On 17–18 November 2024, two submarine telecommunication cables, the BCS East-West Interlink and C-Lion1 fibre-optic cables, were disrupted in the Baltic Sea.
Foreshadowing the new reality.
Then Another Quiet Incident in the Baltic
On a cold December morning in 2025, Finnish authorities boarded a cargo vessel suspected of dragging its anchor across the seabed between Finland and Estonia. The ship had departed St. Petersburg only hours earlier. When investigators examined the route, they discovered that several underwater telecommunications cables had been severed along the vessel’s path.
Attack on BCS East-West Interlink and C-Lion1 Fiber=optic Cables, Baltic Sea
The incident did not trigger NATO’s Article 5.
No missiles were launched. No troops crossed a border.
But the damage disrupted communications infrastructure linking two NATO states. It forced emergency investigations, naval patrols, and political consultations across the alliance. Finnish authorities detained the crew while investigators attempted to determine whether the damage was deliberate or accidental.
This was not an isolated event. It was part of a growing pattern of infrastructure disruptions across the Baltic Sea that Western intelligence agencies increasingly view through the lens of hybrid conflict.
What makes these incidents difficult to respond to is precisely their ambiguity.
They occupy the space between accident and attack.
And that ambiguity is the battlefield.
The Return of Irregular War
Eighty years ago the United States and Britain confronted a similar strategic dilemma.
OSS & SOE: The Plan - Time to Get Back to the Basics
In 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered much of Europe. Traditional armies had collapsed across the continent. The remaining resistance to German occupation operated in fragmented underground networks scattered across occupied territory.
London responded by creating the Special Operations Executive (SOE) with Winston Churchill’s directive to set Europe ablaze.
The United States followed with the creation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under William Donovan.
These organizations were not conventional intelligence services. They fused espionage, sabotage, resistance support, propaganda, and political warfare into a single operational instrument.
Their founding premise was simple.
When war moves into the shadows between peace and open combat, intelligence services must become active instruments of national strategy, not passive collectors of information.
Russia and China have spent the past decade refining what analysts increasingly describe as fifth generation warfare: conflict conducted through networks, infrastructure vulnerabilities, information ecosystems, and psychological pressure rather than traditional military maneuver.
The battlefield is no longer limited to territory. The Front Line is Everywhere
In her first public speech, as Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Blaise Metreweli warned: “The front line is everywhere. Online, on our streets, in our supply chains, in the minds and on the screens of our citizens.” “It runs through data systems, logistics networks, and the internal political stability of democratic societies.”
Blaise Metreweli, Chief, Secret Intelligence Service
Metreweli’s warning came during a broader argument that modern state competition is now conducted largely in the “grey zone” between peace and war. Instead of tanks crossing borders, adversaries increasingly use:
cyber attacks on infrastructure
sabotage and covert action
influence operations on social media
disinformation campaigns
attacks on supply chains
intimidation and hybrid warfare below the threshold of open war
She explained that Russia and China, and other actors are deliberately exploiting these tools to destabilize Western societies without triggering a conventional military response.
In the same address she warned that the United Kingdom and its allies are entering “a new age of uncertainty”, where the traditional distinction between wartime and peacetime is eroding.
Her line “the front line is everywhere” was meant to communicate three ideas to policymakers and the public:
Hybrid warfare has replaced clear battlefields. Conflict now occurs simultaneously in cyberspace, finance, technology, media, and infrastructure.
Civilian society is now part of the strategic terrain. Elections, public opinion, data networks, and supply chains are all targets.
Intelligence services must integrate technology with traditional espionage. Metreweli emphasized that modern officers must be as comfortable with code and cyber tools as with human intelligence sources.
The Fifth Generation Battlespace
Traditional warfare seeks territorial control. Fifth generation warfare seeks strategic paralysis. Russia and China do not need to defeat NATO militarily to weaken the West. Their strategy instead aims to gradually erode the cohesion that gives Western alliances their power.
Operational objectives include undermining trust in democratic institutions, disrupting logistics supporting Ukraine, exploiting divisions inside Western societies, penetrating infrastructure systems, and manipulating digital information ecosystems.
Spy Wars are everywhere
The goal is not rapid victory.
It is strategic exhaustion.
Evidence of this strategy now appears across multiple domains.
European investigators have uncovered sabotage networks linked to Russian intelligence that conduct arson attacks, infrastructure disruptions, and logistics sabotage across the continent.
Hybrid warfare does not require large scale destruction. Its purpose is persistent insecurity.
The Digital Transformation of Espionage
Spies Must Avoid Leaving Digital Exhaust Trails
At the same time that hybrid conflict has expanded, the intelligence profession itself is undergoing a technological revolution.
For much of the twentieth century intelligence officers relied on carefully constructed legends - fabricated identities supported by documents, employment cover, and background stories.
That model has collapsed.
Modern life produces an enormous stream of data.
Every individual now generates digital traces through financial transactions, biometric records, smartphone location data, surveillance cameras, social media history, and Internet of Things devices.
This constant stream of data creates what intelligence professionals increasingly call digital exhaust. Maintaining a false identity over long periods has become far more difficult, but not impossible.
Artificial intelligence has accelerated this transformation.
China has deployed massive biometric surveillance systems integrating facial recognition and behavioral analytics across its cities. Russia has implemented similar systems in Moscow and other major cities.
Any movement can expose identity.
Espionage has therefore shifted from stealing documents to exploiting data ecosystems.
Infrastructure as Strategic Terrain.
Hybrid warfare increasingly targets the connective systems that make modern economies function.
Energy pipelines. Undersea telecommunications cables. Financial clearing networks. Transportation logistics. Satellite infrastructure. These systems represent strategic vulnerabilities.
Undersea cables in particular have emerged as critical targets. Those repeated cable damage incidents across the Baltic Sea have confirmed suspicions among European officials that Russia is probing vulnerabilities in Western communications infrastructure for its “rainy day.”
Western intelligence agencies have also warned that Chinese cyber actors linked to the group known as Volt Typhoon have infiltrated networks associated with energy, communications, transportation, and water infrastructure in the United States.
These intrusions appear designed not merely for espionage but to position access that could be activated during a future geopolitical crisis.
The Cognitive Battlefield
The ultimate target of fifth generation warfare is not infrastructure.
It is perception.
Russia and China devote significant resources to influence campaigns designed to manipulate political narratives inside democratic societies.
These operations include coordinated disinformation campaigns, amplification of polarizing political narratives, synthetic media and deepfake propaganda, and covert funding of extremist or fringe political actors.
The strategic objective is cognitive fragmentation.
When democratic societies lose trust in institutions, coherent national strategy becomes difficult to sustain.
The Strategic Choice
Three structural changes will likely determine whether the West can compete effectively in the hybrid conflict environment emerging in the coming decade.
First, Western governments must build permanent hybrid defense architectures integrating cyber defense, counterintelligence, infrastructure protection, and influence monitoring.
Second, intelligence agencies must develop offensive counter hybrid capabilities capable of imposing costs on adversaries.
Third, governments must use strategic transparency - rapid public attribution of covert attacks - to limit the operational space available to hostile actors.
Hybrid warfare thrives in ambiguity. Exposure can function as deterrence.
Strategic Forecast 2026-2030
Western intelligence officials increasingly warn that hybrid conflict will intensify over the next decade, and now, that is coupled with proxy warfare, as a fallout of the Iran war.
Intelligence services must have their head on a swivel.
Expanded targeting of undersea communications infrastructure, increased cyber penetration of energy grids and logistics networks, wider use of criminal proxies for sabotage operations, growing sophistication of AI generated disinformation, and deeper integration between cyber and physical sabotage operations are today’s reality.
A Moment of Institutional Choice
After World War II the United States and its allies built institutions designed to manage long term geopolitical competition. NATO. The CIA. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
Today’s hybrid conflict environment requires a comparable shift.
But, the handcuffs must come off covert action.
The front lines of modern conflict now run through data centers, financial systems, shipping routes, telecommunications cables, energy infrastructure, and the psychological stability of democratic societies.
The West does not lack technological capability, or specially trained and equipped operatives.
What it is lacking is institutional imagination and strategic urgency.
The lesson of OSS and SOE is not nostalgia.
It is mindset. We need to let it out of the closet.
We know how to RAT XXCK.
When conflict moves into the shadows between war and peace, intelligence services must become instruments of national resilience, disruption, and initiative.
The front line is everywhere.