When analysts and policymakers talk about sabotage of subsea infrastructure, they usually focus on telecommunications cables—the fiber-optic lines that carry data, financial transactions, and military communications across the ocean floor. That threat is real and well-known.
However, it is just one part of a much larger and more dangerous problem. The world’s offshore energy infrastructure, which includes thousands of kilometers of subsea pipelines, a growing number of LNG terminals and export facilities, offshore wind farms with their power cables, and the substations and mooring systems that connect them, is just as exposed. In some ways, it is even less protected and could have more serious consequences if attacked. As Europe speeds up its energy transition and the United States considers the security risks of offshore infrastructure near key naval sites, the threat of sabotage to subsea energy systems has become one of the most important and overlooked risks in maritime security. This essay argues that the physical protection of offshore energy infrastructure has not kept pace with its strategic value or with adversaries’ clear intent to target it. Without urgent investment in surveillance, resilience, and international cooperation, the energy transition could become a list of vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited.
The world’s offshore energy infrastructure is huge and growing quickly. About 20,000 miles of subsea pipelines carry oil and gas across the ocean floor, linking production sites to processing plants and export terminals (Straight Arrow News, 2025). In Europe, energy security after moving away from Russian gas now depends on a network of LNG import terminals, offshore wind farms, and power cables that barely existed ten years ago. In January 2026, nearly a dozen European countries—Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom—signed the Hamburg Declaration. They committed to building 100 gigawatts of joint offshore wind projects in the North Sea by 2050, with about €1 trillion in investment (Euronews, 2026a). These new offshore assets, such as wind farms connected to several countries through shared interconnectors, are a new type of critical infrastructure. They are located in remote areas, are hard to monitor all the time, and are, according to security expert James Bore, “attractive for sabotage by highly capable, motivated hostile actors” (as cited in Euronews, 2026a, para. 6).
The University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Energy Policy Center has documented a sustained and expanding campaign of offshore energy infrastructure sabotage across Europe that began in earnest just weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and has not abated (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025). Beginning with the dramatic September 2022 explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea — the single most consequential act of energy infrastructure sabotage in modern history — the pattern has since encompassed attacks on gas pipelines, LNG facilities, offshore wind survey sites, communications cables, and military infrastructure across NATO member states (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025). In August 2024, German authorities tracked long-range military-grade surveillance drones operating over the ChemCoast Park in Brunsbüttel, adjacent to Germany’s floating LNG facility — the same onshore pipeline having already been damaged in a separate sabotage action in 2023 (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025). In 2023, a joint investigation by public broadcasters from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland found that Russia was operating a fleet of vessels disguised as fishing trawlers and research ships that were conducting underwater surveillance and mapping key North Sea sites for possible future sabotage (Euronews, 2026a).
The fast growth of offshore wind energy has created a new type of critical infrastructure at sea, giving adversaries a wide and mostly unprotected area to target. The European defense technology company EUROATLAS has warned that North Sea countries are building a huge underwater power system, but are not investing enough in underwater security. They argue that “persistent autonomous underwater surveillance is becoming as essential to energy security as radar is to airspace” (as cited in Euronews, 2026a, para. 8). This shows a basic problem: energy projects are growing faster than security measures, leaving more valuable sites with little protection.
In the United States, the Trump administration paused the leases of five large-scale offshore wind farms under construction along the East Coast in December 2025, citing classified national security risks identified in Pentagon assessments (Fox News, 2025a). Interior Secretary Doug Burgum specifically cited the threat of undersea drone attacks and the possibility of swarm drone strikes exploiting the radar distortions created by large turbine installations (John Locke Foundation, 2026). The Heritage Foundation argued that the decision was “not only prudent but essential,” noting that many turbine components are manufactured in China, raising concerns about embedded espionage capabilities and potential “kill switch” scenarios warned about by a NATO official (Heritage Foundation, 2026). Derrick Max of the Thomas Jefferson Institute flagged “classified national security concerns involving foreign-made components — undersea cables, turbine electronics, and data systems linked to Chinese suppliers” embedded in critical offshore energy infrastructure as a risk that would be “naïve to ignore” (as cited in John Locke Foundation, 2026, para. 7).
The risks from the Chinese supply chain are real. HMN Technologies, a Chinese state-linked company that leads in global submarine cable manufacturing and repair, also provides parts for offshore energy connection systems (University of Washington, Jackson School, 2025). Control Risks has found that as offshore energy infrastructure becomes more digital, it faces growing cyber and physical threats. Adversaries might not need to damage equipment directly if they can hack the software and communication systems that control it (Control Risks, 2025). The mix of physical sabotage and digital weaknesses in the same systems creates a complex threat that military planners and energy regulators have not fully addressed.
Europe’s move from Russian pipeline gas to LNG imports has made its floating storage and regasification units (FSRUs) and onshore terminals high-value targets. The Kleinman Energy Center has found evidence of surveillance and reconnaissance against LNG facilities in Germany and Scandinavia, even before any attacks happened, which matches patterns of pre-attack planning (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025). During the 2026 Iran war, Reuters reported that Iranian drones hit Qatar’s gas facilities at Ras Laffan Industrial City, forcing QatarEnergy to declare force majeure on its exports. This shows that offshore energy terminals can be military targets in conflicts and can be disabled with widely available weapons (Fox News, 2026). At the same time, the Strait of Hormuz crisis raised new worries about fiber-optic cables on the seabed there. Technology analyst Vakai Muntambirwa of BMI said that cable damage in the strait is a “credible threat” that could cause “service blackouts” and disrupt the “basic services that an economy needs” (AGBI, 2026, para. 4). The International Cable Protection Committee also confirmed that deliberate damage in that area is a real possibility.
Russia has used energy infrastructure as a strategic tool for years, but this approach has become much more aggressive since 2022, shifting from supply manipulation to direct sabotage. The Kleinman Energy Center notes that identifying who is responsible remains a major problem: “A minority of incidents have thus far been positively attributed by authorities to any actor,” and Russian disinformation makes this even harder (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025, para. 5). This is not a failure of intelligence; it is a result of careful planning. Subsea attacks are designed to be unclear, deniable, and hard to prove in court, taking advantage of legal and investigative gaps that make cable sabotage difficult to prosecute.
The main challenge in protecting subsea energy infrastructure is not technology, but issues with institutions and legal authority. The Kleinman Energy Center’s research team says that NATO countries facing proven sabotage should be using Article 4 of the NATO Treaty, which is meant for consultation. However, the political bar for this is so high that repeated attacks have happened without a formal alliance response (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025). EU Foreign Affairs chief Kaja Kallas has admitted that Europe’s critical infrastructure is “at high risk of sabotage” and promised that the EU will “fortify its critical infrastructure, including by investing in new cables, strengthening surveillance, ensuring more repair capacity, and moving against Moscow’s shadow fleet” (Euronews, 2026b, para. 3). Still, promises and actual ability to act are not the same.
A lack of repair capacity makes energy infrastructure even more vulnerable, just as it does for telecom cables. Recorded Future found that fixing a subsea cable now takes about 40 days on average, and this number is rising because the network is growing faster than the repair fleet (Recorded Future, 2025). For subsea pipelines and offshore energy export sites, repairs after sabotage can take months or even years. The Nord Stream case shows this clearly, as those pipelines have been out of use for more than three years since the 2022 attacks, which has permanently changed how energy moves in Europe.
In 2024, the FCC voted to propose rules that would stop undersea communication cables with Chinese technology or equipment from connecting to the United States. FCC Chair Brendan Carr said the agency was “taking action to guard our submarine cables against foreign adversary ownership, and access” (MarineLink, 2025). This was an important move toward seeing cable and energy infrastructure security as a supply chain issue, not just a physical protection issue—a view the Heritage Foundation and others have supported (Heritage Foundation, 2026). However, getting approval for subsea infrastructure projects in the U.S. involves five federal agencies and usually takes two years, which makes it hard to build backup or stronger systems as quickly as needed (CSIS, 2026).
A key risk for 2026 is that Russia might retaliate against European crackdowns on its Baltic shadow fleet by attacking European subsea energy infrastructure. At the Global Salvage and Wreck Forum in December 2025, Herminius adviser Dominick Donald predicted that Russia could answer European actions against shadow fleet tankers by targeting subsea infrastructure. This would make cable and pipeline incidents not just intelligence operations, but tools of pressure and diplomacy (Riviera Maritime Media, 2025). The Kleinman Energy Center also describes Russia’s broader campaign as a “shadow war”—the Norwegian word is skyggekrigen—meant to put steady pressure on NATO countries without crossing the line into open conflict, hoping to force them to ease sanctions and reduce support for Ukraine without triggering Article 5 (Kleinman Energy Center, 2025).
In practice, every time Western countries take stronger action against Russia’s shadow fleet, there is a risk that Russia will strike back at the offshore energy systems that Europe relies on. Control Risks points out that “the question of best practice, the division of security roles and responsibilities between companies and authorities, and the increased convergence between the physical and cyber security realms” are still not settled for offshore energy infrastructure. This leaves a strategic gap that adversaries can take advantage of (Control Risks, 2025, para. 8).
Sabotage of offshore energy infrastructure is a threat that is more urgent, more serious, and less visible politically than attacks on telecommunications cables. The Nord Stream case has shown that large-scale, lasting damage to subsea energy infrastructure is possible. Ongoing surveillance of North Sea and Baltic energy sites shows that adversaries are identifying targets and practicing attacks. The fast growth of offshore wind and LNG infrastructure, much of it using Chinese-made parts and located in areas that NATO cannot monitor all the time, is making the risk even bigger. To close this gap, we need more than just better patrols and sensors—although those are important. We need to rethink how offshore energy infrastructure is designed, insured, managed, and protected as a key part of national and alliance security.
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