Armed Forces Minister Al Carns MP has formally confirmed the extent of Ministry of Defence engagement with the United Kingdom telecoms industry on protecting undersea telecommunications infrastructure.
In a written answer published by Hansard on 22 April 2026, Carns responded to a question from Ben Obese-Jecty MP, Member of Parliament for Huntingdon, on discussions with the telecoms industry to counter threats to undersea telecommunications infrastructure posed by Russian sub-threshold interference.
Carns said the Ministry of Defence is committed to a collaborative approach between government and the private sector to work together on national resilience. Supporting the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology’s lead on telecoms security, Carns stated, the Secretary of State for Defence has engaged with private sector partners including the telecoms industry to discuss undersea telecommunications infrastructure. The Minister said these discussions form part of a broader effort to protect critical national infrastructure from a range of threats, including Russian sub-threshold interference.
The ministerial answer is significant because it puts on formal parliamentary record what has until recently been a more diffuse pattern of engagement across government, telecoms operators, maritime defence agencies, and security and intelligence stakeholders. It situates the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology as the lead for telecoms security policy, with the Ministry of Defence as a closely coupled partner on the physical protection of undersea cables and the wider seabed and subsea environment.
The engagement aligns with several visible workstreams on the maritime side. The Royal Navy’s multi-role ocean surveillance ship, Proteus, contributes to the protection of subsea infrastructure. The wider Atlantic Bastion effort is bringing together surface, air and underwater sensing, data and response activity in the North Atlantic. Commercial investment in subsea data cables and in resilient communications architectures continues to expand, drawing in specialised engineering, inspection, sensing and monitoring providers. Ministerial confirmation of ongoing government–industry dialogue is, in effect, the entry point for a much larger industrial ecosystem.
For United Kingdom suppliers, the practical implications extend across seabed warfare, maritime surveillance, autonomous underwater and surface vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, cable protection and repair services, secure and resilient communications, subsea sensor networks, and data fusion. Companies in these areas should engage both the Ministry of Defence, through its developing subsea warfare and maritime security capability teams, and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, through its telecoms security and critical national infrastructure workstreams. Positioning that explicitly references collaborative government-industry resilience frameworks will be better aligned to the stated policy intent.
