Hans Liwång is an associate professor at the Swedish Defence University (Försvarshögskolan) and a researcher in Naval Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. In a piece for FSN Perspektiv, he discusses the need to secure society's infrastructure, with a particular focus on the seabed and its unique challenges, and shares his reflections from the Rikskonferens (National Conference) in Sälen (central Sweden).

I was given the opportunity to speak at Folk och Försvars Rikskonferens (the People and Defence National Conference) under the theme Securing Society's Lifelines: Threats to Infrastructure. I focused on infrastructure on the seabed. Here I first summarise my main message and then my three reflections.

At sea, beneath the surface, it is easy to hide. Detection, identification, and measures to stop ongoing sabotage or accidents are therefore extremely resource-intensive on land and especially at sea. Society must work with indirect measures that protect the societal function, not the cable itself.

The majority of disruptions at sea and on land result from accidents and other faults that arise. The industry is already working to reduce such risks, for example by burying cables in areas with a high probability of damage from fishing equipment and anchors. Other important measures include repair capability. Taking responsibility for such measures is the task of operators, but society also needs to provide support by rewarding reliability. Even during heightened readiness, it remains critically important to work on protection against accidents and faults.

With good passive protection in place, state resources can focus on guarding against larger, coordinated attacks. There are also certain occasions when additional protection is needed, for example when major domestic power producers are offline or when a larger cyberattack is simultaneously under way.

Electrical power and data cables are infrastructure that can be well protected through redundancy both on land and at sea. However, advanced technology interacts more deeply than ever before in our lives and organisations. We therefore need to be better at leveraging the strengths of each type of infrastructure. Today's infrastructure makes society stronger. This was also evident in Sälen during the session on economic defence and secure supply chains.

An expanded infrastructure reduces the number of truly critical points and also reduces the occasions on which additional protection is needed. However, it becomes more complex to analyse where and when extra protection is required. Such analytical capability is now growing in importance. To better address these complex analyses and to be able to attribute sudden outages to the correct cause, more information is needed from all remote locations across the infrastructure. That information also needs to be shared among many more parties, both governmental and commercial. This is a new challenge.

Society also needs to become better at valuing reserves and a diversity of solutions, both proactive and reactive. An overly coordinated preparedness risks building in vulnerabilities to something we have not foreseen. The best protection consists of system-level measures and organisational measures taken well before heightened readiness, long before any conflict. Ideally with imagination and diversity.

One obstacle to achieving even better infrastructure is the distance between policy and infrastructure development. My three most important reflections, three areas for development, all relate to knowledge of this gap:

1. Politicians and overarching authorities are often insufficiently informed about the characteristics of different types of infrastructure and their systemic aspects, for example the difference between the vulnerability of a specific cable and the vulnerability of the system as a whole. Alternatively, infrastructure is discussed in overly sweeping terms, without distinguishing between data infrastructure on the seabed and railway networks. During the session on secure trade flows, the danger of today's often schematic analyses was also raised, as was the risk of drawing far-reaching conclusions from the Cold War era. Different types of infrastructure have different protection needs and different conditions for being protected, and these are also new in character compared with just thirty years ago. This needs to be developed into more specific guidance for the industry on what different types of infrastructure should aim for, providing a relevant and clear target picture.

2. Project managers and engineers in infrastructure sectors see many different opportunities to incorporate defence and security considerations, but know too little about defence and security needs and therefore miss the chance to let small system changes make a significant difference. They do not lack interest, but they do not know where to raise these questions in order to find a balanced way forward. Conditions for this kind of informal dialogue must be created, and doing so will raise knowledge levels and create the conditions for better policy and better infrastructure.

3. There are occasions when state resources may need to be concentrated around our infrastructure, but the analysis of where and when is not straightforward. The relevant expertise is spread across several authorities and sometimes primarily within the private sector. How this should be organised needs to be developed further.

I can also note that politicians in Sälen talk a great deal about the "defence industry", but when I look at many of the defence challenges discussed there, it is not the defence industry that holds the answers. Those answers are more often found in other parts of our ...