"We do but not for 100% of the time," he replied.Ĭonstantine Atlamazoglou works on transatlantic and European security. NATO militaries are guarded when describing their own capabilities to find those subs, but officials have acknowledged that they can't see everything they want to see.Īt a Senate hearing in February 2020, the head of US European Command was asked if US forces have "sufficient visibility" on Russian submarines in the Atlantic. While the Russian navy fell into disrepair after the Cold War, NATO's focus on finding and tracking Russian subs has intensified in recent years as Moscow has strengthened its undersea fleet and shown the ability to strike target deep inland with new cruise missiles.Įxperts have said new technologies will make detecting enemy subs more complex than ever in the years ahead. However, the North Atlantic, through which many such cables pass, "is such a deep and wide area" that even if cables were protected with sensors and an approaching threat were detected, "by the time the defending force would go to the site, the cables and pipes would have already been destroyed and the offending sub would be long gone," Pöyry, who is also a captain in the Finnish military reserve, told Insider.Ī Russian sub in the eastern Mediterranean fires Kalibr cruise missiles at ISIS targets in Syria in September 2017. Protecting that infrastructure is feasible in relatively shallow waters and close to naval bases, conditions that exist in the Baltic and Nordic seas, if sufficient submarine-detecting sensors are placed in the right areas, said Tuomas Pöyry, vice president of Image Soft, a Finnish company that develops underwater surveillance systems. "We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don't believe we have ever seen," the US Navy admiral in charge of NATO's submarine forces said in 2017. Since then, Russian submarines have deployed more often and for longer and their activity close to critical undersea infrastructure has increased. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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