As the world faces greater geopolitical volatility in 2026, maritime grey-zone threats are becoming a growing concern for ports worldwide, especially those near ongoing regional conflicts. Port administrators are now veering away from the traditional routine inspection of foreign-flagged vessels at sea, to a more hardened stance as potential threats to facilities and operations.

Countries hosting major ports, critical undersea infrastructure and exclusive economic zones (EEZs) have stepped up their commitments to enhance detection and response capabilities to counter growing and evolving grey-zone threats. The United Kingdom and Norway recently signed a defense deal amid concerns about increased Russian vessels operating just outside their maritime borders, highlighting the changing posture.

The significant investments towards ports and maritime assets aim to implement a more proactive detection strategy towards grey-zone threats, providing more accurate information about incursions and facilitating appropriate responses. Implementing scalable technologies that enhance situational awareness can be crucial to hardening these measures.

Grey-zone threats constitute deniable, state-sanctioned incursions just outside a country’s maritime borders that technically do not violate international law. Still, foreign actors will design them carefully to achieve a strategic objective. Vessels in the grey zone will typically engage in routine commercial activity, such as fishing or surveying, while actually conducting activities such as gathering intelligence, sabotage or testing security responses.

The number of grey-zone incursions has significantly increased over the last few years, creating complex operational environments around ports and naval facilities. Since 2022, China has increased military drills around Taiwan’s sovereign borders, increasing the risks of commercial disruptions. Russia also continues to test the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) defense commitment by ramping up incursions outside the alliance’s collective waters by over 30% in the past two years.

These incidents put commercial assets and critical infrastructure at risk. Where grey-zone operations are deniable, they can damage undersea cabling, disrupt commercial shipping lanes and create uncertainty in the security environment without accountability.

Subsequently, grey-zone threats pose more challenging scenarios for ports, as they employ refined tactics such as blending into commercial shipping traffic to create plausible deniability for their operations. They are not deemed serious enough to warrant a full-scale military response. However, as mentioned, they can still compromise national security and the operations of shippers in the surrounding seas.

Grey-zone threats are not only increasing in frequency but also in complexity and sophistication. Major ports globally are responding to growing risks of disruption by upgrading their maritime surveillance technologies, enabling a more hardened stance and more effective deterrent against these incursions.

Identifying and validating unusual vessel behavior has become an integral part of port security operations, beyond traditional perimeter observation. Many maritime facilities worldwide are adopting comprehensive security approaches, layering multiple devices to help separate grey-zone threats from legitimate activity.

Evolving risks and threats mean ports are implementing detection hardware that scales to the ever-changing tactics of grey-zone operations, using advanced optics assisted by artificial intelligence to continuously detect unusual activity offshore. The deeper insights the technology provides can help port security teams gather intelligence more quickly, enabling a swifter, more appropriate response to potentially politically sensitive incidents.

Global ports can harden their positions by enhancing detection and response capabilities, strengthening mechanisms for incident accountability and improving asset resilience. Leveraging advanced technologies can be the first step to achieving a more resolute stance against grey-zone threats.

Grey-zone operations around ports and maritime facilities are growing and becoming more aggressive in scale. Vessels continue to use new and evolving tactics to maintain the impression that they are part of ordinary shipping traffic engaged in commercial activities, but acting maliciously within the bounds of deniability.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) states that the most effective countermeasures to grey-zone threats are preparation, an integrated response and early action against potential perpetrators. Implementing scalable port security systems that enhance situational awareness and provide deep, real-time insights into active scenarios can help build a strategy that facilitates those capabilities.

Major ports are actively hardening their stance against grey-zone threats by integrating these scalable systems to help ensure security and stability across territorial waters. Given the ongoing volatility in global geopolitics, deterrence has become a vital component of maritime facility operations.

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