “international problem”, he emphasised. It is therefore “so important to work closely with our partners in NATO, the UK, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and the Baltic States, because, together, I think that we can achieve much, much more than if this had sort of like been a Norwegian Navy problem alone. Our capability to solve this problem is very small compared to the seriousness of it”.

Scandinavian and Baltic countries have played an increasingly active role in protecting CUI since RADM’s appointment as Norway’s Navy Chief in October 2023.

In November 2024, Norway joined an ‘international initiative on submarine cables’ after three separate cables carrying internet data and power between five NATO Allies – Estonia, Finland, Germany, Lithuania and Sweden – were severely damaged.

On 25 December, Swedish authorities seized a tanker carrying Russian oil which had dragged its anchor for almost 100km, damaging an undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia and severing four telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea.

In January, Norwegian and Latvian authorities seized a Russian-crewed vessel suspected of damaging an undersea cable in the Baltic Sea. For many NATO partners, this represented a tipping point akin to the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines explosions in September 2022, which kickstarted concerns over the vulnerability of CUI.

NATO then launched ‘Task Force X’ in February, in response to what it described as “an evolving maritime security environment characterised by increased Russian aggression, including threats to critical undersea infrastructure”. Task Force X involves a fleet of autonomous systems detecting and tracking potential threats to enhance maritime situational awareness.

The Baltic pilot of Task Force X, tested in mid-February as part of ‘Baltic Sentry’, drew on US Navy Task Forces and existing NATO projects including Digital Ocean.

Author Details

Alex Blair - Defence Reporter

Alex Blair is a UK-based Defence Journalist at Clarion Defence and Security, organisers of DSEI, APEX, and other defence industry shows. Previously, he was a Thematic Reporter for GlobalData Media, specialising in geopolitics and conflict.