Company insight
Keeping critical underwater infrastructure safe
With the ever-increasing risk of hostile actors that wish to disrupt trade and communications by attacking and sabotaging critical underwater infrastructure (CUI), Europe and Nato have never needed the tools and capabilities to tackle this threat more than they do today. We speak to Jeroen de Jonge, key account manager for navy, defence, safety and security at TNO, to learn more about what his organisation is doing to contribute to the fight.
The recent severing of critical undersea communications cables between Germany and Finland has highlighted the vulnerability of critical underwater infrastructure (CUI). How does TNO’s expertise and tech contribute to mitigating such risks?
Jeroen de Jonge: TNO is the Netherlands’ largest defence research and development institute, with over 1,000 scientists working for the ministry of defence on a daily basis. We are active in many technology areas, such as acoustics, sonar processing, data processing and analysis, radar processing and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMIC) development, autonomous systems and decision support tooling. To mitigate the risk to CUI, we aim to develop the technology readiness level (TRL) of promising capability solutions into a level that enables industries to deliver in time. To achieve this, we collaborate with government and industry partners in focused roadmaps. An example is the scientific support TNO provides to SeaSEC, where industry can demonstrate existing unmanned capabilities in representative conditions.
TNO has advocated for a scenario-driven approach to CUI protection. Can you elaborate on this approach and how it helps nations to prioritise their security efforts in light of evolving threats?
TNO supports navies of the Northern Naval Capability Cooperation (NNCC) and the NLD Ministry of Infrastructure
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TNO foresees using more unmanned maritime solutions to counter threats in the medium-term.
and commercial companies in defending CUI. However, the sensors and effectors needed for this task are always scarce compared to the size of the total area to be defended – the North Sea. The radar coverage is being extended as we speak to improve the situational awareness of surface ships entering the area. The underwater domain, however, is too complex and large to monitor in its entirety. We therefore developed a scenario-based approach to assess the risks to specific infrastructure that would enable a quantitative and information-based response planning of scarce resources. We integrate layers of static and dynamic data (virtual and live) – including oceanographic and meteorological conditions, shipping patterns, AIS data and data coming from CUI asset owners – in a virtual environment to assess areas where non-benign ships deploying assets like unmanned underwater vehicles or divers might pose a threat. The resulting situational understanding helps to create an effective deterrence, based on
dedicated platform/sensor combinations for attribution of activities and the development of effectors to counter the threat and measures to make infrastructure more resilient.
SeaSEC seems to play a crucial role in testing and evaluating new technologies for underwater security. Can you provide specific examples of how SeaSEC is accelerating the development and adoption of these
capabilities, especially in shallow water environments? Put simply, SeaSEC’s mission is: “Accelerating the adoption of capabilities to secure underwater infrastructure in shallow waters.” In order to develop these capabilities, SeaSEC brings together industries in a dedicated 10-by-10-mile experimentation environment in the North Sea to demonstrate existing unmanned capabilities, such as sonar sensors, unmanned surface and underwater vehicles against a number of operational military challenges.
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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