Many decision-makers have spoken about the importance of the infrastructure that exists on seabeds all over Europe. Sweden, with its long coastline and limited land connections, is particularly sensitive.
In preparation for a possible heightened state of alert, it is risky to take your inspiration from today's isolated events. And the now popular expressions Sea bed warfare and protection of critical infrastructure are possibly misleading. Best protection is not war at every cable.
At sea below the surface it is easy to hide. This is due to extremely short sensor ranges and difficulty with communication. The challenges in the Baltic Sea also include the bottom topography and stratification in the water. Therefore, detection, identification and measures to stop ongoing sabotage or accidents are very resource-intensive on land and especially at sea. The society must work with indirect measures that protect the social function, not the cable.
Most of the disruptions at sea and on land are a consequence of accidents and other errors that occur. The industry is already working to reduce such risks. For example, by burying cables in areas with a high probability of damage from fishing gear and anchors. Other important measures are repairability. Taking responsibility for such actions is the responsibility of the operators, but society also needs to support by rewarding reliability.
Burying a cable is also an effective protection against sabotage, but then it has to be buried all the way. Supplementing a buried bottom cable with a cable via a completely different route, creates a very good protection against single attacks and single accidents.
At times of greater tension and heightened alertness, civil shipping and other activities continue both on land and at sea. But examples show that the skills on board and the quality of the ships declines. This means that the probability of accidents increases. So even at high levels of international tension, it is of great importance to work with protection against accidents and errors.
With good passive protection, the state's resources can focus on protection against larger coordinated attacks. But there are some places that need active protection. There are also some occasions when extra protection is needed. For example, when large domestic power producers are down or at the same time as a major cyber-attack.
Today, there are few individual cables that are critical for Sweden, and with each new cable the importance of the respective cable decreases. But we can do better. Electricity and data cables are infrastructure that has a good chance of being protected via redundancy on land and at sea.
Advanced technology interacts more deeply than ever in our lives and organizations. We therefore need to be better at making use of the respective infrastructure's strengths. Today's infrastructure makes society stronger. An expanded infrastructure means that the really critical points are reduced in number and that the occasions when extra protection is needed are also reduced in number. But it becomes more complex to analyze where and when extra protection is needed. Such analytical ability is now increasing in importance.
To better work with these complex analyses, and to be able to attribute sudden interruptions to the right cause, more information is needed from all the remote locations of the infrastructure. The information also needs to be shared between many more parties, governmental and commercial. This is a new challenge.
Society also needs to get better at valuing reserves and a diversity of solutions, both proactive and reactive. And an overly coordinated preparedness risks building weaknesses against something we did not anticipate. The best protection is measures at the system level and organizational measures before high alert well before the war. Preferably with imagination and diversity.
However, a hinder for achieving this is the distance between policy and infrastructure development. Policy makers are many times to ignorant about the characteristics of different types of infrastructure and the systemic aspects. For example the difference between the vulnerability of one specific cable and the vulnerability of the system. And project leaders and engineers knows too little about the defence and security decisions and therefore miss the chance to let small system changes make big difference. However, they do not lack interest.
I think it is an informal dialog between policymakers and infrastructure designers that really can make a difference. To inform the policymakers about the infrastructure and to inform designers about the societies challenges outside the direct need of that specific infrastructure component.
