Sponsored by: Cyber 4.0 – Cybersecurity Competence Centre

Produced by: Luiss CISS and BIP

In collaboration with: Underwater Centre of Excellence – La Spezia

The report analyses the underwater domain as one of the primary fronts of Italian national security. The seabed of the Mediterranean is criss-crossed by fibre-optic cables carrying around 99 per cent of international communications, the Transmed, Greenstream and TAP gas pipelines, Terna’s electricity interconnections and, in the future, connections to dozens of offshore wind farms. Due to its geographical position and the concentration of landing points in Sicily, Puglia and Liguria, Italy is one of the countries most exposed to both accidental incidents and hybrid threats, in a context made more unstable by the proliferation of low-cost weaponry such as marine drones, rising international tensions and the pre-positioning of latent assets in anticipation of future conflicts.

The report maps the country’s strategic underwater infrastructure, outlines the international and national regulatory framework – starting with the new powers granted to the Italian Navy under Law 9/2026 – classifies risks and threats, examines available defence solutions and the experiences of eleven countries, and concludes with a scenario exercise looking ahead to 2050. Several key findings emerge from the analysis:

• The most common risk is not sabotage, but accidents – anchors, fishing nets, seabed instability – which are often indistinguishable from a hybrid attack in the early stages. This ambiguity makes rapid attribution a prerequisite for any response.
• The Sicilian and Otranto Straits are the system’s bottlenecks: mobile traffic (LNG carriers bound for regasification terminals) and fixed infrastructure intersect there, and their criticality varies with the changing geography of gas supply, as demonstrated by the crises in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz.
• Repair work is the real industrial bottleneck: global capacity for laying and repairing pipelines depends on a few dozen specialised vessels, most of which are non-European and constantly in use. In the event of concurrent failures, the response system would quickly become overwhelmed.
• The underwater domain is inherently opaque: advanced Underwater Domain Awareness is required, based on sonar, autonomous systems and inter-agency command and control, capable of achieving ‘deterrence by detection’.
• Underwater security is an international issue: Mediterranean infrastructure depends on the stability of the Red Sea, the Suez Canal and the eastern Mediterranean, and requires a Euro-Atlantic architecture for surveillance, resilience and response involving NATO, the EU and regional partners.

Four measures prove robust across all scenarios up to 2050: the national capacity for seabed surveillance; the full implementation of the framework set out in Law 9/2026; the management of the industrial bottleneck in pipeline laying and repair; and the prioritisation of critical infrastructure. Protecting the underwater domain is therefore not merely a technical challenge, but a strategic task requiring operational superiority, inter-institutional cooperation and the ability to anticipate developments, so that Italy may preserve its role as a hub for energy and digital security in the Mediterranean.