Protecting Critical Maritime Infrastructure: A Multi-Domain Approach to Maritime Security Governance

By: Su Wai Mon

SYNOPSIS

This commentary examines how emerging threats across physical, cyber, undersea, and space domains are creating unprecedented risks to critical maritime infrastructure. It argues that proactive and coordinated action by industry, regulators, and governments, supported by coherent legal and regulatory frameworks, is essential to strengthening resilience. While the analysis global relevance, the piece highlights Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific as a strategic case study, demonstrating the urgent need for integrated, multi-domain, and regional cooperation to tackle evolving maritime security challenges.

COMMENTARY

Good maritime security governance requires an integrated multi-domain approach, given that emerging threats increasingly target critical infrastructure across interconnected terrestrial, digital, maritime and even space domains.

Historically, maritime security threats, whether traditional or non-traditional, were largely confined to the physical maritime domain. Today, however, the maritime threat landscape is rapidly evolving alongside advances in technology, digitalisation, and the automation of maritime infrastructure.

Ships, ports, and offshore infrastructure, such as oil and gas installations and offshore wind farms, form part of increasingly interconnected systems and are all regarded as critical maritime infrastructure. In addition, the communication systems that provide connectivity between them have become essential and therefore warrant stronger protection as critical infrastructure.

For example, space infrastructure, particularly satellites, plays a critical role in maritime operations such as navigation, communication, and surveillance, and its importance will only grow as the shipping industry becomes more reliant on higher-bandwidth connectivity to support advanced technologies, including autonomous ships, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, blockchains, and big-data analytics.

In addition, protecting critical underwater infrastructure (CUI), subsea cables, and pipelines is increasingly crucial given their dual physical and digital vulnerabilities and their central role in global connectivity and energy security. As a result, maritime security challenges have increasingly extended beyond the physical maritime domain into the cyber and digital realms.