Playing catch up: Moscow has invested heavily in its submarine fleet, while NATO has largely ignored the underwater realm. Newsweek talked to HCSS strategic analysts Paul van Hooft and Frederik Mertens about the Alliance’s vulnerability to seabed warfare.
Russia’s navy has taken a battering in the war with Ukraine, with a number of several high-profile humiliations, including the sinking of the Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, in the early days of the war. A vivid show of a declining surface fleet, the real threat Russia’s military poses to NATO lurks elsewhere.
The bulk of Russia’s seafaring investment has been channeled into its high-tech submarine fleet. Russia’s subs are widely considered to be a formidable force, and the U.S., along with its NATO allies, neglecting the war beneath the waves has left the alliance struggling to make up ground.
Questions remain about how well Russia has maintained its untested underwater fleet, but a consensus shows a distinct Western wariness of Moscow’s capabilities, not least its 11 nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), with the Borei-A class vessels. Russia also has its nuclear-powered cruise missile submarines (SSGNs), including its Yasen-class subs, in its underwater arsenal.
Areas in the North Sea, including oil extraction operations, appear to be increasingly monitored by Russian submarines
HCSS senior strategic analyst Paul van Hooft
Finland’s accession to the alliance, with Sweden’s membership on the horizon, has brought the Russian submarine question into sharper focus. The inclusion of these Nordic countries into NATO not only expands Russia’s borders with the alliance by hundreds of miles, but threatens the security of its critical maritime bases.
Changing NATO, New Threats and ‘Strange Routes’
The Ukraine war, spurring Helsinki’s and Stockholm’s NATO applications, therefore changes the maritime situation not just in the Black Sea, but in the Barents Sea around the Kola Peninsula, the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea.
It is in this context that Moscow’s subs have been moving along “strange routes,” deviating from the trajectories Western defense officials have come to expect, British defense minister Ben Wallace noted during a trip to Washington, D.C. in mid-April. He said the U.K. had been tracking the paths of Russian undersea vessels in the North Atlantic, Irish Sea and North Sea “that they normally wouldn’t do.”
Asymmetric Warfare and Undersea Cables
But Russian submarines are not just a strategic nuclear deterrent. A new submarine war is emerging, experts say, bringing maritime security concerns into the world of “seabed warfare.”
The head of the U.K.’s armed forces, Sir Tony Radakin, suggested at the beginning of the year that Moscow could “put at risk and potentially exploit the world’s real information system, which is undersea cables that go all around the world”. Speaking to The Times of London in January, he said there had been a “phenomenal increase in Russian submarine and underwater activity” and Russia has “grown the capability to put at threat those undersea cables and potentially exploit those undersea cables.”
Russia looked towards asymmetrical warfare and at nurturing new capabilities where Moscow could undercut Western military dominance, which could mean targeting internet cables and pipelines. Areas in the North Sea, including oil extraction operations, appear to be increasingly monitored by Russian submarines, Paul van Hooft, a senior strategic analyst at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS), told Newsweek.
In February, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced the creation of a Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell, spurred on by the Nord Stream explosion and the “vulnerability of undersea energy pipelines and communication cables.”
“In response, NATO allies have significantly increased their military presence around key infrastructure, including with ships and patrol aircraft,” the alliance said in a press release.
In response to a Newsweek request for comment, NATO pointed to remarks made by Stoltenberg earlier in May, when he said that for the alliance, “protecting critical undersea infrastructure is essential to our security and defense because it is key to protecting the security and prosperity of our societies.”
During Cold War-era relations, the most hot it got was underwater.
HCSS strategic analyst Frederik Mertens
“This is an enormous amount of infrastructure, meaning that of course, we cannot protect every meter of this infrastructure at every time,” Stoltenberg said in a separate event in March 2023. “But what we do is that we have stepped up what we do when it comes to exchanging intelligence, information, more closely monitoring the infrastructure, then we have increased our presence with more military capabilities.”
The underwater battle, with its submarines, increasing use of uncrewed underwater technology, and asymmetric warfare, should absolutely be a concern for NATO, experts say.
NATO Enters The Underwater Race
A concerted change has taken place in NATO consciousness in recent years, experts say, waking up to what Frederik Mertens, another strategic analyst at the HCSS, called a “uniquely threatening weapons system.”
Back during Cold War-era relations, the “most hot it got was underwater,” Mertens told Newsweek. Yet after the simmering tensions of the 20th century, NATO countries looked away from the war underneath the waves, experts say. Moscow, however, did not. Throughout the past 30 years, NATO countries “were not particularly thinking about it,” his colleague Van Hooft added.
After a slower start, some experts say NATO now matches up to or exceeds Russia’s submarine capabilities, arguing that the alliance does not have “some objective, incredible weakness towards Russia in this domain.” But Moscow has understood “that we haven’t really invested in this, so they might be pressuring those weak points,” Van Hooft added.
Read the full article at Newsweek, by Ellie Cook, 5/13/23
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