How hidden undersea dependencies could reshape business resilience

The infrastructure your organization never sees may support some of its most important ambitions.

Undersea cables carry critical communications. Pipelines and power cables connect energy systems. Offshore infrastructure supports industries, communities and investment. These assets also rely on a less visible ecosystem of survey data, specialist vessels, contractors, manufacturers, landing facilities and repair capabilities.

Recent incidents have also shown how undersea infrastructure can become a focus of strategic competition and grey-zone activity, creating disruption and uncertainty below the threshold of open conflict.

For business leaders, the strategic issue extends beyond the security of individual assets. Growth plans, AI adoption, digital services, energy security and operational resilience may all depend on infrastructure that organizations neither own nor control.

WTW is exploring these dependencies with Willis Research Network partner, Elisabeth Braw, whose new book, The Undersea War: The International Battle for Supremacy at the Bottom of the World, examines the growing strategic competition surrounding the undersea domain. Drawing on perspectives from across WTW’s energy, natural resources, marine and risk specialists, together we are developing three scenarios to test how undersea infrastructure disruption could affect organizations, markets and wider systems.

Each scenario examines a different phase of the infrastructure lifecycle. The aim is to explore how vulnerabilities change as infrastructure moves from early development through construction and into operation, without treating any single scenario as a prediction.

Why undersea dependencies matter to you

Public discussion often concentrates on whether a cable, pipeline or offshore asset could be damaged. That is an important question, but it captures only part of the exposure.

Organizations can be affected even when they have no direct ownership of undersea infrastructure. Their dependency may sit within telecommunications services, cloud platforms, energy supplies, customers, suppliers, investment plans or business continuity arrangements.

These connections are becoming more strategically significant. AI, cloud services, data centers and electrification all place growing demands on the connectivity, power and physical infrastructure behind them. A strategy may remain attractive while becoming harder to deliver if those enabling systems are delayed, constrained or disrupted. The decision advantage report describes this wider challenge: apparently separate ambitions increasingly depend on common infrastructure, resources, capabilities and institutions.

This changes the question leaders need to ask. The starting point is no longer only, “Which assets could fail?” It is also, “Which critical decisions assume that this infrastructure will remain available, accessible and recoverable?”

Hidden concentration can connect separate risks

Infrastructure systems depend on far more than their physical assets. Surveyors, installation vessels, cable manufacturers, specialist engineers, digital platforms, ports and repair providers all help these systems function.

Many of those capabilities serve multiple projects, industries and regions. Organizations that appear diversified may still rely on a common infrastructure corridor, contractor, dataset, manufacturing facility or pool of recovery resources.

This creates shared-fate exposure. Several organizations or projects can face disruption at the same time because they depend on the same underlying system. Their connection may become visible only when demand converges, capacity becomes constrained or several incidents occur close together.

Recovery arrangements can contain similar concentrations. Alternative routes and contingency plans may still rely on the same specialist vessels, engineering expertise or supporting infrastructure as the primary system. A recovery plan provides less protection if its dependencies are exposed to the same event.

The three scenarios will explore these relationships across different parts of the infrastructure lifecycle, considering how disruption could propagate through organizations and sectors that appear separate at the asset level.

Infrastructure risk begins before operations

Physical damage is the most visible expression of infrastructure risk. It is rarely the only way value can be affected.

Survey information can lose credibility. Route assessments can require revision. Construction schedules can slip. Specialist capacity can become unavailable. Financing assumptions can weaken. Future investments can be delayed because the infrastructure required to support them will not arrive when expected.

The first phases of an infrastructure project can carry dependencies with consequences extending far beyond the development itself. Survey data, regulatory approvals, specialist contractors and construction resources influence decisions before an operational asset exists. If confidence in those inputs weakens, the effects can move through project economics, supply chains, capital allocation and long-term planning.

This is one reason the scenario work covers three lifecycle phases:

• Surveying and reconnaissance
• Construction and installation
• Operations and production

Recovery and restoration run across all three. This structure allows the research to examine how the sources, transmission pathways and consequences of disruption can change as infrastructure develops.

What the scenarios are designed to test

Scenarios help leaders examine uncertainty without requiring them to agree on a single forecast. They create a structured way to test the assumptions supporting an important decision and consider how that decision could perform under different conditions.

The three scenarios begin with decisions already being made about infrastructure, investment, connectivity and energy. They then examine where dependencies could weaken, how consequences could spread and which options might remain available.

The work is designed to explore questions such as:

• Which strategic ambitions depend on undersea infrastructure developing or operating as expected?
• Where do several projects rely on the same data, suppliers, contractors or recovery resources?
• How would disruption affect investment and growth plans as well as existing operations?
• Are alternative routes and recovery arrangements genuinely independent?
• Which assumptions require monitoring before they become constraints?
• What could your organization secure, diversify or redesign while credible choices remain available?

This decision-led approach reflects a wider principle within The decision advantage report: scenario analysis creates greater value when it helps organizations identify changing assumptions, assess what is at stake and act before options narrow.

From infrastructure awareness to better decisions

Understanding that a dependency exists is a useful first step. Preparedness requires a clearer view of how that dependency connects to decisions, value and recovery.

Organizations can begin by identifying the services and ambitions that depend on undersea infrastructure. They can then trace the providers, routes, supporting capabilities and recovery arrangements behind them. This may reveal that several apparently independent activities share the same points of concentration.

The next question is when the organization would reconsider its assumptions. Changes in infrastructure access, contractor availability, restoration time, capacity or geopolitical conditions may provide reasons to accelerate investment, diversify a dependency or revise a continuity plan.

Over the coming months, WTW and Elisabeth Braw will use the three scenarios to continue this exploration. The scenarios may be shared individually, allowing each to open a focused conversation about a different part of the infrastructure lifecycle and the decisions it supports.

For many organizations, the most important exposure may not be the infrastructure they own, but the infrastructure they assume will always be there. The consequential risk lies in whether they have tested the assumptions behind that availability.

The opportunity is to make those dependencies visible early enough to strengthen resilience, preserve options and support better decisions before disruption reveals them.