From space to seabed - Protecting the UK’s undersea cables from hostile

The epicentre of Sino-American competition is the South and East China Sea, both major nodes of maritime activity and critical maritime infrastructure.6 With China rapidly expanding its naval surface- and sub-surface capabilities, the likelihood of the deep-sea domain entering the contested Indo-Pacific theatre in the near-future is high. [...] Now, as in 2017, only three international conventions cover the sub-surface maritime domain: the 1884 Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables; the 1958 Geneva Convention on the High Seas; and the 1982 United Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). [...] The Brexit vote appeared to divert the UK from the bloc’s ever-closer economic and security path: it would leave the single market at the end of 2020; whilst the referendum excluded the UK from the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy aim to “enhance [its] credibility in security and defence”.23 Whilst the bloc progressed towards the establishment of a European security framework – later codified in its Stra. [...] In response, there has been a flurry of planned projects in the UK to reverse the plant closures over the preceding decades.37 Significant challenges face each of these endeavours, however: the relative lack of process standardisation in the industry prohibits economies of scale from kicking in to drive down manufacturing costs; whilst the global nature of the market engenders stiff competition. [...] The Kremlin’s maritime special operations are housed at the intersection of the navy-intelligence domain, combining the Intelligence Directorate of the Main Staff of the Russian Navy, the GUGI (the Deep-Sea Research Group), and the GRU.