Subsea has been growing as a domain of competition and conflict for some time. Along with the threat to critical underwater infrastructure (CUI), such as the fibre optic cables which are the backbone of the internet and many aspects of our society, we’re facing a new age of undersea warfare where national security threats are increasing in both frequency and severity.
As such, countries including the UK have a clear need for a persistent underwater wide-area system of systems that can provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities – delivering the timely information required to support effective subsea threat response.
This need is highlighted in the UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which outlines the Royal Navy’s “leading and coordinating role in securing undersea pipelines, cables, and maritime traffic”. The SDR also discusses the Royal Navy’s plan to “secure the North Atlantic for the UK and NATO against the persistent and growing underwater threat from a modernising Russian submarine force”.
Working with a multi-domain BAE Systems team and a commercial collaborator Ocean Infinity, we previously conducted a live demonstration of our ability to combine and deploy commercial technology within a military defence scenario to secure a subsea competitive edge.
Transmitting insights from sea to shore
In June 2025, we deployed a lean-crewed Ocean Infinity vessel to conduct underwater survey operations. The objective: to acquire multi-domain sensor data from dispersed maritime platforms and transmit to a designated shore-based command node within a one-hour threshold.
The vessel was equipped with a suite of sensors to deliver a full, live maritime domain awareness capability. These included side-scan sonar, which uses fan-shaped acoustic pulses to create detailed images of the seafloor, and a multi-beam echo sounder – a high-resolution sonar system that maps the seabed using multiple acoustic beams. Both are designed to detect seabed anomalies such as mines or camouflaged submarines.
These sensors were supplemented by a low Earth orbit satellite tipped and queued to take Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery of the target area, thereby providing a near-real time ISR picture no matter the weather condition.
With these assets in place, the demonstration provided a representative mission environment in which the sensors generated credible intelligence indicating the presence of a hostile submarine (in this case a dummy threat deployed to the seabed) operating in proximity to UK CUI. The assets conducted coordinated search, localisation and tracking operations, simulating an operation to safeguard national maritime assets and deter the hostile submarine.
We established a ship-to-shore satellite communications link to transfer the subsea ISR data to the BAE Systems Maritime Integration Support Centre (MISC) – completing the process of capturing data at sea, analysing it and transmitting the resulting insights to the land base for further human analysis within the articulated threshold. We also leveraged a proprietary solution as the data fusion platform, fusing multiple data sources (including AIS) together to provide full maritime situational awareness.
This all demonstrated our ability to securely collect and transfer multi-domain data insights across entities and dynamically re-task a vessel to analyse potential threats based on initial intelligence.
Leading the way
Proving the low latency transmission of analysed data from ship to shore using representative sensors and platforms is critical to providing confidence of a timely response in the event of a real-world subsea threat. As such, this demonstration has validated our ability to support military decision making in an underwater battlespace environment – as well as delivering the foundations of a hybrid ASW threat response.
The inclusion of space assets for Earth observation and ISR is particularly important given the growing focus on tapping into industrial dual-use innovation and represents a crucial capability that can help underpin future warfighting competitiveness and readiness.
What’s more, the demonstration proved the ability of our model to deploy commercial maritime technologies for military operations, giving customers the ability to meet current and future requirements for subsea ISR and CUI protection.
Exploiting the underwater battlespace
With the subsea domain quickly emerging as a new arena of strategic conflict and competition, how can we engineer the underwater battlespace to our advantage?
Download our new paper to learn about the scale of the subsea threat and why there’s an urgent need for next-generation underwater networking capabilities that can help shape an effective response.