According to a recent report on the website of Defense News, NATO has begun planning to establish its own unmanned fleet aimed at helping protect critical underwater infrastructure in the Baltic Sea and Mediterranean Sea. Following the repeated destruction of submarine cables in European waters over the past year (with the most recent one occurring a few weeks ago), senior NATO officials have begun envisioning a capability that would enable NATO to have permanent surveillance capabilities both on and underwater. General Pierre Vendier, commander of the Allied Transitional Supreme Command based in Norfolk, likened this idea to installing police surveillance cameras on streetlights in areas with poor urban security to record evidence of crime. He said, "The technology of using unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) to create this street lighting effect is mature Wangdiye said that his team is in the early stages of building a surface unmanned boat formation, through which "NATO can see and monitor the environment where the formation is located every day". The first step is to achieve this on the surface of the water, and then underwater. Wangdiye added that this new project has received "strong support" from the NATO Allied Maritime Command and the various Allied combat commands under the NATO European Allied Forces Commander in Chief. Although many details still need to be discussed and finalized, officials believe they can equip the unmanned boat fleet with known effective and operational platforms based on the attempts of the US Navy's 59th Task Force. Wangdiye told our reporter, "At present, it does not have an official name, it is just called the USV formation. In fact, it already exists, so to some extent, the risk is not significant. For many years, the United States has deployed the 59th Task Force in the Gulf region, so everything is known and accepted, so it is more about adoption issues rather than technical issues." The 59th Task Force was launched in 2021 and is a force dedicated to integrating unmanned systems and artificial intelligence into the operational area of the US Navy's Fifth Fleet. Vandier said that NATO's goal is to launch an unmanned vessel surveillance fleet before the next NATO summit in the Netherlands in June next year. The recent submarine cable breakage incidents occurred on November 17th and 18th, respectively, when a cable between Lithuania and Sweden was cut and a cable between Finland and Germany was damaged. The investigation into the above-mentioned incident is still ongoing. (New Society)