Nachgefragt: Krieg am Meeresboden – Gefahr für Deutschland? I Bundeswehr

British Royal Navy Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, chief of the Defense Staff, said in January this year that Moscow could endanger the global information system by attacking undersea cables. Since the gas leak in the Nord Stream gas pipelines, we are all aware of this danger. Fears of hybrid warfare at the bottom of the sea are growing. The Defense Technical Office 71 in Eckernförde deals with this danger within the Bundeswehr. And investigates, advises and supports the Navy. And today we have as a guest their leader, Mr. Frank Henning, in “Nachgefragt”. Hello, Mr. Menning. Good morning, Mrs. Watson. I just mentioned it: the danger to seabed infrastructure is increasing.

What do we have to imagine about infrastructure on the seabed? In addition to the oil pipelines mentioned, these are essentially submarine cables. We see a global network of submarine cables. 97 percent of the world's data traffic passes through these undersea cables. A lot? And the rest a little by satellite and also divided by radio links, but that is not relevant here. And if we take a look here, I would like to point out this place, this maritime zone: this is where the submarine cables go from northern Europe to North America, which handle a large part of the financial flows, the data, the actions. exchanges, payment transactions and I would really like no damage to occur there.

And if we look at other areas here, along the Mediterranean, along the coast, the risk of cables being tampered with is considerable. In addition to submarine cables, we also have wind turbines. In Germany alone, in the sovereign territories or in our economic zone we have more than 1,200 systems of this type. They are distributed along our coast, where the wind blows naturally. And if the power cables are damaged, we will miss out on much of the electricity we need. And another point that we see here are the straits. When we are in the Little or Great Belt or in Fehmarn, when a ship breaks down there, for any reason, human error, technical failure or even manipulation.

And the ship gets stuck there, sinks, and immediately there is a disruption in trade. You can imagine it if you remember what happened in the Suez Canal when the cargo ship Evergreen got stuck on the embankment. Global container trade came to a halt immediately, with enormous consequences. This event occurred here and not only the signals of the submarine cables, but also the data traffic, which is more or less identical to the maritime lines. So, we looked even closer to shore. Port facilities, I am thinking of the LNG terminals and also the locks of the Kiel canal.

We almost regularly have accidents with ships crashing into lock gates and blocking one of the lock chambers always immediately causes a drop in freight and shipping traffic on the Kiel Canal. And as an export-dependent trading nation, we can't afford that. There is debate over whether Russia is responsible for sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. What skills are needed to trigger something like this? So, I need a ship that is at least suitable for the specific sea area, I need explosives or for a cable I need some kind of manipulator that can cut that cable. And I need water depths, Nord Stream has a water depth of about 70, 80 meters.

But the submarine cables reach up to 6,000 meters and run along the seabed. So in this range you would need means of manipulation. I could place an explosive there with a simple boat, a simple crane. Or I can manipulate the great depths with so-called remotely operated vehicles, in a rather banal way, to destroy them there. One of the questions from our users is: How is this damage repaired? The repair is not entirely trivial. Here we see the image of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Depending on where the pipe is located, the wall thickness ranges between two, two and four centimeters, so it is already solid steel.

Then here, which has been blown away by the wind, is another concrete casing for safety and weight for the pipe. If we now want to re-solder the two ends of the pipe, I need the missing piece. This must be fixed somehow. The original segments were about 12 meters long and were welded together on special ships. In theory, it works here too. That means I would save both ends and pick them up. I can imagine bags with balloons lifting up here, I can imagine tweezers here that then lift the pipe, that's not easy. And we don't have many special ships in the world that can do that.

They have to be available. And once I've got it up, the water has to come out and then I can re-weld the new segments, like a new building, so to speak. And put the two ends back together and lower them again. It's not easy and it probably won't be cheap either. Have there been any other acts of sabotage that we can observe recently? A key word that comes to mind would be Norway. Yes, we suspect that we have observed several acts of sabotage on the submarine cables. This was once in Norway. In relation to the offshore industry and the extensive maritime and coastal area, Norway has the need to establish communications and surveillance using fiber optic cables.

At some point the Norwegians realized that no signals were coming from this cable, they examined it and discovered that four kilometers of cable were missing. At first it was thought to be an underwater avalanche. But then it turned out that no, they simply stole my cable. And these are fiber optic cables that, unlike copper, do not have such a high material value. Perhaps it can be understood, but Norway suspects that other states are also involved in this case. Additionally, we noted that in Egypt, off the Egyptian coast, an undersea cable was damaged, causing massive outages in data traffic near Egypt.

Other cases, for example in the Shetland Islands. An undersea cable was also damaged there, which also had a significant impact on the Shetland Islands. But the cause was a fisherman who destroyed the underwater cable with a trawl net, with a towing rig. But that was an accident. Now the question: What armed forces could generally operate at the bottom of the sea? I would like to mention the Russian Federation very prominently here. They have a research ship called Yantar. In principle, any individual can exercise it. Through AIS and Marine Traffic, where the Yantar is, unless the Yantar turns off the AIS.

But the Yantar is capable of doing anything up to 6,000 meters on the seabed using these vehicles. Soil samples, water samples, and other similar means can also be used to negatively manipulate underwater infrastructure. Here's another example, but it's a bit high-tech. This underwater vehicle of Russian origin can be used from a special submarine or from the Yantar. And here you can clearly see the manipulator. Which ends up cutting the cords, right? As an engineer, I can say that yes, you could probably cut an underwater cable with it if you applied enough hydraulic power and had the right scissors.

I don't know if that was done or will be done with that. So if we look at it now, to be honest: haven't we paid enough attention to the critical infrastructure on the seabed? We didn't see enough of Nord Stream 1 until the Nord Stream 1 incident. But we also have to keep in mind that critical infrastructure, like the ones we have in the Baltic and North Seas, is where operators are responsible for security. Basically we are talking about technical security. Operational security must be guaranteed. They are responsible for incidents that monitor their critical infrastructure, including for economic interests and operational security reasons.

But as actors or state actors, we haven't really addressed it, or, in my opinion, we haven't really addressed it. Only now are we thinking about concepts, about putting all the actors and all the responsibilities more or less together at the same table. What do we have to do to, if not prevent, future incidents like Nord Stream 1 and 2 or at least keep them focused and be able to react in a timely manner? Defense Technical Department 71, in the future I will simply abbreviate it as WTD 71, supports and advises the Navy. What should we imagine with this? Therefore, the WTD is essentially responsible as part of the purchasing office.

And if we look now at the underwater area, we do a lot of research in the area of ​​underwater communication and develop systems for and with the Navy so that the Navy is successful in its operations. Here you can see a very good example of what such cooperation means. A Navy minehunting ship uses a Sea Cat of ours with our personnel and together we test new things so that they have a certain level of technical maturity to then introduce them into the Navy as a weapons system or as a reconnaissance system. We are active in many underwater areas.

Development of torpedoes, for example, development of sonar. I can proudly say that we are actually global market leaders and have a unique selling point within our alliances. And the Navy also likes to use our skills. For example, if we need to make solid forecasts for the areas of application. The sea area is different when it comes to sound beam patterns and the successful use of sonar systems. Temperature, salinity, soil conditions, stratification by solar radiation. All of this is needed by the Navy, or by the machinists, by the machinists, so that they can successfully assert themselves or carry out their mission successfully.

And that's where we come into play. We record this good weather and also make a small contribution to weather monitoring to prepare the Navy for its areas of operation. And we're also doing a lot of research at WTD 71 using AUVs, with autonomous underwater vehicles, to be prepared there, as far as critical infrastructure, for the Navy's next capability, the so-called seafloor critical infrastructure to be monitored. in the future. The surveillance thing is very, very good. I would like to address this in this context: Is it even possible to completely monitor the Baltic Sea in such a way that critical infrastructures on the seabed can be monitored?

Difficult. They are huge areas, a huge maritime surface and many kilometers of lines that we have to monitor. We are currently working on a concept to achieve exactly this capability. This is just a sort of initial capability, with one or more underwater vehicles. They can be gliders, which listen and look autonomously in the water for several days and then appear, for example, once a day, sending the data to a situation center that must be defined, or the "sea cats" that we end up with. to mention. As I have seen, only a few can do that. It can be underwater for hours, but if I use several, this Sea Cat can fly along these pipes very well.

So she flies 10 meters above the pipe and uses sonar or a camera, depending on the lighting conditions, to detect anomalies there with the best sensor. Now we just talked a little bit about the Sea Cat or playing it. What other technologies exist that serve lighting purposes? I would like to highlight the so-called AIS, Automatic Identification System. Every boat of a certain size must have this transponder on board and turn it on. It says the name of the ship, technical data, a little technical data, cargo perhaps, port of departure and port of arrival. And using this system, you can basically create a database.

And I can, if I skillfully evaluate this database, I can detect anomalies. Coaster, it always travels along the coast from A to B, then I would delete or filter it. But there are also ships that do strange things. Warships are typical; When they maneuver, they do strange things. Research ships do strange things that then appear as anomalies and then there is still something left that I can look at more closely. And of course I have the traditional options. I can use satellites, if I have these satellites available, the right sensors, to see what is happening in the water.

For example, I can detect indirect signatures of submerged submarines using satellites. As you can imagine, a ship produced the wake, the wave. The submarine does the same, only in three dimensions. At some point this wave structure comes to the surface and I can observe it with a satellite and then I know: are they our own submarines or those of alliance partners or are they submarines that are not operating in our system? And then I know that if something happens, I'll have to look closer. Is it possible that submarines spend a lot of time over an interesting station on this critical infrastructure or does something happen later, when exactly such an anomaly occurred at that moment?

And I have to look closely. In addition to the destruction of cables, for example, there is still the danger of espionage, for example not by cutting the submarine cables but perhaps simply by intervening in them. What do you have to imagine with that? It is technically and physically possible to access information through optical fibers or copper cables. With copper cables these are magnetic fields and electric fields, the changes in these fields I can pick up if I am close enough and the cables are not shielded,so I can get information from them. Of course, a lot of information is encrypted or has a code, but with enough computing power I can decrypt most of it after a certain period of time.

Now I can manipulate or use fiber optic cables in such a way that I can even see if a whale swims over this fiber optic cable. To do this, I simply send a light signal, a laser signal, to the cable, to the optical fiber, measure the transit time and the reflections and manipulate the amplitudes and phases and frequencies and that's it, it's too much, but can it be done? know who, what and when drove there? What type of information circulates through those cables? So, 97 percent data traffic. Every type of data you can imagine. Of course, also interesting are military data, communication data and operational plans, all of which are, of course, highly encrypted, but who knows what other information or much information is passing.

Classified data is harder to decipher, if anything. But just the amount of open data being transported across the seas allows us to draw many conclusions about the behavior of specific groups. In various conflicts, especially the war in Ukraine, drones are gaining more and more importance and more and more attention. What options exist for underwater drones? So, like I said, our focus is on education and only education. Perhaps communication, if we bring information to the surface from a submerged submarine, it could well be that we also use an autonomous vehicle there. In DMT 71, among other things, the port protection project initiated by NATO is carried out.

Germany said yes, we are carrying out this project and the WTD is fulfilling the project management mandate. To do this, we have created an experimental model and have integrated various systems, including unmanned ones, in a containerized situation center. We want to use ships that autonomously monitor the port area with different sensors. The same with drones in the air, with radar, with sonar, electro-optics. And weapon stations should also be integrated into this. And of course all this should be operated by the naval battalion. And regarding ship drones, this is more or less hobby model building, you need to build there.

Of course, everything has been made a little more reinforced and operationally secure from a military point of view. But if I want evil, knowing what I have, I need a GPS receiver, I need a little program, like an autonomous vehicle. There is nothing more or less. And then when the things that happened in Crimea with the Russian Black Sea Fleet happen, with these images that we see of possible unmanned ships, that's not rocket science. It is sometimes very fascinating what kind of threats could lie at the bottom of the sea and that Ukraine has now simply added.

What impact does this have on your office, on DMT 71? Well, now we have to face this new situation and we have to strengthen our position precisely in this area. That is why we have to advance research in this area. I have a research group of scientists, materials and ships. There we have to face this new situation. How can I recognize these dangers in time? How can I eliminate these dangers? So I also have to evaluate this foreign military material, what's going on there or do some kind of forensic evidence preservation and then see: What's going on there?

I have to be well equipped with my sensors, especially with this sea cat. If the Navy is well equipped with the sensors and weapons that it has, or the mine destruction payloads that we still use, we can counter this threat or this scenario together. We have to act together. And now there are several stories going on. For example, I already have a center for autonomous underwater vehicles. Until now it was small because we only had a few at home. But now, together with the Norwegians, this is being significantly strengthened, both in terms of personnel and material.

All of this, together with the Navy and in the Navy, ideas are being developed, ideas about how we can set up this glass ocean there, so that we can do what you asked before, that we can control more of the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. or less permanently to do this and prevent things. So there are actually a lot of stories going on right now, all of which center around allowing the Navy to operate there. At WTD 71 we have some skills, but we are not in the operation. We are doing this now, this administrative assistance, because we can do it right now and because we have to position ourselves better overall.

Mr. Menning, thank you very much for the interview. Gladly. And I can say goodbye to you, dear viewers, for this week. Thanks for watching and until next time. If you don't want to wait that long to watch the next episode of "Nachgefragt", you can access all episodes of "Nachgefragt" and also the episodes of the Funkkreis podcast on YouTube or at

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