It is not a mere irritant that Russia is shadowing Europe’s undersea cables and that China’s gray-zone fishing flotillas are pushing at the limits in the East China Sea. These are calculated attempts to gain a strategic advantage through hybrid warfare.

For the U.S., this means defending the undersea commons and the infrastructure laid across it, deterring hybrid probes without endless escalation, balancing finite naval and joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance resources between Europe and the Indo-Pacific and sharing burdens with allies.

For Canada, the key question is what must be done in the Northern Approaches — the North Pacific, Arctic and North Atlantic — to monitor, harden and hold contested waters and air–sea seams daily, not just during crises. Ottawa’s answer is overlapping sensors that compress decision space, continuous presence that closes gaps, undersea shadows that raise adversary risk and seabed infrastructure that can’t be left in the dark.

The concept is simple: Make every probe costly, every approach dangerous and every act of sabotage perilous long before it matures. Make friction accumulate to the point that misbehavior becomes self-defeating.

In practice, this starts with early warning. Canada has funded North American Aerospace Defense Command modernization and selected northern

© The Hill