NATO has developed a new tool to help Allies detect suspicious shipping vessel activity and protect undersea cables and pipelines from potential sabotage.
Known as ‘Mainsail’, the software tool developed by the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), flags vessels behaving suspiciously. The CMRE is situated in La Spezia, Italy, and is a world-class NATO scientific research facility with over 60 years of expertise.
Artificial intelligence analyses maritime traffic, allowing authorities to spot vessels that appear to be diverting off-course to potentially damage or gather intelligence about undersea infrastructure.
Damage to the pipelines and cables that carry energy and information across the seabed can be very disruptive. In November and December of 2024 alone, three separate cables carrying internet data and power between five NATO Allies – Estonia, Finland, Germany, Lithuania and Sweden – were severely damaged.
Footage includes shots of CMRE scientists testing out Mainsail, as well as an interview with CMRE Director Dr Eric Pouliquen.
---SHOTLIST—
(00:00) VARIOUS SHOTS – EXTERIOR OF THE NATO CENTRE FOR MARITIME RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
(00:12) VARIOUS SHOTS – NATO CMRE SCIENTISTS ON A RIB
(00:22) VARIOUS SHOTS – CMRE SCIENTIST’S HANDS ON A KEYBOARD
(00:26) VARIOUS SHOTS – A CMRE SCIENTIST WORKS ON MAINSAIL, AN AI TOOL TO PROTECT UNDERSEA INFRASTRACTURE
(00:40) SOUNDBITE (ENGLISH) - DR ERIC POULIQUEN, DIRECTOR, NATO CENTRE FOR MARITIME RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
“We've seen in the past few years that these acts of sabotage are different. Each of them are different in character, in nature, in MO. We've seen an attack on Nord Stream, which was, I believe, a detonation. We've seen an anchor being dragged and tearing cables apart. So, we can see that the threat is evolving, the threat can be taking different forms, different shapes, and so that's why technology must respond to that in different ways, and that's why we need to actually investigate and develop all sorts of solutions to tackle potential future threats and the current ones.”
(01:33) SOUNDBITE (ENGLISH) - DR ERIC POULIQUEN, DIRECTOR, NATO CENTRE FOR MARITIME RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
“So, Mainsail is the result of years of experience and development, scientific development, in order to pick up anomalies in the maritime domain. And these algorithms that the Centre has been developed, oftentimes using AI, have been able to be used for monitoring ship traffic, especially white shipping, so civilian traffic on various locations of the globe. // Turns out that it works very well. It's able to, in an automatic way, without the user and the presence of operators, it's able to actually raise suspicion on particular trajectories of ships and other activity.”
(02:29) SOUNDBITE (ENGLISH) - DR ERIC POULIQUEN, DIRECTOR, NATO CENTRE FOR MARITIME RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
“This has been actually turned into a toolkit that is very user-friendly for operators in the Maritime Command of NATO to use and to be able to, in an automatic way again, give them clues on what to do if they detect something that is suspicious. We anticipate to actually bring more data that will fit this toolkit as we go, as we continue to improve this tool. And we are quite optimistic that in the not-so-distant future we will be able to have something very robust that will make our operators able to do a proper job and prevent and deter any saboteur, anyone who would be willing to damage those infrastructures.”
(03:25) SOUNDBITE (ENGLISH) - DR ERIC POULIQUEN, DIRECTOR, NATO CENTRE FOR MARITIME RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
“What happened in Finland was quite remarkable. First of all, the reaction of Finland was extremely swift. It actually shows that we are getting better at this. Nations are getting better at this, but NATO, our Alliance of 32 nations, is also getting better at this, at understanding the likelihood of such an attack and also being able to rapidly react to such acts of sabotage.”
(04:02) SOUNDBITE (ENGLISH) - DR ERIC POULIQUEN, DIRECTOR, NATO CENTRE FOR MARITIME RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTATION
“Acts of sabotage can have disastrous effects on our societies and on our economies in particular. Our nations are becoming more and more resilient about such attacks. There is the possibility to reroute the flow of energy, of gas, of oil, of data as required. So, our nations are better than they were just even a few years ago about reacting to such acts of sabotage, but some of them could have some strong impact and long-lasting impacts to our economy in particular. So that's why we must remain vigilant, we must remain mobilised as an Alliance, but we also need to continue to be better at not only preventing those acts of sabotage by technology, but also, we need to be better organised at sharing data among each other. Oftentimes data that come from the ocean are owned by private industry, so there needs to be a political will to share in order to be better together. This is really a strong message that our heads of state and decision-makers have made by making it a priority.”
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