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NATO countries like the UK must apply a “wartime mindset” to decisions over energy policy, a leading figure in the military alliance has said.
Jean-Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, NATO’s Assistant Secretary General (ASG) for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber, spoke to PoliticsHome after the UK government last week hosted a summit on energy security in London.
NATO’s General Secretary, Mark Rutte, has recently called on European countries to spend more on defence, not least to help defend any peace deal in Ukraine.
But concerns over the Russian threat to subsea cables have also raised questions over energy security both in the UK and beyond, with Western countries being urged to step up efforts to defend their critical infrastructure from disruption by hostile states.
In an interview with PoliticsHome, Ellermann-Kingombe said: “As we hear at NATO headquarters, we’re talking about a wartime mindset and as we do so, that also needs to be applied to the energy domain…
“In moving forward, we need to ensure that we also integrate the security dimension in the decisions that we take on establishing and developing the energy infrastructure and energy resources.”
Currently, the UK’s undersea cable network transmits billions of pieces of data, including online transactions, and the threat to infrastructure is something the government about with unusual candidness in recent months.
An inquiry was launched earlier this year by the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to examine threats to undersea cables.
Last year, NATO held its first meeting of the critical undersea infrastructure network in response to increased disruption of subsea cables and suspected sabotage.
According to Ellermann-Kingombe, the majority of global internet traffic is secured via the cables, with an estimated $10 trillion worth of financial transactions passing through every day worldwide.
Those figures, Ellermann-Kingombe said, demonstrate “the disruption and destabilisation potential for our societies” if hostile actors were to successfully carry out attacks.
The UK’s resilience in the face of disruption was recently called into question by former ministers who told PoliticsHome that the nation is not currently capable of defending itself from attack.
The official said NATO has seen an increase in the number of incidents involving the damage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, close to UK allies like Germany, Denmark and Sweden, but stressed that some were still under investigation and it is “not yet determined whether these were a result of accidents or deliberate disruptions”.
The impact of such damage, whatever the cause, is extreme. Ellermann-Kingombe admitted that if further cables had been severed at that time, it could have caused major disruption.
Former naval chief Lord West previously told PoliticsHome that he lacked confidence that “infrastructure on the seabed is secure and looked after properly”.
Ellermann-Kingombe said that NATO was working to establish “a tech-based surveillance capability” to allow members to avoid damage in the future.
When subsea cables are damaged, the repair can be slow, raising concerns about the recovery time from a mass-scale attack on the infrastructure.
The NATO official admitted that there is “certainly an issue” when it comes to the number of ships countries have to carry out vital repairs to subsea cables.
However, he pointed out that the European Commission had recently committed to growing its repair ship capacity in response to global threats to undersea networks.
Concerns over foreign threats to infrastructure also extend to the net zero debate, with warnings over the involvement of hostile actors in new energy infrastructure.
For example, Tory MP Harriet Cross last week told PoliticsHome that she was particularly concerned about China becoming “increasingly” involved in UK wind farm development.
Ellermann-Kingombe told PoliticsHome that there is also an important discussion to be had about supply chain resilience and who controls the infrastructure provided.
“We need to avoid moving from a situation where we relied on one unreliable supplier in the fossil fuel era, to a situation where we are becoming dependent on other seemingly unreliable suppliers in the green domain.”
However, Ellermann-Kingombe refused to be drawn on country-specific examples, only adding that this is something allies need to be aware of as they establish their critical infrastructure.
