Summary
- The Council has approved five European Defence Projects of Common Interest.
- One programme focuses on integrated maritime and seabed defence, while Eastern Flank Watch includes cyber among its operating domains.
- The projects are eligible for initial EU funding under the European Defence Industry Programme.
The European Union has approved its first five Defence Projects of Common Interest, including programmes spanning seabed infrastructure and cyber operations as resilience concerns increasingly cross physical and digital domains.
The Council of the European Union approved the projects on 28 September under the European Defence Industry Programme. The selected areas cover drones and counter-drone systems, maritime and seabed defence, space, air and missile defence, and protection of Europe’s eastern flank.
The most direct infrastructure-security component is the Integrated Maritime and Seabed Defence project, which is intended to create an interoperable system for identifying, deterring, and responding to threats at sea and on the seabed. The Council explicitly referenced the protection of undersea cables when announcing the programme.
A separate Eastern Flank Watch project spans land, air, sea, cyber, and other domains. The Council has not yet published enough technical detail to establish what specific cyber capabilities will be procured or deployed under that programme, so it would be premature to treat the announcement as a defined cybersecurity project.
The infrastructure context is clearer. Subsea telecommunications and power links have become an increasing European resilience concern because damage can affect connectivity, energy flows, and cross-border services. Protecting them requires coordination across operators, governments, military authorities, communications providers, and other organisations whose responsibilities do not fit neatly into a single sector.
The selected projects are eligible for EU funding under the European Defence Industry Programme, with initial funding intended to support deployment and create a basis for possible further investment through the planned European Competitiveness Fund.
The approach reflects the growing overlap between cyber resilience and physical infrastructure protection. A cable can fail because of accidental damage, sabotage, or another physical event, while the systems used to monitor, operate, route around, and recover from that failure depend heavily on digital infrastructure.
Similar convergence is visible in space systems. The approved SPACE project includes satellite communications, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, positioning, and early-warning capabilities. All rely on complex digital supply chains and ground infrastructure, even though the Council’s announcement is primarily framed as defence-industrial policy rather than cybersecurity regulation.
The programme should therefore not be read as evidence that the EU has created a unified cyber-defence architecture for critical infrastructure. It is a funding and capability-development decision whose cyber implications will become clearer as projects move from political approval into procurement and implementation.
For infrastructure operators, the direction is nevertheless notable. European resilience policy is increasingly treating undersea cables, satellites, communications networks, energy systems, and cyber capabilities as connected dependencies rather than separate risk domains.
