Someone’s been playing games in the Baltic again.

Someone’s been playing games in the Baltic again.

LRT (Lithuanian National Radio and TV) is reporting that a telecommunications cable running between Lithuania and Sweden has been cut. It runs alongside two other cables, meaning that the internet bandwidth between the two countries had been reduced by a third, More seriously, another cable carrying data between Germany and Finland was put out of action, severing all data transmission between the two. LRT adds that the 1,200-km-long cable “runs alongside other important pieces of infrastructure, including gas pipelines and electricity cables.”

Twelve hundred kilometers is 750 miles, meaning that that cable was a very soft target. According to LRT, the U.S. had warned of increased Russian military activity around these cables. No one so far has been blamed for the damage, but the German and Finnish foreign ministers have put out a statement saying (after some throat clearing) that an investigation was underway, and that:

Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors.

Fixing such damage would typically take anywhere between five and 15 days.

In March, Mike Coté, writing for NRO, set out a detailed assessment of the shadow war now being fought on the seabed, pointing out that the Houthis had gotten into the act too, as had, inevitably, the Chinese. There are, he wrote, nearly 900,000 miles of communications cable alone stretching across the seabed. How to defend that? Among other applications, these cables are used to transmit $10 trillion in financial transfers a day. What could go wrong?

Hybrid warfare is a concept as slippery as the way in which it is fought, but on one interpretation it can mean a form of war that is not quite war, but not quite peace either. A better term, if it is definitively proved that the damage to the cables was deliberate, might be to define it as an action carried out in the “gray zone.”

Writing earlier this year about some incidents — assassination plots and acts of sabotage — seemingly arranged by Russia or on its behalf, I borrowed a definition from Clementine G. Starling, the deputy director of the Forward Defense program and a resident fellow at the Transatlantic Security Initiative:

The gray zone describes a set of activities that occur between peace (or cooperation) and war (or armed conflict). A multitude of activities fall into this murky in-between — from nefarious economic activities, influence operations, and cyberattacks to mercenary operations, assassinations, and disinformation campaigns. Generally, gray-zone activities are considered gradualist campaigns by state and non-state actors that combine non-military and quasi-military tools and fall below the threshold of armed conflict. They aim to thwart, destabilize, weaken, or attack an adversary, and they are often tailored toward the vulnerabilities of the target state. While gray-zone activities are nothing new, the onset of new technologies has provided states with more tools to operate and avoid clear categorization, attribution, and detection — all of which complicates the United States’ and its allies’ ability to respond.

I added:

Two key reasons why waging a war in the gray zone is so effective for the aggressor are contained in the last part of that last sentence. The first is the question of proof, and the second, which applies even if there is proof of who was responsible, is how to respond. NATO is not (nor should it) go to war over an arson attack or even an assassination of, say, a business executive. But how does it hit back?

It’s hard to say, and Moscow knows that. But the failure to respond is bound to gnaw away at the sense of security that membership of NATO is meant to give its members.

Writing for CEPA in October, Elisabeth Braw:

a string of packages containing incendiary devices have been dispatched to German logistics firms. Had everything gone according to the perpetrators’ plans, the packages would have exploded mid-air. This summer, a similar package caught fire at a DHL warehouse in the UK.

Grounds for concern? Clearly, but in a smart article for The Spectator, Rory Cormac warns of the dangers of overstating the danger:

 Hostile states, violent groups, petty criminals, corporate negligence, and genuine accidents all co-exist to create an altogether ambiguous situation. This can too easily be exploited by states like Russia where the Kremlin gets the credit — so to speak — for fire across Europe. Suddenly Putin looks ten feet tall and a grand master of the dark arts of covert operations, just like many commentators thought he was a master of disinformation. Sabotage works hand in glove with disinformation to weaponise friction, weaken resolve: to disrupt, delay and degrade. It is of little surprise that just as in the Cold War, Russian sabotage today is accompanied by propaganda and disinformation campaigns designed to generate uncertainty and erode morale. We must understand them together.

Following a period of panic, we are increasingly realising that, just as downplaying it, exaggerating the threat of disinformation helps foreign propagandists. The same principle is true for sabotage. The threat must be taken very seriously, but exaggeration risks helping foreign saboteurs. We will end up frustrating ourselves, weaponising our own friction, and doing the saboteurs’ job for them. If every fire in an arms depot is seen as a Russian attempt to increase the costs of supporting Ukraine – then that is exactly what it becomes. Paranoia will be induced; morale will sap.

Complicating matters, however, at least so far as dis/misinformation is concerned, is that too many politicians have a vested interest in talking up the risk from Russian or other hostile state dis/misinformation in order to put in place laws that will clamp down on, most notably, social-media speech of which they disapprove. In doing so, they are doing Putin and Xi’s work for them. But if the rage with which they are responding to X is any indication, they are unlikely to care.