Sea Control - Sea Control 575: Baltic Conundrums with Sebastian Bruns

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

1. "Conundrums, right ahead: Five strategic concerns for Baltic Sea decision-makers," by Sebastian Bruns, Royal Swedish Naval Society, 2024. (Website is in Swedish, Click the Ladda ned button to download the issue, the article is on page 61 of the PDF in English.)2."From 'Flooded Meadow' to Maritime Hotspot: Keeping the Baltic Sea Free, Open, and Interconnected," by Sebastian Bruns, Carnegie Endowment, December 20, 2023.3. Sea Control 548 – Maritime Competition in the Mediterranean with Dr. Sebastian Bruns & Dr. Jeremy Stöhs, by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, September 21, 2024.4. Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University.

So help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley. You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Help me, Bob, I'm bullying the alley. Bullying the alley shouldn't go now. Welcome, board Sea Control fans. This is Jay, and my guest today is Dr. Sebastian Brunt. Sebastian, you're a longtime friend of SimSec and not infrequent guest on Sea Control, but for those poor listeners who may be new or have somehow just missed your work and appearances, Could you start off telling us a little bit about yourself, please?

Absolutely. And it's good to be back on SimSec. Yeah, I'm Sebastian Bruns. I'm a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Policy at Keeley University in northern Germany. And previously, I was a visiting professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and a congressional staffer in Washington, D.C. My work has a focus on naval strategy, maritime security, the Baltic Sea, all these other

beautiful places. Could you talk a little bit about ISPK there, where you work? Just what do they do? I mean, it's somewhat self-evident, but tell folks a little bit about that, please. Sure, absolutely. So ISPK is a nonprofit organization which is aligned with the University of Kiel. We used to be part of the chair, actually, of the Department of Political Science. But since 2015, we have an endowment that funds us.

And we still, we're no longer organically connected with the university, which means we use some of their administration and things like, you know, the email and everything. But we have our own funding and ISPK does policy relevant and, well, research on current events as well as strategic studies. We have people, colleagues who are working on radicalization and terrorism. We have colleagues who are working on Ukraine. And I was fortunate in 2016 through 2021, I was the founding director and head of the Center for Maritime Strategy and Security, which is Europe's only think tank research institution of that kind. And because we're a non-profit and we don't have a political leaning, we can do a lot of work on all things concerning maritime security and the role of navies and truly sea power in international relations. And of course, with everything that's going on in the world, we were quite busy. I directed this center for five and a half years. And since 2021, my colleague Johannes Peters is the current head of the center. And I returned as a senior researcher after some time spent at Annapolis. Nice. Thanks so much. That leads into the article we're going to talk about today.

You published quite a bit, but we've got a short but very relevant article that just came out from you called Conundrums Right Ahead, Five Strategic Concerns for Baltic Sea Decision Makers. Now, before we get going, I want to say that a reminder, all opinions expressed are our own and not representative of any institution, which we may or may not be associated. I'll also remind folks that we're recording this in late January 2025, so there may be some things have changed by the time folks hear this in a few weeks. So, all right, I imagine most sea control listeners, you've got some idea of the current environment in the Baltic Sea as of this recording, but I'd say the Black Sea, the Red Sea,

South China Sea are probably getting the most coverage for naval and maritime actions, even if you're somebody like us who follows this sort of thing. So could you talk a little bit about what inspired you to write this? Absolutely. So the Baltic Sea, which is a body of water in Northern Europe, it was actually on the front line or a front line in the Cold War. It pitted the West German and NATO navies against the East German and the Warsaw Pact navies.

And if the conflict would have gotten hot, the Baltic Sea would have been one major theater. After the end of the Cold War, it really became a very peaceful, if not tranquil, area. You know, the Warsaw Pact was gone, the superpower conflict, the Cold War was over, and Western navies scaled down. Some people, including myself, have called the Baltic Sea the flooded meadow because it was basically just that. The Baltic Sea is also sort of particular for its features. It's rather shallow. It's confined waters.

But there wasn't much naval or indeed military activity going on. The European Union and NATO expanded eastward. You know, the Baltic States joined, Poland joined. And basically, it was an area of tourism, of trade, of commercial interests, and where the German Navy, which still has one of its two flotillas in the Baltic Sea, would go to train and test and exercise. And all that changed in 2014 with the Russian incursion into eastern Ukraine, with the annexation of Crimea. That suddenly drove home the point, mostly to our Eastern European neighbors, that Russia wants to change the way we do business, wants to change the rules-based order, not just in the Black Sea area, but also in the Baltic Sea area. And of course, these Eastern European allies of ours have a particular history, a violent history, when it comes to being under the umbrella, to put it mildly, of Soviet influence, of Russian influence. And we saw very early that the Russians were also using some of their assets in the Baltic Sea. They are a Baltic Sea nation. They have two of their major ports in St. Petersburg and in Kaliningrad. But they were using the maritime domain to exert hybrid pressure to conduct a gray zone war, gray zone warfare. Some of the listeners might remember images of a Russian fighter jet buzzing an American DDG in the Baltic Sea.

You know, there's a couple of iconic photographs of that. And it's safe to say that the situation has deteriorated since then. Certainly after or since February 2022, when Russia launched its full scale war on Ukraine and escalated all kinds of information operations, cyber warfare and hybrid gray zone activity also in the Baltic Sea. um just you know but as a point of reference the uh the baltic sea is also home to a lot of cables and a lot of uh undersea infrastructure critical in undersea infrastructure including two um pipelines called nordstream nordstream um which were built as a german russian joint venture uh trying to leave out all the european allies and those were sabotaged in september 2022 um still we still don't know who it was actually but uh we do know who has a a uh

who has a motif and um so yeah you know the situation has really changed dramatically and is back to the cold war days of of uh of uh confrontation really right and folks i i think a lot of people who maybe aren't as into this as we are you know naval warfare what they're seeing is what they may think of as gray zone would be something like the like the fighter jet getting close to a u.s destroyer but things like is actually actually kinetic actions like somebody destroying a pipeline and stuff is you know that's being argued over in the little navy nerd circles about whether or not that's actually warfare not because they're doing violence but that sort of thing is going on so that's why this is and there's there's a whole lot of countries in that

little area too if folks again get out the map and look around the baltic so interesting stuff here um it's of course not controlled by any one country with that there's or or any one organization there's a whole lot of countries around there um that that border the baltic and and they're all members of different organizations of course um it's been referred to perhaps uh hopefully as you call it perhaps a meadow is the nato lake um when you so when you you write this article towards decision makers who all are we talking about here who are you directing this to well first i'm going to give you a pushback on the nato lake because i've also written um in december 20. I've written for Panagate now. Check it out. Why the Baltic Sea is not a NATO lake.

My point is, you know, as long as Russia is still a Baltic Sea littoral state, it's never going to be a NATO lake. And we are not doing ourselves a service, you know, this sort of self-advertising, self-deluding concept of, hey, this is ours, you know, we don't have to take care of it. Well, until we'll be unpleasantly surprised. So I've been careful, certainly also mindful of history. You know, there's the instances where the Mediterranean was called a NATO lake early in the Cold War, until it wasn't, until the Soviets showed up. The first German chief of navy called the north atlantic uh and nato lake um which you know you might want to talk about uh talk to soviet submariners about it so or or american boomers uh for that matter

so you know this this the language creates a a reality and we need to be careful and mindful of that so with that out of the way um so the article emerged out of a speech i was invited to give in Sweden, in Stockholm to be precise, on the occasion of the 252nd, I believe, anniversary of the Royal Swedish Society for Naval Sciences, which I'm a corresponding fellow to. It's a very honorable, old and traditional institution, venerable. And I was invited to, well, provide my two cents about strategic issues in the baltic sea and um i've always been trying to get mileage out of what i do for you know what i write what i wherever i present something so um i was very fortunate that this the the the people at the at the society approached me after the event and said

could you please put that into writing this is very important um and certainly you know they are a relatively new nato member there they they need to learn everything they they can they can and you know they don't have 10 20 30 years they need they need to do it fast and now and so um you know based on my experience as a as a congressional staffer uh for a republican congressman from the great state of indiana um back in 2010 2011 he's now the senator one of the senators for the great state of indiana um i you know i have a little bit of experience and certainly i did that you know these kind of things time and again in my in my work ever since. But, you know, decision makers need one pagers. So, you know, academia and

academics really need to be mindful of the audience that they talk to. And yes, you know, not everything is easy to break down to, you know, on one page or, you know, however long any current decision makers will want to read stuff. But it needs to be precise and it needs to be in a you know in the sense that um decision makers have to can pull this out you know read it in the back of the limousine while they're being driven from point a to naval base b um or the media can needs to pick it up and say okay you know maybe these are some some thoughts and some points certainly it helps if you have some sort of background you know i've been doing what i do for more than 15 years almost 20 years so you know if people google me and say oh you know this this is

not you know run-of-the-mill dude from Germany who knows everything better which is you know someone who we might want to listen to so that's that's nice and I will say it is it's this is a pretty sure we'll put the link the on the show notes here the link to it but it is a very it's an open source a a very short read um uh with that and and I I was going to say the subject It may seem a little dry, but I'm not going to say that because that's hokey. You start off by quoting a discussion in this article between Alice and the Cheshire Cat, and you managed to make the short piece pretty insightful, yet fun to read, which I think you just sort of talked about.

You want to make it short enough where decision makers can get to it. Do you want it to go? I mean, are you hoping it goes beyond just sort of leaders of navies and political decision makers in those countries, or just gets a little wider even beyond that, I'm assuming? But, you know, I'm happy for whoever reads it. In fact, I'm, you know, I don't think I'm overreaching that I, because it is open source, you know, I mean, the people in Moscow probably have a copy of it, right? Maybe the guys in China, too. It goes into my file. But we're also China's operating there, too, of course, if people, people probably see control listeners know this, but weirdly enough, you're like, there's. It is true. It is true. Chinese influence in the Baltic Sea. I've also written on that a few years ago. That's perhaps for another day. But, you know, I mean, as a civilian who I am and as someone who's been eager to provide insight to decision makers of any kind, not just to stay in the ivory tower. In fact, I'm not really comfortable in the ivory tower.

I can do it. I can do the methods and the theory and everything, but I'm not really comfortable in it. And I've always wanted for my work to have some sort of impact. Now, whether that's with the military or with the, you know, with policymakers, with media folks, you know, I'm conscious of the fact that probably, you know, this is not the, you know, the daily reading for people in northern Sweden as they, you know, as they build their IKEA and whatnot. So there go the stereotypes. But, you know, I want to hope there's sort of a trickle down effect or if to use the examples I've just given, if, you know, if the admiral or the general doesn't read it or if the minister or state secretary or undersecretary doesn't read it, perhaps there's someone way down the line, you know, who's a lieutenant or a captain right now, who's a staffer in the Swedish parliament or any parliament around the Baltic Sea region. In fact, even, you know, the House of Representatives and the Senate in Washington, D.C., you know, or in the State Department. I mean, there's a lot of audiences I'm trying to entice that they need to learn more about the Baltic Sea and about maritime and strategic security in the area. Yeah. And, you know, my my my go to one of my my go to approaches has been to use some some sort of quotation like, you know, Alice in Wonderland, which sort of, you know, hopefully makes people pick up and say, hey, this is interesting.

Why would he use this? It's one of the privileges of being bilingual. I was born and raised in Germany. German academia, German texts couldn't really have that. In fact, I'm going to, you know, this is going to be published in German, similarly sort of, you know, but in a German language, German magazine, our equivalent of Proceedings. And I've consciously left out the Alice in Wonderland quote because I don't think it'll fly, no pun intended, with German audiences.

ironically all the uh english uh articles like this have to start off with a quote from an old dead german guy too interesting we always have to if it's not mahan it's klauswitz so anyway i really appreciate it and i think it will like you said i kind of pictured when you said people reading at the back of a limousine i had to think yeah i you know it's it's a it's a quick read you can do on your phone and go i just learned a lot there um and with all that being a quick read and very insightful like i said i i feel i learned a lot from that whatever less than 10 minutes probably even someone like me spent on it um why should our you know again we've talked about there's a lot of stuff going on now conflicts around the middle east the u.s navy of course

heavily involved in the red sea as of this um as we're uh talking right now why should this why should um our listeners our other folks what why should they pay why should the baltic get perhaps more attention than it's getting now if you would well uh you know quite self-serving but of course it's always useful to learn about the baltic and educate yourself about the baltic but um you know to to cite from another piece that a colleague of mine uh and i have published with simsec i believe in 2021 um we we came up with the formula um that the baltic for the baltic there's the inverse vegas rule so of course everyone knows that what happens in vegas stays in vegas but for the baltic what happens in the baltic does not stay in the baltic in fact

the supply routes in a case of a hot conflict with russia would go through the baltic and through the north atlantic to north america to canada and to the united states there's a lot of things happening in the baltic sea that merit decision makers attention i believe when it comes to cooperation. How do navies cooperate in an area that's sort of in enclosed waters, but where you have a spoiler, namely the Russian Navy

and perhaps sometimes the Chinese Navy, what do you do? How do you really cooperate? How does data fusion work? You know, there's a lot of, with all the critical infrastructure, the undersea infrastructure, wind parks, pipelines, cables,

a lot of cable cutting has been going on lately. The question here is, how do you get all the relevant actors together without creating a monster of a bureaucracy? How do you get them to share the information and the data that they have? And how do you create deterrence through naval means, you know, sending warships? I mean, there's only so many warships you can deploy in the Baltic Sea at any one time. What is the role of Coast Guards? What's the role of, you know, the civilian users of such wind farms and offshore wind farms? In addition, you have a lot of what political scientists call the human security element.

Despite all the things that are going on in the Baltic for since last, well, for the last nine years, there's a massive amount of tourism. So you need to be sure, you know, who's doing what on the Baltic, the Baltic, you know, not so much flying above the Baltic, but you need a full operational picture. Yeah, like civilian ferries going back and forth and this sort of thing, right? Yeah, so, yeah. Yeah, and a lot of cruise ships too. Right, right, right.

A lot of tourism, international tourism, not just Germans and Europeans, but also a lot of Americans, lots of Asian tourists, and their their cruise ships are plowing the waters here um we also have roughly 1.5 million tons metric tons of unexploded ammunition in the baltic sea which was done after world war ii because when germany was defeated uh they basically just said you know let's get rid of it we'll we'll just drop it into the baltic sea let someone else worry about it this is almost 80 years ago. And a lot of this unexploded ordnance is corrosive now. Some of the toxins are going into the food chain. And so maritime security in the Baltic Sea is so multifaceted. It's almost

like looking at the issue, not just the naval part. I mean, the naval part is important, but And it's part of a larger maritime, I don't want to say maritime threat picture, but a maritime picture, which is so multilayered, multifaceted with so many different actors and institutions and people that you have to tie into dealing with the emerging problems. And all of this happens against the backdrop of an ever-increasing climate change, against the backdrop of instability in Europe, populism, the whole question what kind of navies we should have, the investments into the infrastructure that are necessary, because which is also it's also true that you know for 30 25 to 30 years the navy's around the baltic sea in fact that the northern flank to encompass norway and and you know the norwegian sea um they've all scaled down massively they've really scaled up because the threat was no longer there and now the threat is here again and we really don't have 20 to 25 years to recapitalize our fleets um and you know it's it's it's a it's a big challenge to uh to to to do maritime security

and naval strategy right particularly in the baltic sea but you know because there's also so many things going on that you've got a lot of academics and professionals working on this so a lot of expertise that's also here in keel not just well myself but the the ispk there's also the uh the NATO accredited think tank here at the Flotilla 1 called the Center of Excellence for Operations in Confined and Shallow Waters. So a lot of things are happening here and it just merits more attention, certainly by the U.S. I mean, you know, I feel like I'm just referencing myself and my works here, but a few years ago, my colleague Jeremy Stoess and I had Peace and Proceedings, which we argued that the U.S. shouldn't decide so, should send

the LCS, a couple of LCS to the Baltic Sea, because the Baltic Sea is the ultimate confined in shallow waters, the ultimate littoral, where the LCS perhaps could prove some of its worth. Right. Nice. Excellent. Thank you. I'm convinced.

I'll have to pay more attention to the Baltics, folks. With all that, we're getting close to being out of time. So I'll ask, where can folks find more of your work and what are you working on now? Happy to. So I am not on LinkedIn and I left X, which tells you that I'm not really trying to be offline, which doesn't really work anyway. But the best way to find me really is, you know, check out killseapowerseries.com or ispk.org.

you'll find my profile and and you know some of my work there to download um and of course you can find my email address i'm always happy to to engage with readers and listeners um i am currently working on a um research project that we've been that i've been the lead researcher to um since january 2023 so for two years now it's a project that teams me as a civilian political scientist with a Bundeswehr German Armed Forces military historian based in Potsdam. And we're researching and we're doing work on NATO maritime strategies and naval operations

from the Cold War through today. So it's a huge project. It's interdisciplinary. There's going to be a book, a forthcoming book in the I Speak East Seapower series, which Jay, of course, you know very well. And I'm also very much, of course, When things are getting hot in the Baltic Sea, such as recently with the cable cutting, there's a lot of media engagement that we do.

And last but not least, our flagship event every year is the Kiel International Seapower Symposium, KISS, by shorthand, which also stands for Keep It Short and Straightforward. So we're doing a conference again and looking at the future of sea powers this year. So there's a lot of work. We're putting a lot of effort into a conference that really is, well, has over the last 10 years developed into the leading forum in Europe for naval matters, for sea power. So if you want to score an invitation, also do reach out to me. And I'll vouch having met Sebastian in person at the Naval Academy's McMullen History Conference a couple of years ago. He is extremely accessible, although you'll see him quoted in international news outlets all the time. He's extremely accessible and happy to answer questions, very responsive, and just an all-around nice guy. So thanks, Sebastian, and he was also nice enough to join us again today and talk about this.

So with that, Sea Control listeners, we will cut this off and see you next time. Thank you. We'll be right back.