Establishing Military, Legal, and Economic Deterrence Against Sabotage Targeting Energy and Critical Infrastructure of Democratic States Worldwide

The primary objective of this extension to the UNDERWATER MAYHEM research program, will be to continue the study and development of next-generation policy and technical responses for democracies to deploy against onshore and offshore physical security threats to energy and critical infrastructure–especially in the Northern European and East Asian regions–and to build out an open-source intelligence toolkit to help democracies identify, attribute, and ultimately, deter these emerging physical threats against critical infrastructure in both maritime and remote environments. This project extension will focus on a comparative legal analysis of open and completed legal cases against suspected maritime industry saboteurs from the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China in Europe and Taiwan, as well as engagement with global maritime insurance, reinsurance, and classification firms to identify what policies these sectors can improve to aid in deterrence.

Benjamin Schmitt

Senior Fellow, Kleinman Center and SAS

Benjamin Schmitt is a joint senior fellow at the Kleinman Center and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Penn. He is also an affiliate of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute.

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