Abstract: Seabed warfare is transforming maritime strategy by shifting competition from platforms and manoeuvre toward infrastructure, connectivity, and persistent monitoring, influence and selective control over the benthic domain. Growing dependence on critical undersea infrastructure, combined with advances in autonomous systems and distributed sensing, is turning the seabed into an active and contested battlespace. This article argues that traditional concepts of sea control and deterrence are increasingly insufficient for understanding conflict in this evolving environment. Building on the concepts of seabed control and liminal warfare, it examines how technological change, infrastructural vulnerability, and legal ambiguity reshape maritime strategy and enable persistent competition below the threshold of open conflict. The article concludes that adapting to seabed warfare requires doctrinal innovation, resilience, and closer integration between military, civilian, and alliance structures.
Problem statement: How does the emergence of seabed warfare transform traditional concepts of maritime strategy, sea control, and deterrence?
So what?: States and alliances must move beyond exclusively manned platform-centric naval doctrines and integrate seabed control into broader multi-domain strategy. This requires investments in autonomous systems, distributed sensing, resilience, and persistent situational awareness, as well as closer coordination among military, civilian, and private actors. Likewise, legal and institutional frameworks must adapt to the challenges posed by liminal warfare, attribution, and the protection of critical infrastructure in an increasingly contested maritime order.
Introduction
While the seabed has long been a part of naval warfare, it has historically remained a secondary, largely subordinate domain. Throughout the twentieth century, undersea competition was primarily defined by submarine operations and the technologies developed to detect and engage them. In this context, the emergence of seabed-based systems such as the United States Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) in 1957 demonstrated the viability of the ocean floor as a platform for persistent strategic monitoring. Nonetheless, naval doctrines continued to conceptualise the seabed as an auxiliary operational environment rather than as a distinct operational domain sui generis. This conceptual distinction contributed to a persistent gap in strategic thinking, one that is becoming increasingly untenable as technological developments and geopolitical dynamics reshape the maritime domain.
Modern societies in both military and civilian spheres have become deeply dependent on critical undersea infrastructure (CUI), while advances in autonomous systems, distributed sensing, and artificial intelligence are transforming the operational logic of undersea warfare. Emerging approaches increasingly emphasise networked, data-driven, and long-duration capabilities. These developments expand the scale and granularity of maritime surveillance while enabling more direct and continuous interaction with the seabed environment. Numerous incidents involving seabed infrastructure in recent years demonstrate that these systems are already exposed to strategic competition and interference. Such cases highlight not only the physical vulnerability of critical infrastructure, but also a broader strategic blind spot: dependencies on seabed-based systems are expanding more rapidly than the concepts and capabilities required to secure them.
Despite diverse adaptations to these developments, strategic and doctrinal responses remain uneven and incomplete. Traditional doctrines of sea control and undersea warfare were largely developed around mobility, manoeuvre, and concealment.[1] They are less capable of explaining a strategic environment defined by fixed infrastructure, distributed sensing systems, continuous surveillance, and operations occurring below the threshold of open armed conflict. Likewise, existing concepts of hybrid and grey-zone warfare only partially capture the dynamics of the seabed domain because ambiguity in this environment is not merely instrumental but structurally embedded in its physical, technological, and legal characteristics.
Seabed warfare can therefore be understood as military operations conducted on, from, or targeting the benthic realm, including the reconnaissance, surveillance, protection, manipulation, or disruption of CUI and systems.[2], [3] In contrast to traditional undersea warfare, which historically centred on mobile platforms, particularly submarines, seabed warfare places greater emphasis on static and distributed assets embedded in the seabed environment. The focus of competition consequently expands beyond manoeuvre and platform engagement toward the control of infrastructure, information flows, and access to the physical environment itself.
From Undersea Warfare to Seabed Warfare
Undersea warfare has long been shaped by a persistent competition between concealment and detection, often described as a “hider-seeker” dynamic.[4] At its core, this competition centred on mobile platforms operating within the water column, most notably submarines. The primary objective was to locate, track, and, if necessary, destroy adversary vessels while preserving one’s own freedom of manoeuvre. Strategic advantage was therefore closely linked to acoustic stealth, and operational success depended on the ability to remain undetected in an increasingly hostile sensing environment.
Historically, this form of undersea warfare was defined by a platform-centric logic. Throughout the twentieth century and during the Cold War, naval competition focused on the mobility of maritime forces and the destruction of adversary vessels. Technologies evolved accordingly, including diesel and later nuclear propulsion, sonar systems for detection, and torpedoes and mines as principal weapons. The battlespace remained the water column, while the seabed was largely treated as a physical obstacle or, at most, a space for concealment rather than an operational domain sui generis. The emergence of fixed sensing infrastructures during the Cold War expanded the strategic role of the seabed without fundamentally altering this underlying logic. Systems such as SOSUS, first operational in 1957 and deployed by the United States Navy, enabled basin-wide monitoring through hydrophone arrays placed on the ocean floor.[5] While this significantly expanded maritime situational awareness and demonstrated the seabed’s value as a technological platform, the system remained embedded within a conventional anti-submarine warfare framework: the seabed functioned primarily as a sensing layer, while submarines continued to constitute the principal targets and instruments of action. At the same time, early forms of direct interaction with the seabed began to emerge, although they remained limited and highly specialised. Operations such as the US Navy’s Ivy Bells programme (1971–1981), which involved the covert tapping of Soviet underwater communication cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, demonstrated the strategic relevance of fixed seabed assets as intelligence targets.[6] Yet such operations remained exceptional, requiring dedicated platforms, extensive planning, and significant operational risk. They did not fundamentally challenge the dominance of platform-centric warfare.
In recent years, however, confirmed sabotage, suspected external interference, and unresolved disruptions involving CUI have underscored a broader shift in the seabed’s strategic significance. Incidents across multiple regions—including the Baltic Sea (Nord Stream 1 and 2 in 2022;[7] Balticconnector in 2023;[8] C-Lion 1 and East-West Interlink in 2024;[9] Estlink 2 in 2025[10]), the Greenland Sea in 2022,[11] repeated cable disruptions in the Taiwan Strait since 2017,[12] as well as incidents near the Ivory Coast, Canada’s Cabot Strait in 2024, and the Red Sea in 2025[13], [14]—reveal an emerging pattern of disruption and vulnerability across geographically dispersed but strategically interconnected environments. These developments coincide with a broader technological transformation of the maritime domain. Autonomous underwater vehicles, distributed sensor networks, artificial intelligence, and advanced data processing increasingly enable enduring maritime surveillance and continuous environmental interaction. As distributed sensing architectures and multi-domain data integration expand, the maritime environment becomes increasingly observable, creating conditions that may be described as “ocean transparency,” albeit in uneven and asymmetrical forms.
The strategic significance of acoustic stealth correspondingly declines as distributed sensing reduces the effectiveness of traditional concealment strategies, turning ocean transparency itself into a contested capability.[15]
As a consequence, the operational focus of undersea competition is expanding beyond mobile platforms toward the physical environment itself, particularly the seabed. This shift is reinforced by the growing strategic importance of CUI, including submarine communication cables, energy pipelines, and offshore installations. Unlike traditional naval targets, these systems are geographically fixed, difficult to conceal, and highly interconnected, introducing a different operational logic centred on monitoring, resilience, protection, and selective disruption.
Seabed warfare should therefore be understood as a distinct form of maritime competition emerging at the intersection of these developments. Such a perspective reflects a shift in the primary domain of operations from the water column to the ocean floor, a shift in the primary objects of contestation from mobile platforms to fixed infrastructure, and a shift in the sources of strategic advantage from acoustic stealth toward distributed awareness enabled by networked sensing and data-driven capabilities. Rather than merely extending traditional undersea warfare, this transformation reconfigures its underlying strategic rationale. Despite these developments, doctrinal adaptation has not fully kept pace with technological and operational change. Existing naval concepts remain largely oriented toward anti-submarine warfare and the control of the water column, often without fully integrating the seabed into strategic planning. This creates a growing gap between emerging capabilities and established frameworks, increasing the risk that states may prove insufficiently prepared to address the dynamics and vulnerabilities associated with seabed-based competition. Traditional “hider-seeker” logics become increasingly constrained in an environment defined by fixed and identifiable infrastructure that cannot manoeuvre, conceal itself, or evade attack. As a result, strategic competition increasingly expands beyond evasion toward resilience, spatial control, and the protection of interconnected systems, complementing rather than replacing the continued importance of surface and subsurface naval platforms, while exposing states and alliances more directly to seabed-based coercion and infrastructure disruption.
The Infrastructure–Technology Nexus
Contemporary maritime power increasingly depends on dense, geographically fixed networks of CUI. Submarine communication cables, energy pipelines, offshore platforms, and sensor systems form the physical architecture that sustains military communications, digital connectivity, financial transactions, and energy flows. While the strategic vulnerabilities associated with these systems are often most pronounced in infrastructure-dense maritime corridors and chokepoints, their significance extends far beyond these localised spaces.[16] Major naval powers, alliance structures, and globally connected economies increasingly depend on undersea connectivity, making seabed warfare strategically relevant not only at concentrated chokepoints but also wherever such infrastructure underpins broader military and economic systems.[17]
This vulnerability is exacerbated by the physical characteristics of the undersea environment. The seabed remains difficult to monitor continuously due to ocean depth, topography, currents, and harsh operating conditions. Traditional naval approaches based on intermittent patrols and platform-centric surveillance, therefore, struggle to provide sustained coverage across extensive maritime spaces. As a consequence, the strategic challenge increasingly shifts from episodic presence toward continuous environmental awareness. Technological developments are transforming how states seek to address these vulnerabilities. Rather than relying exclusively on episodic patrols and localised platform-based surveillance, emerging approaches increasingly seek to establish persistent environmental awareness, rapid anomaly detection, and sustained interaction with CUI. Programs such as DARPA’s Hydra concept illustrate this broader transition toward dispersed and enduring undersea systems designed to complement conventional naval platforms and extend operational reach.[18]
These developments significantly expand maritime situational awareness across increasingly large and complex operational environments. At the same time, this increased transparency remains uneven and contested rather than absolute. States capable of integrating distributed sensing networks gain significant advantages in situational awareness, while adversaries may continue exploiting environmental complexity, legal ambiguity, and attributional uncertainty to conduct covert operations below conventional escalation thresholds.[19], [20]
The strategic consequences of this transformation are substantial. Distributed autonomous systems and comparatively low-cost underwater technologies create significant asymmetric advantages by enabling actors to threaten highly expensive, difficult-to-replace infrastructure at relatively low cost. Offensive and defensive capabilities increasingly include autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated systems, loitering seabed platforms, distributed surveillance networks, and coordinated unmanned operations. Strategic competition correspondingly expands beyond singular fleet engagements to include enduring infrastructure-oriented competition characterised by persistence, resilience, and system disruption.
Recent incidents increasingly demonstrate the operational relevance of these dynamics, ranging from sophisticated sabotage to low-tech grey-zone coercion. Disruptions involving subsea infrastructure across regions such as the Baltic Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the Red Sea demonstrate that the seabed has become an active space of strategic contestation rather than merely a passive physical environment. The strategic importance of these developments extends beyond physical infrastructure alone. Undersea systems increasingly support command-and-control functions, intelligence sharing, financial systems, logistics, and broader C4ISR architectures whose disruption can generate cascading effects far beyond coastal regions and directly affected maritime spaces.[21], [22] Disruptions to seabed infrastructure, therefore, have cascading effects that degrade military coordination, digital connectivity, and broader operational resilience across entire theatres. Recent incidents such as the damage to the Balticconnector pipeline and associated cable systems in 2023 illustrate how even limited disruptions can trigger prolonged operational uncertainty, economic disruption, and complex multinational responses. At the same time, the restoration and repair of damaged systems often require scarce specialised vessels, extended timelines, and coordination between civilian operators and state authorities, further intensifying strategic vulnerability.
These dynamics also expose growing tensions between public security responsibilities and privately owned infrastructure systems.[23] Significant portions of CUI are operated by commercial actors whose priorities, escalation thresholds, and operational responsibilities may not align directly with those of states or military alliances. This fragmented governance environment complicates attribution, deterrence, and coordinated responses, particularly in hybrid and below-threshold conflict environments. The convergence of infrastructural dependency and technological transformation consequently reshapes the strategic logic of maritime competition itself. Maritime power increasingly depends on both naval manoeuvre and fleet operations and on the capacity to secure, monitor, and selectively influence interconnected systems located on or beneath the ocean floor. The seabed thereby emerges as a strategic environment wherever critical infrastructure, sensor systems, or operational dependencies create conditions of infrastructural vulnerability, distributed technological competition, and persistent contestation below the threshold of conventional warfare.
Legal Ambiguity and the Emergence of Liminal Warfare
The strategic transformation of the seabed increasingly clashes with a legal framework largely designed for a different maritime era. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982, remains the foundational legal architecture governing maritime jurisdiction, navigation, and resource exploitation. Yet UNCLOS was primarily conceived to regulate shipping, territorial sovereignty, and economic rights rather than to protect highly interconnected CUI exposed to persistent strategic competition, and it remains institutionally weak in responding to covert interference, sabotage, and other ambiguous seabed activities. This creates a growing tension between technological transformation and legal adaptation.[24] While modern states and societies increasingly depend on interconnected undersea systems, the legal framework governing these spaces remains fragmented across multiple jurisdictions. Within territorial waters (up to 12 nautical miles), coastal states retain extensive sovereign authority under UNCLOS Articles 2 and 21. Beyond this zone, however, legal authority becomes progressively diluted. In the Exclusive Economic Zone (up to 200 nautical miles), coastal states possess sovereign rights primarily related to resource exploitation under Article 56, while other states retain significant navigational freedoms. On the high seas, the principle of freedom of navigation under Article 87 further dilutes enforcement authority and complicates the protection of fixed infrastructure that extends across multiple jurisdictions.[25]
As the distance from the coastline increases, the practical capacity of states to monitor, attribute, and respond to hostile activity weakens. This jurisdictional gradient becomes particularly significant in the context of seabed infrastructure, where pipelines, communication cables, and sensor systems frequently traverse multiple legal zones and involve both public and private actors. Although UNCLOS Articles 113 to 115 criminalise intentional damage to submarine cables, enforcement mechanisms remain limited and heavily dependent on state cooperation, attribution, and jurisdictional clarity.[26], [27] These limitations become especially consequential in situations involving sabotage, interference, or coercive activity below the threshold of open armed conflict. Under Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, states are prohibited from using force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another state, while Article 51 preserves the inherent right of self-defence in response to an armed attack. Yet in the seabed environment, determining whether a particular incident constitutes accidental damage, criminal activity, covert sabotage, or an armed attack is frequently exceptionally difficult.[28] Environmental complexity, technological opacity, fragmented jurisdiction, and the dual-use character of many maritime platforms combine to generate persistent attributional uncertainty. The 2023 Balticconnector incident illustrates this problem: investigators identified an anchor drag by the NewNew Polar Bear as the likely cause of the damage, while the question of whether it was an accident or a deliberate act remained contested during the investigation.[29] Similar ambiguity surrounded the 2023 Matsu cable disruptions, where Taiwan linked the damage to Chinese vessels but did not establish deliberate state-directed interference.[30] In both cases, the strategic effect lay not only in the physical disruption itself, but in the time-consuming evidentiary process required before political or military responses could be calibrated. States may therefore encounter substantial difficulty in attributing responsibility with the degree of certainty required for escalation, retaliation, or the invocation of self-defence.
These conditions reveal the limits of existing concepts of hybrid and grey-zone warfare. In conventional understandings of hybrid conflict, ambiguity is primarily used tactically to obscure attribution, delay response, or avoid escalation. Within the seabed domain, however, ambiguity increasingly functions not simply as a tactic, but as a structural condition of conflict itself.[31] The interaction between maritime geography, environmental opacity, fragmented legal authority, dual-use technologies, and attributional uncertainty embeds ambiguity directly within the operational environment. This article conceptualises this condition as liminal warfare. Unlike traditional distinctions between peace and war, liminal warfare describes a persistent condition of strategic competition unfolding within legally, politically, and operationally ambiguous spaces. Actors may impose substantial economic, military, and political costs without clearly crossing established legal thresholds associated with armed conflict. While seabed warfare may serve as an instrument within broader hybrid warfare strategies, it remains analytically distinct. Hybrid Warfare is defined by the coordinated use of multiple conventional, unconventional, cyber, and informational instruments across domains, whereas seabed warfare is defined by its specific physical domain and its focus on undersea infrastructure and connectivity. Liminal warfare, by contrast, describes the strategic condition in which such activities often unfold below clear thresholds of attribution and escalation. The seabed consequently becomes a domain in which strategic disruption can occur continuously below the threshold of conventional war, yet remain difficult to attribute, regulate, or deter effectively. The emergence of liminal warfare carries significant strategic implications. Classical deterrence models, based primarily on attribution and retaliation, become increasingly constrained in environments where hostile activity remains persistently ambiguous, and escalation thresholds are uncertain.[32] As a result, states and alliances may increasingly shift toward deterrence by denial, infrastructural resilience, persistent monitoring, and distributed awareness rather than relying exclusively on punitive responses after an attack occurs.
Strategic Implications: Towards Seabed Control
The emergence of seabed warfare carries significant implications for the future of maritime strategy and maritime power, particularly for great powers and states operating in infrastructure-dense maritime theatres.[33] Traditional concepts of sea control were historically oriented toward the temporary domination of surface and subsurface spaces to secure manoeuvre, protect shipping, and deny adversaries operational freedom. Within the context of seabed warfare, however, strategic competition increasingly extends to the protection, monitoring, and selective disruption of fixed infrastructure, information flows, and interconnected systems embedded within the benthic environment itself, particularly where critical undersea systems are geographically concentrated yet strategically connected to wider military and economic networks.[34] Seabed control should, therefore, not be understood as absolute dominance over the undersea domain, but rather as the capacity to maintain awareness, resilience, and selective denial in a contested, continuously monitored environment. In contrast to classical manned platform-centric approaches, seabed control places greater emphasis on enduring environmental interaction enabled by distributed sensing architectures, autonomous systems, and resilient infrastructural networks. Rather than replacing conventional force projection, these capabilities complement existing surface and subsurface fleets by expanding maritime power into the protection, monitoring, and selective disruption of interconnected systems operating beneath the ocean surface.[35]
This transformation reshapes the operational logic of maritime competition. Rather than focusing exclusively on the destruction of adversary platforms, strategic competition increasingly revolves around monitoring, protecting, disrupting, and manipulating critical undersea systems. Awareness, protection, and denial consequently emerge as interconnected dimensions of seabed control. Recent institutional responses, such as NATO’s establishment of the Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell in 2023, illustrate this shift by formalising continuous monitoring, information-sharing, and coordinated infrastructure protection as core elements of alliance maritime security.[36] States and alliances capable of integrating continuous sensing, rapid repair capacities, distributed surveillance, and selective denial mechanisms gain substantial strategic advantages within an environment characterised by persistent ambiguity and infrastructural vulnerability.[37]
At the same time, the emergence of distributed sensing and autonomous technologies challenges long-standing assumptions surrounding stealth and concealment in undersea warfare. The increasing integration of passive hydrophone networks, autonomous platforms, satellite observations, and AI-assisted data processing contributes to an operational environment in which maritime activity becomes increasingly observable across multiple domains. Although ocean transparency remains incomplete and contested, the strategic value of acoustic invisibility declines correspondingly. Undersea competition increasingly depends upon the integration of data, environmental awareness, and system resilience rather than solely upon platform concealment.[38] These developments also accelerate the integration of seabed operations into broader multi-domain strategic frameworks. Undersea infrastructure increasingly intersects with cyber operations, intelligence systems, satellite networks, and digital communication architectures. Disruptions to seabed infrastructure may therefore generate cascading effects that extend far beyond the maritime domain, affecting military command systems, intelligence coordination, financial transactions, logistics, and broader societal connectivity. Maritime strategy correspondingly becomes more deeply interconnected with cybersecurity, space-based surveillance, and digital infrastructure protection.[39]
The strategic transformation of the seabed also creates growing pressures for institutional and doctrinal adaptation. Existing naval structures and procurement models remain heavily shaped by traditional anti-submarine warfare and large platform-centric force structures. Yet seabed competition increasingly rewards distributed systems, autonomous underwater vehicles, networked sensing architectures, and long-duration environmental interaction.
States and alliances may therefore face increasing pressure to rebalance maritime capabilities toward more flexible, distributed, and technologically integrated force structures that can sustain continuous seabed awareness and infrastructural resilience. France has already formalised elements of seabed warfare doctrine through its 2022 Stratégie ministérielle de maîtrise des fonds marins, which defines seabed warfare in terms of the interconnected functions of knowledge development, monitoring, and action, while emphasising the strategic importance of hybrid ambiguity, deep-sea surveillance, and continuous seabed control.[40] Similar developments are emerging across NATO states through expanding seabed surveillance initiatives, unmanned underwater capabilities, and critical infrastructure protection programmes, while Russia and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) continue to expand operational capacities associated with deep-sea operations, seabed mapping, and unmanned undersea systems.[41]
At the same time, the governance of seabed security remains fragmented across civilian operators, private corporations, intelligence agencies, and military organisations. Significant portions of critical undersea infrastructure are privately owned and operated, while responsibility for maritime security remains largely state-based. This disconnect complicates deterrence, crisis response, and coordinated protection mechanisms, particularly within hybrid and liminal conflict environments characterised by attributional uncertainty and below-threshold operations.[42] These challenges increasingly require broader forms of alliance coordination and institutional integration. Broader alliance initiatives aimed at strengthening CUI protection reflect growing awareness of the strategic importance of undersea systems and the need for collective responses to emerging vulnerabilities.[43] More broadly, seabed warfare underscores the need for closer coordination among naval forces, intelligence communities, cyber organisations, civilian infrastructure operators, and allied maritime institutions in increasingly interconnected operational environments.
The strategic implications of seabed warfare, therefore, extend far beyond technological modernisation alone. They point toward a broader transformation in how maritime security, deterrence, and strategic competition are conceptualised. Maritime power increasingly depends not simply upon fleet size or platform superiority, but upon the capacity to sustain awareness, resilience, connectivity, and selective denial across an increasingly contested benthic domain. In this context, seabed control emerges as a form of benthic dominance grounded less in absolute territorial control than in the sustained ability to secure and influence the infrastructures and systems upon which contemporary maritime order increasingly depends.
Conclusion
Seabed warfare reflects a broader structural transformation of maritime conflict and maritime order itself. The seabed is no longer merely a passive environment beneath naval activity, but an increasingly contested strategic layer through which political, military, economic, and informational effects can be generated below the threshold of open confrontation. As CUI, distributed sensing systems, autonomous technologies, and data-driven operations become increasingly interconnected, the benthic environment is evolving into a central arena of strategic competition.
This transformation challenges the conceptual foundations of traditional maritime strategy. Classical notions of sea control and sea denial remain relevant, yet they are increasingly insufficient for understanding a domain defined by infrastructural dependency, continuous surveillance, and distributed technological capabilities. The strategic logic of maritime competition is gradually shifting beyond the control of mobility within the water column to control of connectivity across the seabed. Maritime power increasingly depends not only on the movement and protection of naval platforms, but on the ability to secure, monitor, and, if necessary, disrupt the critical systems that sustain military communications, digital networks, energy flows, and broader economic stability. In this context, the control of infrastructure and information becomes inseparable from the exercise of maritime power.
The strategic implications of this transformation are substantial. Traditional approaches to maritime security are increasingly challenged by a strategic environment in which resilience, sustained awareness, distributed sensing, and infrastructure security have become central components of deterrence and defence. Seabed control, therefore, should not be understood as absolute dominance over the undersea domain, but as the capacity to maintain awareness, resilience, and selective denial within a contested benthic environment. Achieving this objective will require doctrinal adaptation, closer integration between naval, cyber, intelligence, and civilian actors, and a broader rethinking of how maritime security is organised within alliance structures and multi-domain operational frameworks. States and alliances that fail to adapt to these dynamics risk exposing critical vulnerabilities that may be exploited below conventional escalation thresholds and at comparatively low cost.
The strategic importance of the seabed is therefore likely to intensify as offshore energy systems expand, digital infrastructure proliferates, and autonomous technologies become increasingly integrated into maritime operations. Yet legal and institutional adaptation is unlikely to proceed at the same pace as technological transformation, prolonging the structural ambiguity that characterises contemporary seabed competition. The seabed must consequently be understood not as a peripheral extension of maritime operations, but as a distinct operational and strategic domain. Adapting to this transformation is no longer simply a question of technological modernisation, but of reassessing the strategic grammar of maritime power within an increasingly interconnected and contested global order.
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[33] Scipanov and Sava, “Doctrinal Approach to Gain Seabed Control,” 94.
[34] Till, Seapower, 183–97.
[35] French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Seabed Warfare Strategy, 8–9.
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[37] Christian Bueger and Tobias Liebetrau, “Protecting Hidden Infrastructure: The Security Politics of the Global Submarine Data Cable Network,” Contemporary Security Policy 42, no. 3 (2021): 394–98.
[38] Carr et al., Seabed Warfare and the XLUUV, 21–24.
[39] Bueger and Liebetrau, “Protecting Hidden Infrastructure,” 399–401.
[40] French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Seabed Warfare Strategy, 8–9, 20–21, 38–40.
[41] French Ministry of the Armed Forces, Seabed Warfare Strategy, 17–20.
[42] Bueger and Liebetrau, “Protecting Hidden Infrastructure,” 399–401.
[43] NATO, “NATO Stands Up Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell.”
