Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922) died before he could finish his work, and the influence of his thinking faded. It was also taken. Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) tinkered with Corbett’s ideas, claimed them as his own in the “British way in warfare”, and disparaged Corbett in the process. It was a start of a process that Sir Micheal Howard (1922-2019) later completed, giving Corbett the boot and with it the erosion of understanding the influence of maritime affairs upon the state amongst historical accounts, policy and more. That Hart’s actions happened early, in the interwar years, when Corbett most needed defenders resulted in damage that was amongst the hardest to undo. Some of his defenders and educators of his work, he had taught or influenced, among them British naval officers Herbert Richmond (1871-1946) and Ernle Chatfield (1873-1967). They did their best to keep it alive through the interwar years and beyond, while a few American naval officers and scholars tried too, but it never recovered its standing. Bryan Ranft (1917-2001) and Andrew Lambert began its revival after the 1970s, and it is Lambert above all who, since 2001, has put Corbett back where he belongs: among the great strategists, in the company of Clausewitz if not his equal. That is a striking thing to say about the author of one of the great books on strategy, and it is also a warning. A tradition that survives through a few devoted followers and a handful of scholars is fragile.

To describe oneself as a Corbettian is to accept an intellectual responsibility. The designation should tell us how a person thinks and the standards to which they hold their own arguments. Corbett was offering something much larger than a naval doctrine. He offered a way of viewing the world, in war and in peace, from logistics to money to humanity to defence. He also offered a method for reaching it: the sophisticated analysis of experience. This paper argues for that view and that method, for the habits that follow from them, and for the institutions, civilian ones above all, without which they do not survive. It is open to anyone who wants to understand how the connected parts of war fit together, whether the aim is to keep the peace or to fight a conflict. It ends on what I think is the real prize, which is protecting a state’s capacity to think and act strategically. Three relationships run through what follows: historical understanding informs strategic judgement, education allows that judgement to be shared and finally, institutions decide whether it reaches the people who can act on it.

Corbett was a civilian and a historian, not a sailor. He lectured to serving officers on the Naval War Course at Greenwich, worked closely with the Admiralty, served as an official government historian, advised government committees on defence and became allies of naval officers, amongst then Admiral John Fisher’s (1841-1920) closest ally. He could say things to politicians and civil servants that naval officers could not. His value lay in standing outside the profession while understanding it well enough to translate it for the people who controlled its fate. Being Corbettian therefore has nothing to do with uniform or rank. Civilians and officers can share it, and it works best when both do. His own position was also an argument, which I return to below.

This is why there is speak of ‘ways of war and peace’. Strategy is the continuing work of securing interests, sustaining relationships and preventing the circumstances in which force becomes necessary. War sits inside that responsibility. A discussion that begins only when fighting starts has already left out most of what makes strategy matter. A Corbettian sees the whole system, starting with what the state is trying to achieve, and is therefore unimpressed by counts of ships, aircraft or brigades. Many numbers of people answer “how many?”, and the Corbettian’s first question is “for what?”

The starting point is the (nation) state itself. What sustains its security and prosperity? Where are its dependencies, geography? What interests must it protect, and what resources can it reasonably commit? A strategic argument needs answers to these before it can explain the forces required. Beginning with an inventory of capabilities leaves the most consequential part of the reasoning unfinished.

This is where the contrast with the Prussian tradition matters. The continental military tradition, associated above all with Prussia, grew from the circumstances of a land power: borders that can be crossed, armies that can march, a resource base large enough that the state can choose its doctrine and absorb mistakes. Its instinct is to focus on the fight, the battle, the campaign and the tactical problem, and to treat everything else as support. That makes sense for a continental power, but it carries a bias. It narrows strategy to the application of force, and it produces strategists who ask how to win the engagement before asking why it is being fought. Maritime thinking is a different approach and starts at the opposite end of asking questions. For example, an island with scarce resources cannot choose to ignore the sea, so it has to ask what it is protecting, what it depends on, what it can afford and how to get the greatest effect from limited means. Those questions make better strategy than the tactical ones, because a nation that cannot answer them will find that victories in battle do not add up to a policy.

The fairest test of that claim is Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831), because he is the strongest case the continental tradition has while also being the closest intellectual relative Corbett has. Both insisted that war serves political purpose, and Corbett can fairly be read as Britain’s answer to him, building on the insight and not rejecting it. But in the end Corbett bests him, and the reason is scope. Clausewitz wrote about war: its nature, its friction, its relationship to politics. Corbett wrote about how a state uses force alongside trade, blockade, finance, diplomacy and alliances in pursuit of its aims, with war as one instrument among several. That is a larger subject, and it is the one governments actually have to manage. Clausewitz also theorised from the experience of a continental power. Corbett grounded his work in the experience of a nation that survived on limited means and could not afford to confuse winning a battle with achieving its purpose. Corbett was building something the Prussian tradition never quite produced: a method for educating the people who make national strategy, through applied history, through institutions, and through the partnership of civilian and officer. The target of my criticism is therefore not Clausewitz himself so much as the land-centric, tactical inheritance that followed him, the habit of treating the world as a battlefield and strategy as something that begins when the shooting does. We can see this today throughout many War Colleges, militaries, domain specific military services and government thinking. It’s simplification and means education as failed because people think in frankly, dumber terms. Strategy is not difficult, learning to think strategically is another matter, one that requires sustained effort.

There is also a plain human reason why land-think dominates. People live on land, so their existence revolves around what happens there, and the business of navies takes place over the horizon. Land-think is the default instinct of almost everyone, including most politicians and many soldiers, and airmen and now space forces and even plenty of misguided naval officers. The maritime view is the less natural one and has to be taught: often and repeatedly.

That brings us to the method, which I think is Corbett’s greatest achievement and the part we are losing today. Corbett did not arrive at his conclusions by theorising from first principles or by selecting convenient episodes from history. He assembled a vast body of historical research on centuries of British military, foreign and national strategic effort, and he analysed trends, facts and evidence from it using sophisticated methods. From that evidence he drew out the patterns that endure, and from those patterns he built a coherent account of how Britain had waged war and peace and why it had done so. Lambert’s point is that the key to sound contemporary strategy lay in combining sophisticated historical analysis with strategic theory. Only someone working at the level of a master of applied history could have done it. However: note what the method is not. It is not a search for lessons to be applied mechanically, and it is not a catalogue of famous victories. It is the disciplined study of a large body of experience, tested against evidence, in order to build judgement for problems that have not yet arrived.

In practice the method asks demanding questions. What did decision-makers know? Which alternatives were available? How did political objectives interact with economic resources and military possibilities? Why did one combination succeed, and what stopped another from doing so? Comparison then needs a second judgement: which features of the earlier case matter to the present problem, and where are the limits? Technology may change the means while leaving questions of purpose and dependence untouched, and a change in political or economic circumstances can make an attractive precedent misleading. That is the character of war changes little, even if the circumstances do.

That is why it is better than the alternatives. Much of what other fields offer in its place is theory, assumption and guesswork. Theory alone can spark an idea, but the day after it is dismissed another takes its place, which is the habit of a reactive mind and not of a strategic one. Guesswork about the future nature of war rests on little evidence, and it flatters whoever is making it. None of this is of use for policy, strategy or guiding the modern military away from chaos and towards sense. Experience, properly analysed, is a different kind of thing. It has been tested by events, it can be checked by anyone willing to read the sources, and it is freely available, which is far better than relearning its lessons or ‘insight’ the costly and hard way. This is also why historians matter, and not as a decorative addition to the study of strategy. Corbett’s example shows that properly trained historians belong at the heart of the policy-making process, because they are the people equipped to recover experience and turn it, translate it, into something decision-makers can use. The work has to be open-ended and ambitious, avoiding closed questions and lazy assumptions. It is hard, and it is hardest where the pressure to produce a quick answer is greatest. A pressure that has grown in the modern world.

None of this is hostility to theory. Concepts make relationships intelligible and give people a language to test competing arguments, and Corbett himself combined theory with historical analysis. The problem is theory protected from evidence, which can gain institutional authority while losing explanatory power. A Corbettian should be alert to that in the theories they favour too.

It is also an art that is being lost. Strategy has always been an art and not a science, and by that I mean the art of thinking about strategy and then acting strategically. The two halves cannot be separated. Thinking without action is commentary, and action without thought is reaction. Corbett’s method is the discipline that makes the first half sound, and the institutions described below are what make the second possible.

After 1945, the creation of unified defence displaced applied history, and theory, guesswork and assumptions about the nature of future warfare took its place. Debate shifted towards technology, force and the particular application of power in a particular context, and scholars who wanted to use history found themselves arguing against technicists and theorists whose horizons were short and operational. Space is the current example. The literature on space warfare is long on confident theory, often borrowed from airpower, and short on experience of application and influence. The remedy is to do what Corbett did: look back at the experience of other environments, above all the seas, rather than abstracting from nothing. If that kind of analysis is not valued, nor the ideas it produces, nor the institutions that exist to recover experience and process it into usable form, we condemn ourselves to repeat the mistakes of the past. It will hurt, in body bags.

Corbett’s own survival shows how thin the thread is. After his death his followers kept the work going through the interwar years, Ranft and Lambert revived it after the 1970s, and his present standing owes most to Lambert’s work since 2001. That is a poor basis on which to keep any art alive. So the task is threefold: protect the art of strategy where it survives, rejuvenate it where it has weakened, and educate about it so that the next generation of strategists, officers and officials knows what it is and why it matters. This is complicated in a higher education environment, and often, a PME environment, which is disinterested.

Several habits follow from this way of seeing. The first is to treat geography as fact, not sentiment. Britain’s way of war was not an imperial fashion. It grew from being an island with scarce resources, which meant defending the home base and its supply lines before pursuing ambitions abroad. That is why the charge that Corbett and the British way of war are “imperial” is nonsense. The reasoning predates the empire, survived it and rests on a map. Today that map runs from seabed to space. Trade still moves across the surface of the sea, but data and finance flow along the seabed, physically or digitally, and all of it is backed by infrastructure in orbit. The geography a strategist has to read has more layers than it once did, but the logic is unchanged: a state that depends on these pathways cannot afford to ignore them.

But geography still requires interpretation. Its consequences depend on economic organisation, technology, alliances and the character of potential opponents. For example, recognising Britain’s maritime dependence opens an inquiry into how that dependence should be secured under particular conditions. Corbett also wrote in imperial Britain, and that setting belongs in any serious assessment of his work. But naming the period an argument came from does not settle whether it is right. We still have to examine the reasoning and see where it travels and where it does not. It was never hostile to armies either. Corbett’s account is of army and navy working together, with a mobile army supported from the sea, alliances, trade and economic pressure all doing their part. Which is why continental commitments are ruinous for an island because they cost it the ability to focus on the sea in exchange for benefits that rarely arrive. Commitments for other nations, require careful thought.

The second habit is to use history for judgement and not for answers. Corbett was more interested in what should have happened than in what did, and that is what separates applied history from the lessons-learned kind. It explains his distrust of easy analogy. When someone says a present problem is just like an earlier one, the Corbettian asks what was different and whether the difference changes the answer. Isolating military history in lessons-learned doctrine does little for national aims, because it detaches the lesson from the reasoning that produced it.

The third habit is suspicion of false prophets. Every generation announces a revolution that has supposedly changed strategy itself: strategic bombing, atomic weapons, precision, computers, stealth, and now space, probably AI next. A revolution in the means available to the strategist should never be mistaken for a revolution in the nature of strategy, because strategy remains a matter of human purposes, fears and mistakes, and of an opponent who is trying to impose his own will through advantage, dominance or other means. Space is the current test. Better satellites and launch systems do not answer the strategic questions they raise. It is not enough to transpose sea control into orbit. What is worth borrowing is the method: study the evidence, ask how to think and not what to think, and let theory follow experience.

The fourth habit is to accept that the work is unfinished and to be wary of heroes. Some Principles was meant as a living document. A Cold War generation that kept calling for “another Corbett” or “another Mahan” missed the point, because both men were products of their eras, pulling the levers available to them to influence the debates of their time. The same applies to setting Corbett against Mahan and forcing a choice. They complement each other, much as the civilian historian and the naval officer should. Turning Corbett into scripture, with principles quoted confidently and applied without thought, would betray what he was trying to do. It is entirely possible to quote him while ignoring the method that made his work worth quoting.

The fifth habit is the one most often forgotten: keep people in the picture. A way of seeing that includes money and logistics also has to include humanity. On the morning of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), Lord Nelson (1758-1805) wrote in his diary that “humanity after victory” should be the predominant feature of the British Fleet. The maritime tradition treats the sea as an environment that shapes everyone who works on it, and it holds that a navy’s purpose is to keep war at bay from a position of strength, ready to defend its nation and global lifelines if it must. Strategy that has no place for people is incomplete, and a framework that sees only force keeps producing strategists who treat peace as an interval between wars.

That brings me to the sixth requirement, which is institutional. Corbett did not work alone. He wrote and taught within a network that gave his ideas an audience, tested them and carried them into government. The Admiralty and its civilians worked closely with historians like him, and together they preserved experience, educated successive generations and connected specialist knowledge to the people who had to decide. Strategic judgement is not only a property of individuals. It accumulates in organisations that remember, challenge and renew what they know. Corbett’s principles were not set aside because they were outdated. They faded because the machinery that carried them was weakened, and without it even sound ideas struggle to reach anyone who can act on them. An assumption can become embedded in budgets, educational programmes and career structures until it looks like a condition of serious discussion, and challenging it looks like a departure from professional common sense.

This is where Corbett’s own position makes the argument. He was a civilian historian teaching serving officers at the heart of their professional education, and that was no accident of recruitment. Officers bring something no civilian can: practical experience. But a miltiary career crowds out sustained study. Appointments rotate, operational demands press, and promotion rewards other things. Trusting every officer to become a serious student of history and strategy while doing all that was always too much of a risk, and institutional habits, once absorbed, narrow how a mind works. Civilians can offer what that career structure cannot: years of sustained research, continuity, and the independence to say what serving personnel cannot. Corbett could say to politicians what even Fisher could not. Internal think-tanks and professional military education answer to government and are bound by civil-military relations, so they cannot always say what needs saying. It is no coincidence that when the military has struggled to reform its own thinking, it has often been civilian historians who came to the rescue.

For professional military education the implication is plain: it needs civilian faculty, and specifically trained historians, because they are the custodians of the method. I do not mean the occasional guest lecturer or a seminar slot, but a permanent, respected part of how officers learn to think, with the time and security to do real research and the standing to disagree. Lambert’s account of the War Course shows that it worked in an informal, unplanned way, which was both the secret of its success and the reason it was so easily forgotten. What was once left to chance now has to be built deliberately. The relationship also has to run both ways. Serious academic training costs years of time and money, and as I have argued elsewhere the number of civilians working in this field is declining. Expertise paid for at that price cannot be summoned on demand and then ignored. A Corbettian service treats civilian scholars as partners and not as an audience, and the government and the services need to fund, protect and listen to them.

The audience for this education is wider than the armed forces. Politicians, civil servants, business leaders and those shaping public debate also set national purposes and allocate resources, and they need the understanding to assess strategic advice.. Professional military education also makes an essential contribution while civlian universities reach people whose responsibilities will extend beyond the services. Both need room for sustained inquiry and informed challenge..

This is what I mean by the Art of Admiralty: the institutional work of communicating and educating maritime strategy and/or a national strategy across government and national life. There is an ecosystem of business and government which interlaces to this which is build and needs to be maintained overtime: for some nations its easier than others. Specialist knowledge has little influence if it cannot enter the reasoning of those who decide priorities. ‘Seablindness’ is the same problem seen from the other end but that’s just a handy term to admit failure to understand a problem. It is not enough to observe that people know too little about the sea without asking how they were expected to learn. A Corbettian accepts some responsibility for that communication, including the hard work of making complex relationships clear without reducing them to slogans.

It also helps to be clear about where this sits in current scholarship. British writing on seapower since the end of the twentieth century has drawn on two broad approaches: the sea power tradition associated with Professor Geoffrey Till, and the Corbettian tradition of applied history and the philosophy of maritime strategy, which Professor Andrew Lambert carries forward. The difference is one of approach and not of hostility, and both have contributed a great deal. On the question this paper asks, the line is clear. Lambert’s The British Way of War recovers Corbett’s own method, serious historical analysis combined with strategic theory and applied to a nation’s actual circumstances. That is the sense in which he is Corbett’s heir, and why Corbettian thinking is better understood as a method than as a body of doctrine. Nothing here is a judgement on the quality of Till’s work.

Doubling down also means being clear about loyalty. Corbett wrote to improve the state’s strategic judgement, not to advance a service, and The Spectre of Navalism exists for a reason. Navalism, the policy of maintaining naval interests, is a natural attitude for professionals who focus on ships and tactics, and it has its uses. But the Corbettian is not a navalist. A navy that treats Corbett as a source of arguments for its budget has misread him, while a navy that treats him as a source of better questions has not. The Corbettian is as willing to criticise a navy’s habits as anyone else’s. Where the evidence favours naval investment, that should be said. Where it shows self-interest, rivalry or wishful thinking, that should be said too, whichever uniform it comes from.

Cooperation between the services is necessary, but treating every disagreement over strategy as institutional rivalry risks shutting out the debate through which mistaken assumptions get exposed. Strategic judgement means telling a defence of organisational advantage from a defensible alternative conception of national strategy.

Because this is a way of seeing and not a naval doctrine, it can be turned into questions for any strategic proposal in any domain. What political purpose does it serve, and could that purpose be met some other way? What does it assume about the opponent, and what follows if the assumption is wrong? What does it need in logistics, communications and money, and who controls them? How does it combine with the state’s other instruments? What does it do to the prospects for peace, and to the people involved? What evidence is being drawn on, how large a body of experience stands behind it, and what is different now? And who is responsible for preserving and challenging this thinking once the people currently doing it have moved on, and who teaches the next generation to think this way? None of these is about ships, which is the point. They work for space and cyberspace as readily as for the sea, and for a treasury official as readily as for an admiral, because they concern how a state reasons about power, resources and the world beyond its borders.

One more thing should be said about Corbett himself, because it is the last reason he outlasts Clausewitz in my view. He did not live to finish the job, and Andrew Lambert’s account of his last years shows what was lost. Corbett objected in private, but his considered reply would have come in the closing pages of the Official History and in a revised Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. Neither was completed. His energy went instead into a fight with a politician protective of his reputation, and into dealing with an Admiralty Board whose members, though War Course graduates, had let the central lessons slip.1 The past has an educational role which is why Strategy must be national, and not belong to any one service where a sound grasp of how history shaped doctrine has to be spread widely and intelligently. What joined them was a test. For Corbett, history was the final check on any theory, provided it was accurate, carefully considered and consistent.

If Corbett had lived, it would have likely resulted in a second version of Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, he would have developed his thinking on how defence should be organised, and to carry on his work on national strategy-making. Preparations for The Second World War may have been different if that work had been completed and distributed. I put that as a possibility and not a certainty, since no one can know. But the direction is clear enough, and so is the cost of not taking it. The work was never finished, and Corbett fell into obscurity. His followers did what they could, but it fell to Ranft and Lambert to revive him, along with some efforts in the United States. But since 2001 it has been Lambert’s work that has restored him to the standing he deserves. Also, that unfinished business did not die with Corbett. In my own work on national strategy and defence organisation I have tried to carry some of it forward.

So, to be a Corbettian strategic thinker is to see the connected whole: purpose, geography, logistics, money, diplomacy, institutions and people. An ecosystem to some degree of interconnected relationships. It means treating peace as the main business and war as an instrument, and staying loyal to the state’s interests before any service’s. Above all it means practising the art of strategy, which is the art of thinking about strategy and then acting strategically, and the method that makes it possible: the sophisticated analysis of experience, which is better than the theory, assumption and guesswork offered in its place and is why historians matter. It requires the independence to challenge a comfortable interpretation and the discipline to revise your own when the evidence demands.

It also means finishing what he could not. Teach the past as education and not ornament. Therefore:

A) Insist that strategy is national, whatever uniform the argument wears.

B) Spread an intelligent understanding of how history shaped doctrine well beyond the few who study it.

C) Hold every theory, however fashionable, to history that is accurate, carefully considered and consistent. Theory that cannot pass that test is guesswork with a fancy vocabulary.

Corbett’s work reached us by a thread: a few pupils, then a few scholars, and a revival that only just saved him from being forgotten. It does not have to stay that thin. What he left is a discipline, to think about strategy with the best evidence there is and then to act on what it shows, and a discipline can be taught, funded and protected in a way that a reputation cannot. A state that has it, from the seabed to space, can keep the peace and, if it must, fight a war it understands. A state that lacks it will keep paying to rediscover what was already known. Very few people are Corbettian. The work now is to make more of them.

A navy can be admired and respected by the public while the state fails to understand seapower. Warships can draw crowds, its sailors command affection and its history, if educated about, hold a prominent place in national memory. Yet, those responsible for policy can remain poorly equipped to explain what seapower and even the broader maritime industry contributes to the country’s security and prosperity. Popularity and strategic understanding produce different things, in fact popularity can have very negative effects when that affection, or sentimentalism, for the past seeps into the serious business of thinking about strategy, doctrine and policy. That is because affection for a service or force does not supply a government with the reasoning required to employ and sustain it.

Every few years navies decide it has a communications problem. A new campaign is launched and from it there are open days, better photography, a social media push, a recruitment film with a soundtrack, a spokesperson with an easy manner. The service gets noticed for a while. Then the budget round arrives, the same arguments are lost, and the cycle begins again. Little do naval services realise this destructive cycle has only dug a deeper hole for them in hoping for eduation about what they do.

The pattern deserves a better explanation than “navies are bad at public relations”. Some are rather good at it. The truth is more complex, and it starts with the phrase itself. For a navy, public relations is a different thing from what it is for an army or an air force. Its first task is to educate the state to seapower: to government, officials and the poltical system understand what the sea means to the country and what options navies make possible. The public matter, but they come second. Navies have never really got public relations, at least in the contempoary era because they keep aiming it at the wrong audience, and treating it as the job they can excel at, when in reality it was never theirs to do.

I use the Royal Navy as the case study, because its history makes the argument clearest. But this can be replicated for many other navies around the world.

You must start with the oldest problem, which is not a failure of effort. The business of a navy takes place over the horizon. Most people live on land, work on land and make their decisions on land. A warship on patrol in a distant sea is doing something that matters enormously to the country and is invisible to nearly everybody in it.

Arguably submariners gave this condition a name: the “Silent Service”. It began as a label for one branch’s culture of secrecy, but it describes the evolution of the contemporary navy. Warships deploy, the mission is executed, and the best outcome is usually that nothing happens: the sea lanes stay open, the opponent stays deterred, the crisis never arrives, strategic advantage is maintained, communications remain available, commerce continues and a government keeps choices that might otherwise have narrowed. Success at sea produces no news.

Public relations works on a different principle. It trades in what can be seen, photographed and reported. Making naval work visible is useful, I do not dismiss that, but making its relationship to national policy intelligible is a different task, and it takes sustained education.

A navy’s survival has never depended, in the end, on public affection. It depends on a small number of people: ministers, the Treasury, senior officials, a handful of parliamentarians. They decide what the country builds, what it can afford and what it chooses to protect. For a navy, they are the primary audience, and the task is not to charm them but to educate them in what seapower is and why the state needs it. Never ignore Britain’s greatest affection to the navy were driven by people who delivered great victories, but they were also anomalies, rebels often in a rigidi system and certainly not ones that modern unified defence would permit today.

The public are secondary:t hat is not contempt for them. Taxes raised from the people finance defence, they supply the political climate in which a government decides. But a state that understands the sea will find it far easier to carry them along. But winning their goodwill is not the same as educating the state. A public that loves its navy will still be indifferent to a spending round if no one has explained, in terms that a Cabinet minister can use, what the fleet makes possible, what becomes impossible without it and what the alternatives cost. Pride at a ship launch does not become a defence settlement because applause, a pat on the back or a medal is not a argument for seapower.

The educational task also begins from a different place. The first questions concern the country. What sustains its economic life? How do goods and resources reach it? What relationships connect it to markets, partners and sources of supply? For an island, those questions lead quickly to the sea, and they establish why maritime strategy belongs within national policy at all. Publicity usually approaches from the opposite direction. It begins with the service: a ship, a deployment, a capability, an individual achievement, and then invites the audience to recognise its importance. That can be an effective introduction but that is where it often stops. But a minister may know that a warship is impressive without understanding which national dependencies require the capability it represents. While our sailors Professional excellence supplies no automatic answer to questions about commitments, resources or the consequences of withdrawal.

This is where navies differ most from the other services, and why borrowing their methods rarely works.

An army lives among the people it defends. Its soldiers are posted to garrisons and training grounds at home, its regiments carry local and county loyalties, and its deployments on land are seen, filmed and reported. Just as important, defence thinking in most countries starts from the land. The idea that war is fought and won on the ground is the unstated default of the whole system, so an army seldom has to explain why land matters at all. Its public relations is largely about recruitment, morale and affection, and it can afford for that to be so.

An air force had the opposite problem and solved it differently. Created in 1918, the RAF had to fight through the 1920s for its existence as an independent service, against the Army and Navy. It learned early to argue its case before Cabinet and the nation, and it was helped by something the sea does not offer: aircraft overhead are visible, and stories are propelled to powerful myths like the Battle of Britain as it is told about the sky above the places where people live. Air forces have survived because their culture from day one was about survivial, this may something in itself I won’t develer into here, their paranoia has been a core success in their hostile take over of the defence agenda.

Armies and air forces also have to explain deterrence, readiness, alliances and activities whose benefits are hard to observe. They have their own educational problems but , it is not to be ignore they engage more in circles at events with those who make decisions. A navy has neither of their advantages because its work is out of sight, and it cannot assume that anyone starts from the sea. A navy explaining seapower must connect activity at sea with the organisation of economic and political life ashore. The common military vocabulary of readiness, lethality and operational effectiveness explains important features of the force, but it cannot carry the argument for maritime strategy. A presentation confined to how the Navy fights leaves unexplained why the country needs maritime power in peace. Army and air force methods sell the service. A navy that copies them sells the service well and leaves the argument unmade this is because the former are tactical-operationals ervices a navy is strategic. Speed of their effect agains the poltical-cycle is potentially in favour or army and air forces.

The American objection

The obvious objection comes from across the Atlantic. The United States Navy puts considerable organisational investment into public engagement. Its Navy Week programme takes sailors and ships to communities without a substantial naval presence, and its American Connections programme carries sailors’ stories to local media. The stated purpose of Navy Weeks includes explaining the service’s relationship with national security and prosperity. These are purposeful efforts to connect naval service with everyday American life, not publicity without a message. Why can’t the Royal Navy simply do the same?

Part of the answer is that the United States has something Britain has largely lost: a widely shared, unembarrassed sense of patriotism. In few other democracies is it so natural for the public to take pride in the armed forces, or for a political leader to say so. A navy operating in that climate has an audience already inclined to listen, and good public relations does far more with it. That is a fact about American society, and no British press office can copy it, atleast in recent times due to the purposeful destruction of English cutlrue and identity.

It does not change the argument. Even in the United States, the first task is the relationship between the state and seapower. A navy loved by its public still has to win its place in the beurracyed of modern unified defence, the White House and Congress, and those battles are decided by understanding, not by affection. However, for all the public relations of the US Navy, the US Navy as luminaries like CNO Ernest J King () and SECDEF James Forrestal (1892-1949) feared as seen the American navy slip from seapower to merely a naval force in service to the US Air Force and US Army., vulnerable to the whims of foreign policy more than ever.

Outreach cannot by itself establish that national purposes, economic dependencies and naval means are being considered coherently. It would equally be wrong to infer that such understanding is absent in America. The point is that outreach and strategic education do different work and should each be judged on what they actually do. The American example shows what a favourable climate adds to the task. It does not show that the climate is the task.

The excuse that covers up the truth

If public relations is not the problem, why does the diagnosis persist? Because the word that sits behind it has become useful to the people repeating it.

“Seablindness” was coined in the 1950s but popularised as an alarm bell in the 1980s, and it did its job as one. Over decades it has hardened into something less honest: a handy excuse. Politicians are said to be ignorant, officials indifferent and the public distracted. The failure is located among the audiences who supposedly do not understand, while those who claim to educate them escape equivalent scrutiny. After decades of recurring complaints, that evasion is itself part of the problem. Afterall, you can’t educate those who do not want to be educated.

Used this way, seablindness covers up the truth about how the condition was produced. It makes a transformation in the state look like a shortage of public awareness. It implies that if only the Royal Navy posted better content, ran more open days or found the right spokesman, the difficulty would resolve itself. It turns an institutional problem into a public relations problem, and shields failed approaches from examination. A navy that believes it has a public relations problem will, naturally, reach for public relations, ignoring it often doesn’t know its own history and refuses to engage with those who can educate on that history, because that experience cainteind in history, let aloen the history of public relations, is the key weapons have to survive poltical challenges.

The scrutiny has to include naval officers, veterans, scholars and advocates. Bcause navalism, let alone knowing how a navy operates does not amount to understanding how a seapower state works. Some can identify the loss of capability while still prescribing remedies that assume the former system survives. Familiar expertise can become an obstacle when it makes the scale of the change hard to accept. There is a double failure to confront: the adequacy of the understanding being offered, and the willingness of those receiving it to reconsider. Neither belongs only to civilians or only to the naval profession.

Historians have studied earlier attempts to rouse opinion for the Navy. Work on the Navy League, on popular navalism and on the history of Navy Weeks has examined efforts to cultivate public support, promote naval education and influence political debate. These were substantial activities, and public opinion mattered then. They cannot be dismissed as decorative enthusiasm for ships.

But they belong to a different world: and of an Admiralty that still existed and did the real work of educating government. Describing all of this collectively as “PR” encourages a misleading continuity. The Navy League was a campaigning organisation. The Admiralty was a department of state. Public pressure, official publicity and the continuing education of government could interact, but they carried different responsibilities and worked through different forms of authority. A history of campaigning for the Navy does not explain how maritime knowledge entered the making of national strategy.

Nor can the past simply be borrowed, for the past was neither uniformly maritime in outlook nor free of resistance. The relevant difference lies in the institutions and relationships within which advocacy operated. Before treating a past campaign as a model for today, we have to establish what supported its influence and whether those conditions still exist. Calls to revive the name today assume the surrounding system is still in place. It is not, and reviving the name does not rebuild the machinery.

Britain did not leave it to the sailors

The institutional record points the other way. For most of the Royal Navy’s history it did not depend on its own officers to explain it to the nation. The Admiralty was a civilian-led institution as well as a naval one. The First Lord answered to Parliament and the Admiralty Secretary, a permanent civil servant, kept the institutional memory and managed the relationship with the rest of government. Historians such as Julian Corbett (1854-1922) supplied the arguments, grounded in the nation’s experience, that made the case intelligible to people who would never go to sea. I have called this the art of Admiralty: the work of translating maritime strategy for government, Parliament and the public.

Corbett’s place in this history is instructive. His scholarship connected naval operations with political purpose, economic circumstances and the coordinated use of national power, and communicating those relationships took exchanges between civilian thinkers, officers and the people responsible for policy. The intellectual content of the argument and the arrangements through which it reached decision-makers belonged together.

The arrangement had a purpose that is easy to miss. It freed naval officers to be the best professionals at sea. The sailor’s job was to fight, train and sustain a fleet or in short the best sea professional. The explaining belonged to someone else, someone with the access, the time and the standing to do it.

Admiral of the Fleet Lord John Jellicoe (1859-1935) understood this. Addressing an American audience, he is recorded as saying that the worst possible people to talk about and promote the Royal Navy are Royal Navy and Royal Marine officers. He had learned the point from Corbett, and he had watched first hand what happened when naval officers turned too much of their effort towards promoting the service and its careers. It was a striking thing for a First Sea Lord to say but these, unlike today, were professionals who were educated to and understood sound institutional design.

Why the sailors were never going to be good at this

Jellicoe’s point deserves to be taken seriously, and not as a slight on naval officers. The qualities that make a good naval officer are largely the wrong qualities for the work of educating government. Officers rotate every couple of years. Persuading Whitehall requires continuity: the same faces, the same relationships, a memory of what was argued ten years ago and why it failed. Officers are trained to execute policy and not to contest it, so the habits of loyalty and modesty that serve a ship well can look like reticence in a Cabinet committee. And they are bound by the rules of civil–military relations, which rightly limit what a serving officer may say in public about decisions that belong to ministers.

While if you add the plain fact that the job is already full. Running a navy is a demanding profession. To hand sailors an additional responsibility for explaining the nation’s strategy to the nation, on top of everything else, is to ask for something they were never prepared for and were never given the means to do. When they fall short, it is the system that has failed them and worst casr their attention is away from their actual job. The other services learned the habits of Whitehall earlier and used them well, and for good reasons of their own. The Navy’s historic strength lay elsewhere, in the quality of its seamanship and training. Nobody should wish to trade one for the other.

Consider Lord Horatio Nelson(). It is often said that he would have been “all over social media” had he lived today. I doubt it. If he had survived Trafalgar, the natural next step for the nation’s most famous sailor would not have been First Sea Lord but First Lord of the Admiralty, a political appointment, because that was the post from which a figure of that standing could speak for the service in Parliament and Cabinet without the constraints that bind a serving officer. His celebrity would have been put to work through the institution. Today’s defence organisation of course would not allow it for having a free-thinking forum of professionals, something better guarded under the independent departments of state for the services,

The campaigns that did not work

To be a little more blunt, if public relations were the answer, the last forty years should have produced an answer. They have not. Since the late 1980s there has been no shortage of tactics: awareness drives, public engagement, appeals to history, calls for new bodies to champion the service. By the measure that matters, whether government understands what the Navy is for and what it makes possible, the situation has not improved in fact its got worse in many nations which is a damning indictment across the board of a pile of groups and individuals involved.

This is not for lack of talent or goodwill. A campaign is a project with a beginning and an end, but the education of a state is not. It requires a continuing system, one that survives changes of government, of minister and of fashion and military appointments.

Elsewhere, appeals to heritage face the same limit. Naval history can inspire interest as can museums, but nostalgia does little to establish a contemporary requirement. History does more demanding work when it explains how maritime power served national purposes, which conditions made that possible and how those relationships bear on present choices. Celebrating achievement without examining its foundations leaves that value largely unused and plenty of nations have examples of good museums are disjointed about telling the story of seapower. A good example could be warnings about too few ships or assets, they need an account of what the state will be unable to secure and why that matters to its nations purposes. Otherwise, audiences hear an institution asking for resources in a familiar contest with other institutions. The message rallies the convinced and leaves untouched the assumptions through which government decides what the Navy is for.

This is why calls for better naval public relations become circular. Officers and advocates are asked to explain the Navy’s value, often when a capability is already threatened or even a decision-made. They respond with accounts of what the fleet does, warnings about cuts and appeals to professional achievement. The debate is conducted as a contest over the needs of a service, and the prior question, what the country requires from the sea and what follows for national strategy, never receives comparable examination come explanation.

It becomes akin to self fulfilling prophecy: A navy under strain has less capacity to be visible. It deploys more, with fewer people and ships, and has less to spare for ceremonial presence or public engagement. A navy that cannot be seen is a harder case to fund. The decline feeds on itself while public relations can slow this cycle few recognise it cannot reverse it.

What happened when the Admiralty went

In 1964 the Admiralty, an independent deprtment of state, was abolished and absorbed into a unified Ministry of Defence. In the United States, the Department of the Navy faced a near similar fate, however its naval officers managed to offer better resistance due to the make-up of the American government to retain better independence from army centralised stype power. Ultimately the institution that had done the explaining went with it, along with the civilian positions, the relationships and the accumulated habit of translating naval experience into advice for ministers. The responsibility did not vanish. It moved, quietly, onto the people least equipped to carry it: serving officers and their press offices.

Few people grasp the scale of what this was. It was not the closing of a department or the loss of some press officers. It was a reset in how the British state relates to seapower: the removal of the institution that connected maritime experience to national strategy, and with it the people, the authority and the habit of mind that kept the sea in the reasoning of government. I set out the scale of that reset in “The Seapower Charter of the Land Has Been Deconstructed”. Britain built a relationship between the sea, government, commerce, finance, scholarship and society over generations. Naval force was one instrument of that larger undertaking, and the loss of its institutional and intellectual foundations cannot be measured by reductions in fleet strength.

The Royal Navy survived, which has helped disguise how much of the surrounding system did not. Familiar names, uniforms, traditions and professional competence encourage the assumption that the historic relationship between the service and the state remains available to be revived through investment. Possessing a Royal Navy does not establish that Britain still organises itself as a seapower. More ships might restore essential capabilities without rebuilding the political and educational arrangements that give them coherent national direction. Much commentary still assumes that system is intact and merely underfunded, and prescribes more ships and better messaging accordingly. That is a prescription for a patient whose condition has not been identified.

Seen this way, the modern naval communications effort is easier to understand. It is a service that has inherited a job built for an institution that no longer exists. The best-run social media account in Whitehall cannot do what a First Lord, a Secretary and a network of historians once did together. Nobody should be surprised that the substitute has failed.

What a navy can actually do

None of this makes public engagement dispensable: Recruitment matters, pride and patriotism properly understood, matters. Sailors notice when their service is honoured at a national event, and when it is absent while universities, businesses and public debate help form future decision-makers. Done modestly and honestly, this is worthwhile work.

But it should be done knowing what it is. Public relations aimed at the public can make a navy known. It cannot make seapower understood by the state, and the second is the one that determines whether the navy is funded, organised and used well. For a navy, the public come second.

Nor should educating government mean insulating naval preferences from challenge. An informed state must be able to scrutinise the service’s claims, compare alternatives and test whether proposed capabilities serve the purposes advanced for them. The object is a government capable of reasoning to choose to go to the sea and be a seapower, including questioning the advice offered in its name.

The harder work is however institutional. It means asking who in government is responsible for understanding the sea and the forces that protect national interests there. It means asking where that knowledge is preserved (coporate memory), who has the standing to put it in front of ministers, and who is paid, protected and invited to do it. It means a civilian capacity: scholars, officials and political leaders who can speak the language of the people who decide, in the way the Admiralty’s civilians once did. And it means taking seriously the education of the next generation of strategists in civilian universities, where the independence to challenge assumptions can still be found. A renamed headquarters or a larger communications budget would leave most of that untouched.

In conclusion, Navies have not failed at public relations because they are shy, or old-fashioned, or insufficiently attentive to hashtags. They have failed because the thing they are asked to do was never theirs to do or in the American case, one that required a measured response from its naval family of personnel, past and presnet. For centuries Britain’s understanding of the sea was a civilian responsibility, carried out by an institution designed for the task. When that institution was dismantled, the work was handed to a profession whose training, tenure and obligations were never built for it.

The Silent Service could afford its silence while someone else was speaking on its behalf. Without that someone, silence has been a key factor in its deconstruction.

That is the real question behind every new communications campaign. It is not how the Navy should talk about itself. It is who maintains the relationship between the state and seapower, and who is going to speak for the sea. Answering it in Britain means admitting how far the previous relationship has been dismantled. Invoking ‘seablindness’ and demanding better publicity only postpone that reckoning, one I suspect has come for the Royal Navy, and other navies are walking a tightrope over.

Further reading

• James W. E. Smith, “The Seapower Charter of the Land Has Been Deconstructed”, (22 October 2026.

• James W. E. Smith, “What is the ‘Art of Admiralty’?” 15 May 2023

• James W. E. Smith, “Seablindness’ and the Royal Navy Today”, 19 February 2024.

• James W. E. Smith, “Why Navies Stop Being Heard”, 22 September, 2026.

• James W. E. Smith, Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification, PhD thesis, King’s College London (2021).

• Matthew Johnson, “The Liberal Party and the Navy League in Britain before the Great War”, Twentieth Century British History 22, no. 2 (2011), 137–163.

• “No more parades? Navy Weeks, naval theatre and navalism, 1927–38”, Historical Research (2023).

• US Navy Office of Community Outreach: Navy Weeks and American Connections and other outreach programmes.

Prussian Solider Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) is among the most influential figures in the history of strategic thought, reaching almost ‘god like status’ upon some. The saner strategic mind has studied his work in better detail then to believe that. His On War remains a cornerstone of military education, and his insistence that war must be understood in relation to political purpose is as important today as it was in the nineteenth century. Yet, there is a curious imbalance in how we remember the great strategic thinkers. Clausewitz is treated as a universal authority, while English historian and philosopher of seapower Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922), arguably the thinker who took the study of strategy further, is still too often confined to the specialist world of naval warfare.

Recently, I argued that Corbett ultimately bests Clausewitz, and that the reason is scope. That deserves more than the paragraph I gave it in my paper about ‘What it means to be a Corbettian’. This is not an attempt to diminish Clausewitz or to suggest that his insights into war have ceased to matter. Corbett was himself a student to Clausewitz’s work, and their intellectual relationship is better understood through continuity than any form of opposition. Both used the best approach to understanding war and conflict: a sophisticated methodology to analyse experience. But Corbett addressed a larger problem: how a nation thinks about and exercises its power, not only in war but in peace, and not merely through military force but through the relationships between politics, geography, commerce, finance, diplomacy, communications, institutions and national interests.

That distinction may become increasingly important. Indeed, I suspect that the future of strategy will be more Corbettian than Clausewitzian, particularly in the era of Seabed to Space events, let alone conflict, or even war, even if those responsible for making it do not recognise the difference.

Start with what the two men share: both insisted that war is an instrument of politics and must be judged by the purposes it serves. Both distrusted formulas, ignored false prophets, technological saints, and system-builders. They both built their thinking from the study of experience rather than deduction from first principles. Corbett read Clausewitz closely and admired him, and he can fairly be read as Britain’s answer to the Prussian, building on his insight rather than rejecting it. The red flag for everyone is spotting the guesswork about the future of war and how little evidence it rests upon. It is merely there to flatters whoever is making it.

The clearest case is limited war. Late in his life, in a note dated 10 July 1827, Clausewitz recognised that his work had not done justice to a distinction he now saw as fundamental. Some wars aim to overthrow the enemy completely. Others pursue limited aims, such as seizing a frontier province to keep or to bargain with. He intended to revise the whole of On War around that distinction, and died before he could. What reached his readers was a book whose most developed parts still leaned towards the war of overthrow, the decisive battle and the destruction of the enemy’s forces.

Corbett took up the idea Clausewitz had left unfinished and made it workable. In Some Principles of Maritime Strategy(1911) he asked a question Clausewitz never fully answered: how can a state actually wage a war of limited aims, and keep it limited? His answer was what could not be ignored: geography. A continental power fighting a limited war can always be drawn into an unlimited one, because its enemy can march across the border and raise the stakes. A maritime power or island nation is different. If the sea separates it from the object in dispute, it can isolate that object, take it and hold it, while denying the enemy the means of escalation. Limited war, Corbett argued, is only permanently possible to island powers, or between powers separated by the sea. That is not a footnote to Clausewitz. It turns his late insight into a theory of how a particular kind of state can achieve its aims without staking its existence.

The dominance of Clausewitz reflects more than the quality of his work. It also reflects the intellectual and institutional circumstances through which modern strategy came to be understood. The development of professional armies, continental military establishments (unified defence departments) and their systems of education encouraged the study of strategy through the problems of war, campaigns and the application of force. Military history became increasingly concerned with explaining battles and operations, while strategy itself was often treated as an extension of military activity.

The reasons for this are explainable: continental states confronted borders that hostile armies could cross, territories that could be occupied and political settlements that might depend on the outcome of campaigns. The Prussian experience that informed Clausewitz was profoundly shaped by these circumstances. His achievement was to recognise that even the most successful military action could not be understood apart from political purpose. War had its own characteristics, but it was never independent of the state and the objectives for which it was fought.

Yet, Clausewitz’s intellectual achievement should not be confused with the habits of the continental military tradition that subsequently claimed him. A thinker who insisted on the political character of war could still become an authority within institutions whose attention was overwhelmingly directed towards preparing for and conducting it. The danger lay not necessarily in Clausewitz’s argument, but in the narrowing of strategy that accompanied its institutional inheritance. Corbett saw and experienced this risk in the 1910s and 1920s.

That inheritance was renewed at a decisive moment. The translation by Michael Howard (1922-2019) and Peter Paret (1924-2020), both continental land think Prussians (minded), published in 1976, made On War accessible to a new generation.1 American professional military education, rebuilding its thinking after Vietnam, adopted Clausewitz as the foundation of strategic study, and Harry Summers’ On Strategy (1982) used him to explain what had gone wrong. Corbett had no such sponsors. In the interwar years, British army solider, Basil Liddell Hart (1895*1970) ‘borrowed’ his ideas, if not defrauding them, repackaged them as the “British way in warfare” and diminished Corbett in the process. The institutions that had sustained Corbett’s thinking weakened, to the near point of dispareance. Clausewitz was taught because institutions chose to teach him. Corbett faded because the institutions that would have encouraged education of his work were deconstructed.

Corbett approached the problem of strategy from another direction. He was a civilian historian working within the circumstances of a seapowert state. Britain’s security and prosperity depended on relationships extending far beyond its shores. Its geography, resources, commerce, overseas interests and communications imposed demands that could not be met simply by possessing a powerful army or winning battles. The nation had to understand what it depended on, what it sought to achieve, which interests mattered most and how limited resources could be used to secure them.

For such a state, military force was indispensable, but it was not the whole of strategy. A fleet mean’t little apart from the national interests it served. Trade, finance, diplomacy, alliances, blockade and the movement of armies all formed part of one connected strategic problem. Corbett insisted that the sea mattered through its effects ashore, and that maritime power worked by controlling communications: the lines along which trade, supplies, people and armies moved. Victory in battle might be desirable, but it was neither the only means of achieving political objectives nor necessarily the most important. He understood, too, that command of the sea is normally in dispute rather than won once and for all.

This is why Corbett should not be understood simply as a naval equivalent of Clausewitz. Clausewitz wrote about war: its nature, its friction, its passions, its relationship to politics. Corbett’s subject was not merely how to fight at sea, but how a state uses force alongside trade, blockade, finance, diplomacy and alliances, with war as one instrument among several. That is national strategy, and it is the subject governments have to manage. Corbett was, and his ultimate work been about national strategy making than the operational-doctrinal nature of operations.

There is a further distinction: strategy does not begin when war breaks out, nor does it end when the fighting stops. Governments must continually secure their interests, maintain relationships, preserve prosperity, allocate resources and prevent the circumstances in which force becomes necessary. Peace is not simply an interval between wars and it’s why Corbett’s chosen method of study was navies, rather than armies (or later air forces). Navies have tasks to maintain the peace and are busy in peace time, their use different to the deployment of troops or aircraft. It is the principal condition that strategy should seek to preserve, and its maintenance requires sustained political judgement.

This is where the wider maritime tradition becomes particularly important. The oceans have never been exclusively military environments. They have been the means through which societies explored, traded, communicated, competed, accumulated knowledge and built relationships with distant peoples and places. Naval power emerged within that larger maritime world and cannot be understood apart from it. A state might possess formidable warships and still fail to exercise seapower effectively, because possessing military capabilities is not the same as using national power intelligently.

The distinction is not confined to the sea. It applies wherever governments mistake the acquisition of capabilities for the existence of strategy. Many have grown used to measuring military strength through inventories, budgets, technological sophistication and organisational structures. These things matter, but they do not answer the first strategic question: what is the nation trying to achieve? Without that understanding, the most impressive collection of capabilities (and technologies) may amount to little more than an expensive assortment of means without a coherent purpose.

Corbett’s advantage, however, does not rest solely on the breadth of his subject. It also lies in how he approached the problem of strategic understanding. As I’ve set out time and again, his method was grounded in the sophisticated analysis of historical experience. Corbett examined the circumstances in which governments made decisions, the alternatives available to them, the relationship between political objectives and military possibilities, and why particular combinations of instruments succeeded or failed. He was not searching for convenient historical parallels or compiling a catalogue of victories from which commanders could extract simple lessons. He was developing strategic judgement through the careful study of experience. The aim, is to let theory follow experience, but modern times shows theory protected from evidence can gain institutional authority while losing explanatory power.

Clausewitz, too, was a serious student of history, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise. But Corbett’s particular achievement was to connect historical scholarship with a wider programme of national strategic education. His work was not intended simply to provide a theory for military professionals. It was directed at improving the capacity of a state to understand its circumstances and act intelligently within them.

That distinction has been increasingly neglected. Modern strategic debate frequently substitutes speculation (theory) for experience, technological prediction for historical understanding and fashionable concepts for careful analysis. Every generation announces some development that will supposedly transform the nature of strategy itself. Airpower, nuclear weapons, precision weapons, information technology, stealth, and now artificial intelligence and space have all encouraged versions of this temptation. Yet a transformation in the instruments available to a state does not necessarily transform the underlying problems of political purpose, geography, resources, human judgement and the use of power. The more rapidly technology changes, the greater the temptation to dismiss the past as irrelevant. Corbett’s method suggests the opposite. Novel circumstances make historical understanding more valuable, provided we understand what history can and cannot tell us.

There is another dimension to Corbett’s achievement that is often overlooked: institutions. Corbett did not work as an isolated intellectual producing theories for posterity. He worked within a network connecting historical scholarship, professional military education, the Admiralty, naval officers, civil servants and political decision-makers. His position as a civilian historian mattered. He could undertake sustained research, challenge professional assumptions and carry strategic ideas beyond the boundaries of the naval service. His value lay partly in the combination of his independence and his proximity to those responsible for national decisions. It showed that the capacity to think strategically must be cultivated and preserved. Experience does not automatically become understanding, and understanding does not automatically influence policy.

Here lies one of the great tragedies of Corbett’s legacy, and a curious parallel with Clausewitz. Both men left their great works unfinished. Marie von Clausewitz (1779-1836) published On War from her husband’s drafts in 1832, with the revision he had planned in 1827 incomplete. Corbett intended Some Principles as a living document to be revised in light of the First World War, and he never revised it and he had other works in the pipeline. Clausewitz’s incompleteness has been treated as profundity, to be interpreted endlessly by devoted scholars. Corbett’s was treated as obscurity. His ideas survived through a small number of followers until Bryan Ranft (1917-2001) and, above all, Andrew Lambert recovered his standing and showed the significance of his achievement.

But restoring Corbett’s reputation is not the same as restoring the capacity for strategic thought his work was meant to serve. A nation can teach Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, quote its arguments and still fail to understand what made them valuable: the United States, dominated by Prussian army style thinking in an monolithic Pentagon is a prime example of this. Corbett was not offering principles to be applied mechanically. He was showing how historical experience could become strategic understanding, and how that understanding could inform the decisions of government. My own work on the Admiralty, national strategy and defence unification keeps returning to this problem. Organisational reform does not necessarily produce strategic improvement, and the weakening of institutions can remove forms of knowledge and judgement that are hard to recover.

This is why the future may increasingly favour Corbett. The world is becoming more interconnected, from seabed to space, but the intellectual habits through which governments understand strategy have not always kept pace. National security and prosperity now depend on maritime trade, undersea communications, energy systems, international finance, orbital infrastructure, technological supply chains and political relationships that cross borders and military jurisdictions. These dependencies cannot be understood solely through the prospect of armed conflict, even though their disruption may become a cause or instrument of war. The defining contests of our time are not wars of overthrow settled by battle. They are long competitions over access, communications and economic advantage, conducted largely below the threshold of war. Those are Corbett’s subjects.

None of this makes Clausewitz obsolete, and a fair argument has to say what he still does better. His account of friction, chance and the fog of war has no equal. His trinity of passion, chance and reason captures something about war that Corbett need not mention rather than examined. His insistence that war has its own grammar, though not its own logic, remains the best short statement of the relationship between fighting and politics. Corbett relied on all of this. He did not replace Clausewitz; he placed him inside a larger frame. Nor has continental warfare disappeared. Territorial conquest, armies and the political consequences of military violence remain central concerns, as contemporary conflicts make painfully clear. None of this is hostility to theory but concepts make relationships intelligible. The question is only which comes first.

But a theory of war, however profound, cannot by itself supply a complete account of national strategy. Nor should the requirements of war determine the limits of what governments understand strategy to be.

The distinction becomes plainer when we look beyond the familiar boundaries of national defence. Space is a revealing example. It is already essential to communications, navigation, science, commerce, intelligence and the functioning of modern societies. Its significance will not be determined solely by the weapons deployed there or by the military organisations responsible for particular capabilities. The maritime tradition offers a substantial body of experience through which to begin examining it. That does not mean space is simply another ocean, or that the principles of naval warfare can be transferred uncritically into orbit. It means that societies have confronted before the challenge of sustaining activity across environments that transformed their communications, economies and relationships with one another. Corbett’s method asks us to examine that experience before declaring every problem in a new environment unprecedented, and to understand the whole before concentrating on its military parts.

Perhaps the most important implication is that the future of strategy cannot belong exclusively to military professionals. The responsibilities of national strategy extend across governments and societies. Political leaders, civil servants, historians, economists, scientists, industrialists and military officers all hold knowledge that must contribute to a coherent understanding of national interests. The problem is not simply assembling these people around a table. It is building the intellectual and institutional means through which their knowledge can inform strategic judgement. That was part of Corbett’s unfinished work, and it remains unfinished today.

To say that Corbett will best Clausewitz is therefore not to predict that one famous book will replace another on the reading lists of military colleges. Nor is it to suggest that maritime strategy should become a new orthodoxy. It is to suggest that the demands of the future may increasingly vindicate a broader conception of strategic thought: one in which war is understood within the continuing responsibilities of the state, military power within the larger exercise of national power, and historical experience as an essential foundation of political judgement.

Clausewitz remains one of the great interpreters of war. Corbett addressed a larger question: how a nation understands its place in the world, and thinks and acts strategically to secure its interests in war and peace. The intellectual history of strategy has long given Clausewitz the greater prominence. But prominence is not the same as completeness, and the reputation of a thinker is not necessarily a measure of the future usefulness of his work.

Unlike Clausewitz, whose underlying culture encouraged rigidity, students may enjoy another speculation of Corbett. He was a rebel: he was willing to question, to challenge and if the the evidence supports it, change his views. Today, I’d speculate, as a fellow rebel, he would have raised an eyebrow of much of the modern defence terminology, classifying them as nothing bar fluster and imagination. Elsewhere, quaint ideas of the ‘Freedom of the Seas’ and ‘Sea Control’ he would have been willing to revisit and evolve understanding of, if not abolish it. But most of all, he would have vocal about the state of national strategies, where domain warfare doctrine has overridden the national good and mass defence organisations have entirely lost their direction and purpose. The overriding message: advantage in action, advantage intellectually, will the best building blocks for the future of strategic thought and action. But a word of caution: you cannot educate those who do not want to be educated.

Behind the two men lie two schools of strategic thought, and the choice between them is the real stake in this argument. The first is continental. It grew from the experience of land powers, was carried forward by armies and later by the air forces that grew out of them, and is at its strongest in the tactical and operational realm, where problems are bounded and success can be measured in battles won and targets struck. The second is maritime. It grew from the experience of states that lived by the sea, and it sees the world as an interconnected whole of trade, communications, finance, alliances and power, in peace as much as in war. That view now extends from the seabed to space. Every nation draws on both, and needs both. The question is which frames the other. When the continental school sets the limits of strategy, nations become very good at fighting battles and very poor at knowing why, and that has repeatedly ended in disaster. When the maritime school frames the whole, and operational excellence serves within it, the two become a strength no rival can easily match. The interconnected world we now live in is pressing that choice on every government, whether it recognises it or not.

Clausewitz helped us understand war. Corbett may yet prove more important in helping us understand the wider business of strategy. And if the future demands that wider understanding, then Corbett’s greatest contribution to strategic thought may still lie ahead of us.

“When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, arose from out the azure main, this was the charter of the land.” So began the eighteenth-century patriotic conception immortalised in ‘Rule, Britannia!’by Thomas Arne (1710-1778). Its famous refrain was more than an injunction to possess warships. It identified the sea to national identity, political independence and the purposes of the state. Although the song was a poetic charter, not a constitutional document; it served as a rally call to Britain to never forget what being an island state meant. The words captured a strategic conviction that successive generations had learned, through experience, to understand: Britain’s circumstances required it to think and act through the maritime environment.

Today that charter has been deconstructed. Not the song, nor the geography of the British Isles, but the accumulated political, intellectual, institutional and social relationship through which Britain became a seapower. A construct of social, economic, financial and political endeavor. Britain was the last seapower state, that took centuries to construct but its disappearance has been far easier to mistake for an ordinary decline in naval strength.

For decades, the familiar complaints have become ritualistic: too few frigates and destroyers, unavailable submarines, inadequate ammunition, overstretched personnel, defective procurement and governments unwilling to pay for the defence they proclaim. Endless reviews promise to correct mounting and old failures while new technologies act like false prophets to promise that fewer ships and fewer people will somehow achieve more. Yet the same questions return, and the strategic position worsens.

There is a convenient explanation for all this: seablindness. Politicians do not understand the sea; civil servants do not understand seapower; the public has forgotten its maritime inheritance. The word is repeated so frequently that it has become an article of faith among naval commentators. But after decades of repetition, seablindness has become something rather more comfortable than an explanation. It has become an excuse, a burying of heads in the sand to hide failure by many.

Seablindness describes a condition. It does not explain how the condition was produced, why it persisted, or why those who continually invoke it have proved unable to correct it. To blame everyone outside the naval profession for failing to understand the sea is to excuse those who claim to understand it from examining their own failures. Above all, it evades the question of what happened to the institutions that once developed, preserved and communicated maritime strategic knowledge to government.

Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of contemporary naval debate is the persistence of a collective illusion. Many commentators, including some experienced Royal Navy veterans, continue to discuss Britain’s maritime future as though the historic relationship between the state, seapower and the Navy remains intact or recoverable. Their prescriptions assume that a diminished fleet can be repaired and the former system will resume functioning. More ships, better funding, smarter technology, improved doctrine: these may be necessary, but they are not an answer to the disappearance of the system that once gave naval power its national strategic meaning. It is national strategy that matters.

This is not a dismissal of professional service or operational expertise. It is a distinction between knowing how a navy works and understanding how a seapower state works. A distinguished naval career does not automatically confer mastery of the wider political, economic, cultural and institutional history of seapower. Nor does a scholar’s familiarity with naval battles necessarily amount to an understanding of naval warfare.

The delusion is not that Britain still possesses a Royal Navy. It is that possessing a Royal Navy means Britain still possesses the maritime strategic system that once sustained it. Too many are attempting to repair the surviving instrument of a system whose disappearance they have yet to acknowledge or unwilling to because to admit it, reveals the level of failure and change: making the mountain taller and steeper to climb than many imagine.

First is to acknowledge that Britain did not become a seapower merely because it was surrounded by oceans and seas. Geography supplied opportunities, vulnerabilities and constraints; it did not determine how political leaders would respond. Island circumstances made maritime choices especially compelling, whereas continental powers faced different combinations of requirements. But the choice to organise national life around the maritime environment remained a choice, repeatedly made, contested and renewed.

The Council of the Marine established under Henry VIII in 1546 marked an important stage in the development of the institutions that became the Admiralty. Across the centuries, maritime strategy came to connect naval force with commerce, finance, shipbuilding, ports, diplomacy, scientific knowledge, overseas relationships, law, communications and political independence. Civilian enterprise was not an accessory to a naval project. The navy was one instrument within a much larger national undertaking.

That system was neither seamless nor uncomplicated. The history of British seapower includes war, empire, trade, security and constitutional liberty. It also includes institutional rivalries, strategic errors and periods of acute vulnerability. Recognising these realities makes the history more useful, not less. The point is not that Britain once possessed an ideal maritime order, but that it deliberately developed a capacity to understand its circumstances and organise resources accordingly.

To remind, naval power concerns the development and employment of naval forces. Maritime strategy concerns the state’s relationship with the sea in its full political, economic, scientific, diplomatic and military dimensions. Seapower emerges from the interaction of those dimensions, not from a fleet list. A country can retain capable ships long after it has ceased to organise itself as a seapower.

Professor Andrew Lambert’s scholarship, notably Seapower States, has been particularly important in explaining that seapowers are consciously constructed political and cultural entities: not automatic gifts of geography and something to be maintained. Their existence cannot be guaranteed by the achievements of ancestors. A state cannot remain a seapower simply because previous generations understood the sea. Alongside Lambert, my own research into the deconstruction of the seapower state has sought to recover a distinction that remains insufficiently understood, even among those who profess expertise in naval affairs: a navy is not synonymous with seapower, and seapower is not synonymous with the possession of warships. Remarkably few contemporary commentators appear willing to follow that distinction through to its consequences for Britain today.

This is not a claim that scholarship should be immune from challenge, nor that maritime understanding belongs to a select few. Quite the opposite: the distinction matters because it must be taught, tested and understood well beyond the naval profession. But it cannot be recovered while those charged with explaining the sea continue to mistake its military instrument for the much larger strategic system that sustained it.

Second, the Admiralty’s significance is too often reduced to administering ships, sailors, expenditure and naval operations. These were essential responsibilities, but its larger historical function lay in connecting maritime experience to national decision-making. Through political leadership, civilian officials, professional expertise, historical records and relationships across government, it helped translate maritime circumstances into knowledge that ministers could use.

Much of that work was civilian. The permanent institution could outlast individual officers and ministers; it could preserve experience, connect maritime commerce and naval requirements to the wider state, and explain why the sea mattered before a crisis made the explanation urgent. Naval officers could concentrate on the demanding profession of naval warfare while others sustained the political and intellectual work of ensuring that government understood the wider purpose.

I have described this as the art of Admiralty: the continuing capacity to develop, preserve, challenge and communicate maritime strategic knowledge so that a state can think about strategy and act strategically. It was not a guarantee of wisdom, and the historical Admiralty was not beyond criticism. Its importance lay in the function it performed, not the sanctity of its name or its buildings.

In 1964 the independent Admiralty disappeared into the unified Ministry of Defence. The familiar justification was that modern defence required centralisation, cooperation and joint operations. But cooperation is not amalgamation, and administrative unity is not intellectual unity. The transfer of responsibilities on an organisation chart does not ensure that the authority, institutional memory, relationships and strategic judgement attached to those responsibilities survive.

The question is not whether the armed services should cooperate, they should, and they did so well without the MoD, it is whether the organisation of defence preserves the different kinds of knowledge required to determine national strategy. Britain’s maritime experience had once possessed an authoritative route to government. Its removal changed more than departmental administration; it changed who could speak, with what authority, and which questions were likely to reach political decision-makers.

The Royal Navy may have survived the Admiralty. That fact has encouraged a misleading assumption that the essential relationship between navy and state survived too. An institution may retain its operational instrument while losing the means through which its strategic purpose is understood. In that sense the survival of the Royal Navy has helped conceal the disappearance of something larger.

Third relates to the loss of Corbettian Strategic thought because the institutional story is only half the explanation. Britain has also progressively weakened the intellectual environments capable of recognising what was being lost. The disappearance of the Admiralty’s educational function coincided with a longer retreat from the historical study of national strategy and a narrowing of the places in which genuinely independent strategic thought could flourish.

Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922) was not merely a naval theorist offering propositions about command of the sea or limited war. His larger achievement was a method: the sophisticated analysis of historical experience to understand how states connect political purposes, geography, commerce, finance, diplomacy and military force. He began with the circumstances and purposes of the nation, not with an inventory of ships. His first question was not simply how many, but for what?

John Knox Laughton (1830-1915) had helped establish the rigorous historical study of naval affairs; Corbett developed its value for strategic judgement. Both understood that the education of officers was insufficient if the state itself remained unable to understand maritime affairs. Civilian scholarship mattered precisely because it could examine assumptions that military institutions might prefer to leave undisturbed.

The subsequent marginalisation of this intellectual tradition was not inevitable. Corbett died in 1922 before he could finish his work, and his thinking was not only neglected but taken. Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) tinkered with Corbett’s ideas, claimed them as his own in the “British way in warfare”, and disparaged Corbett in the process. That happened early, in the interwar years, when Corbett most needed defenders. Sir Michael Howard (1922-2019) later completed the process, and with it the erosion of historical understanding of the sea’s influence upon the state. Interpretations of Britain’s strategic past increasingly emphasised continental commitments and the requirements of modern military organisation, and accounts of defence unification came to appear as inevitable progress rather than contested political and institutional choices.

Meanwhile, civilian universities, historical scholarship and independent forums for strategic study have faced pressures that make the patient reconstruction of historical experience increasingly difficult. Professional military education remains indispensable, but education delivered within a defence establishment can reproduce the assumptions or agendas of the organisation it serves. A curriculum may teach officers to operate expertly inside a system without equipping them to question why the system exists in its present form, invoking all sorts of issues related to how they view war around them, not least a battle between strategy and operational/tactical schools of thought, aka land think versus maritime think.

Invoking Corbett’s name is no substitute for thinking in a Corbettian manner. To be Corbettian is not simply to prefer one naval doctrine, celebrate maritime communications or reject decisive battle. It is to place military force within the whole of national strategy; to test theories against historical evidence; and to permit uncomfortable conclusions about the institutions that claim to possess strategic wisdom.1

Lambert has played a vital part in recovering Corbett’s intellectual stature. Yet, recovering the reputation of a great strategist is not the same as rebuilding the institutions capable of producing and sustaining that kind of thought. Britain have not simply lost the Admiralty’s capacity to educate the state. We have weakened the places, traditions and habits of inquiry capable of educating those who might perform that function today. I know, I tried to rebuild them at King’s College London to face stiff resistance even from quarters I least expected.

Vitally, a state that ceases to cultivate independent strategic thought should not be surprised when its institutions lose the capacity to think about strategy and then act strategically.

Fourth, this brings us back to seablindness and to an uncomfortable double failure. You cannot educate a state about something you have ceased adequately to understand yourself. Equally, you cannot educate those who do not wish to be educated. Neither failure is confined to politicians, officials or the public. Both can be found among the naval and military profession, its veterans, scholars and its most enthusiastic supporters.

Some who have spent careers defending the Royal Navy remain invested in explanations that assume the survival of the historical seapower state. They can recognise the loss of ships but resist evidence that the political and institutional settlement giving those ships their meaning has been dismantled because familiar expertise becomes a barrier to reconsideration.

The education of a seapower was never supposed to be a lecture delivered by an enlightened Navy to an ignorant nation. It was a continuing exchange between government, commerce, society, scholarship and the naval profession, in which all parties could be corrected by evidence and experience. Corbett himself faced professional resistance when his historical judgements challenged cherished naval assumptions. That tension was part of the value of independent scholarship, not an argument against it.

But the irony is profound: those who insist that politicians must learn to understand seapower may themselves be unwilling to reconsider what seapower means. Seablindness becomes a refuge because it locates ignorance elsewhere. The more frequently it is invoked without historical examination, the more effectively it conceals the failure of the supposed educators as well as the unwillingness of their audience.

This is why yet another campaign to raise naval awareness cannot, by itself, resolve the problem. The missing capacity is not simply publicity. It is an enduring system of strategic education and critical inquiry that reaches the state and remains capable of challenging the naval and military profession itself.

Fifth, we can turn to the events of 2026 made the distinction between possessing naval power and exercising seapower difficult to ignore. Before war began in February, roughly 125 vessels a day passed through the Strait of Hormuz, carrying about a fifth of global crude oil and LNG; by September, traffic had fallen dramatically amid attacks, blockade and insecurity. Around Bab el-Mandeb, the Houthis showed how an actor with nothing resembling a great-power navy could still alter shipping decisions, insurance costs, energy markets and the political calculations of governments. Neither needed to defeat a great fleet in battle to exert maritime influence.

Corbett would have recognised the principle. Command of the sea mattered because it enabled the use of maritime communications, or the denial of their use to an opponent, in pursuit of political purposes. The ships were means, not ends. Their strategic significance depended upon the effects they could produce. What command of the sea and sea control is, or even if it exists is a conversation elsewhere, but the point stands.

For Britain, the lesson arrived in the Channel. Russian warships and state-associated shipping became a recurring presence in Britain’s maritime approaches. A Russian frigate fired warning shots at a civilian yacht in the English Channel before escorting a shadow-fleet tanker through the waters that helped define the English state and gave birth to the modern navy. The Royal Navy shadowed and watched, and its sailors performed professionally. The question was what the circumstances requiring their efforts revealed about the state behind them. I set out the three chokepoints side by side in “2026: The Year Seapower Went Missing”.2

Yet much commentary returned to procurement, fleet numbers and the latest technological promises. Autonomous systems, drones and artificial intelligence may change naval operations profoundly. They cannot decide national purposes, recreate lost institutional knowledge or make the state understand why maritime communications matter. A so-called hybrid navy is not a substitute for a maritime strategy; nor does the promise of future capability excuse the absence of adequate means in the present.

The danger is that scarce, costly warships become assets too precious to risk for the protection of the maritime communications they exist to secure. Risk must always be judged carefully, but when preservation of the instrument displaces the purpose, the strategic reasoning has been inverted.

2026 did not create Britain’s maritime predicament. It exposed the accumulated consequences of decisions taken across generations. The Channel had not changed: Britain had. Behind it lurked something bigger that seapower and naval power were increasingly understood differently by nations and few towards the former.

Ultimately, all good things come to an end if they are not maintained. This is not a romantic claim that Britain’s earlier maritime national life should be restored in every detail. Its imperial purposes, technology and historical assumptions cannot be transplanted into the twenty-first century. Nor would simply reopening the Admiralty automatically recover the functions that once made it valuable. Although the author admits, it sounds better than ‘Ministry of Defence’, as words have meaning and can provide direction.

The requirement is more fundamental: to reconsider how Britain understands its circumstances, defines national purposes, organises defence and cultivates the strategic knowledge on which political judgement depends. That requires examining the assumptions of the Ministry of Defence as readily as those of the Royal Navy. No department, command or armed service should be beyond reconsideration. The loyalty must be to national strategy, not to the preservation of inherited organisational arrangements.

This is because a maritime state is not merely a nation with a navy or even the nation and the navy. It is a state that recognises the sea as central to its political, economic and strategic existence and organises civilian as well as military activity accordingly. That includes commerce, industry, science, infrastructure, law, education, diplomacy and naval force. Britain’s island geography makes that recognition especially urgent, but geography alone will not perform the work of government or education.

The answer therefore cannot be another patch to a system whose foundations have been removed. Rebuilding naval capability may be essential, but it must follow a wider reconsideration of the state, the institutions through which strategic knowledge reaches authority, and the educational culture capable of sustaining independent judgement. A new fleet or even wider defence without that reconstruction risks becoming a more expensive expression of the same intellectual failure. The United States although in different grounds, has people aware that America is walking a tight rope on the same matters and could easily head in direction with its vast naval power to one wholly disconnected from purpose and direction. However, other nations can learn from Britain and avoid the same mistakes to reduce the hole they may have dug for themselves.

The fuller history of how Britain’s national strategy, seapower and navy were progressively deconstructed forms a central case study in my forthcoming book on defence unification, strategic thought and the organisation of the state. It examines the choices, intellectual arguments and institutional changes through which a nation altered its capacity to understand and exercise power. The implications extend well beyond Britain and well beyond the sea. The American experience, in which the Navy Department was drawn into the same unification, sharpens the question and forms the other half of that case study.

As I mentioned in my PhD and forthcoming title: anyone who sets out to create something must accept that it will have to be maintained. Education in the “why” is vital throughout the life of any such endeavour, yet constructed things can always be torn down more easily than they were built. The old adage, that it is easier to destroy than to create, echoes through history, and the Royal Navy and Britain’s understanding of strategy fit it well. Both took centuries to build. Neither needed an enemy to unmake them, only a generation that stopped asking why they existed.

In conclusion, “Rule, Britannia!” told Britons what their country was for. The charter was never a gift of Heaven’s command; it was written, developed through hard experience, maintained at cost and, in our time, deconstructed. The task is not to restore the Royal Navy to a maritime state that no longer exists. It is to decide whether Britain is willing to reconstruct the foundations of a seapower at all or simply say, that the Royal Navy and that part of the pages of history can be assigned to exactly that, history.

On Trafalgar Day (21 October), it is worth considering what Lord Nelson might offer those thinking about the future of military power in space. The technologies would be unfamiliar to him, but questions of leadership, professional responsibility and the purposes of force would give him considerable ground for discussion with his fellow army, marine and naval officers.

Last year,1 I explored Nelson’s continuing relevance to defence and suggested that the maritime experience might offer insight into space. That connection deserves further attention as humanity’s activity beyond Earth expands, bringing with it new forces, institutions and professional traditions.

Nelson’s relevance begins with his willingness to think. Experience gave him a foundation for questioning accepted practice, developing judgement and preparing others to take responsibility. He also understood what battle was for. Trafalgar did not end the war. It secured Britain’s ability to use the sea, and to deny it to others, for years to come. It protected the communications along which trade, armies and information moved across the global commons of the sea, something space is fast becoming. As Sir Julian Corbett, one of the great strategists, reminds us, battle is the means, not the end. Today’s talk of space as the “ultimate high ground” risks mistaking the broadside for everything the broadside protected.

For space forces, this means examining the assumptions through which they understand their purpose. The maritime tradition offers a substantial body of experience on protecting communications, moving people and goods, and relating military strength to peaceful activity. Applying that experience requires careful attention to the physical conditions of space and to the societies whose interests space forces will serve. Those forces will project outward as naval power does, and exert influence back on events on Earth, as maritime power always has over the land. What activities must be protected? What constitutes a favourable strategic position or advantage? How should force contribute to maintaining peace, and what would its use achieve if peace failed?

There is also much to learn from Nelson about leadership and professional judgement. Before Trafalgar he told his captains that if his signals could not be seen or understood, “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy.” That was command by shared intent, built on preparation, training, experience and trust. Space forces will face their own version of the problem. And make no mistake: plenty of false prophets talk about space. Theories built on assumption and guesswork end in disaster. Experience is all we have, and it will guide us in space too. That experience must be brought together through an understanding of strategy, not through the dogma of the culture into which many space forces are being born, that of air power and air forces. Operations will extend farther from Earth, and communications may be delayed, degraded or denied. Institutions will need to decide how authority can be exercised across distance and under uncertain conditions, as ships at sea long have.

This places responsibilities on political and military leaders alike. As I argued last year, America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, drew on his interest in Nelson and on the professional naval counsel he received to understand what unity of effort requires. It requires respect for professional knowledge and care in the exercise of central authority. The organisation of defence shapes the quality of its thinking and must be treated with scrutiny. Space forces will need room to develop expertise while remaining accountable to the political purposes they exist to serve.

Perhaps the most consequential connection concerns humanity. On the morning of Trafalgar, Nelson hoped that “humanity after victory” would be “the predominant feature in the British Fleet.” He recognised obligations that outlasted the fighting: at sea, the environment could go on threatening the lives of those who had just been enemies. As human activity in space grows, and with it dependence on life support, transport and supplies, questions of rescue, assistance and restraint will take on real practical significance. Thinking about these responsibilities belongs within the development of a military profession, whose people must understand both the application of force and the obligations that come with the power entrusted to them.

None of this should surprise us. Humanity named its planet Earth, yet more than seven-tenths of it is ocean: it is Planet Ocean. Nor are oceans unique to our world. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus are thought to hide seas beneath their ice, and the search for life beyond Earth is, in large part, a search for water. The very words give the game away. An astronaut is, literally, a star-sailor, and aeronautics means air-sailing. Nobody has yet volunteered to become an astro-pilot.

History tells the same story. In Jules Verne’s Around the Moon (1870), a naval vessel recovers the returning travellers from the Pacific. A century later, the U.S. Navy did it for real, with USS Hornet greeting the crew of Apollo 11. Naval officers provided more than half of NASA’s early astronauts. The world’s first satellite navigation system, Transit, was built to serve the U.S. Navy’s Polaris submarines, and navigation had been the navy’s business since sailors first steered by the stars. President Kennedy called space a “new ocean”, and science fiction still puts Captains on the Bridge of spaceSHIP. As for the “ultimate high ground”: in orbit there is no up, no down, and no ground. There are, however, lines of communication, and navies have been guarding those for centuries: ready and able.

The scientists got there first. Scientist Carl Sagan described the surface of the Earth as the shore of a cosmic ocean, and a generation of astronomers has since pictured humanity standing at the water’s edge, looking out. The connection is more than poetic. The data that binds the modern world travels overwhelmingly through cables on the seabed and signals from orbit, two halves of a single system of communications, from seabed to space. Protecting that system is not the business of any one service, and here Nelson offers one last lesson. He served national strategy, not merely his service. He lost the sight of his right eye fighting ashore at the siege of Calvi, and his right arm leading an amphibious assault at Tenerife, working alongside the army and marines whenever the task demanded it. Loyalty to the nation came before loyalty to the uniform. Space forces are being born into institutions with strong opinions about who owns what. They would do well to remember that command of the sea was never secured by one service thinking only of itself, and command of space will not be either.

Nelson therefore offers future space forces a starting point for thinking about judgement, institutional culture and service. His relevance depends on our willingness to examine the experience he represents, question it carefully and apply what remains useful to different circumstances.

On this Trafalgar Day, the guiding ambition should remain the one with which I concluded last year: to keep war dead, maintaining peace from a position of strategic strength and ready to defend the people and lifelines on which civilisation depends. As those lifelines extend into space, that responsibility extends with them.

Tonight, raise a glass to the Immortal Memory, and perhaps glance at the stars. They were always a sailor’s business.

The scholar who shaped modern maritime strategy would struggle to find a place in today's universities. That should worry anyone who cares about strategic thought. Arguably some of the great strategic minds would have hated modern academia, or left it.

Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922) is now counted among the great strategic thinkers. Andrew Lambert has placed him in the company of Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831), and a slowly growing number of scholars, officers and officials have asked themselves if they are Corbettian. It is worth asking an uncomfortable question about that revival. If Corbett were starting out today, would the modern university let him become Corbett at all?

Higher Education has its issues, not least they are disinterested in the field that Corbett would have worked in, if not increasingly hostile. Seemingly the mantra of ‘in service to society’ has been replaced by something far less useful. I’ve seen the issues first hand and my faith often shaken in the things I was taught to cherish as vital to the quality of research and scholarship. So, would they employee or create a Corbett? I doubt it, for the reasons say less about Corbett than about the condition of the institutions we now rely on to produce strategic thought.

First is to remember that Corbett was not an academic. He trained as a barrister, practised briefly, and then turned to writing, including, early on, novels. He had private means, which gave him something almost no young scholar has today: time, and freedom from the need to please anyone in order to keep a job. He spent years in the British public record office building a vast body of evidence on centuries of strategy. He lectured to serving Royal Navy officers on the Naval War Course, worked closely with the Admiralty and served as an official historian to His Majesty’s Government. His influence came precisely from that position, independent of any institution’s incentives yet close enough to government to be heard. He was, in the language of today’s job adverts, impossible to place.

Now imagine him applying for a post in todays so called ‘institutions’: PME, Higher education, or otherwise. His work would cross law, history, strategy, finance and policy, which is to say it would fit no single panel and no single department. His great projects took a decade of archival labour before it yielded a manuscript, which is a long time to go without the outputs by which careers are now purely measured. The value of the true researcher degraded. His central purpose, to improve the strategic judgement of the state, would count as “impact” only if it could be documented, evidenced and scored. While his chosen method, the sophisticated analysis of historical experience, belongs to a field that universities are steadily shrinking. Partly because, frankly, many in academia don’t understand it nor are educated to understand it, or they fear the results of what would be produced. A cadre of students heading in different directions, the military amongst them, willing to use their brain to explore questions, challenge assumptions and study practice.

That last point is not rhetoric. In 2024, a Royal Historical Society survey of 66 UK universities found that 39 history departments reported staff cuts, and that 60 per cent had seen academic staffing fall since 2020. Thirty-six per cent had closed one or more degree programmes. The Society’s president warned that history risked becoming the preserve of elite institutions. The pressures have not eased since. More than 5,000 redundancies were announced across over twenty UK institutions in 2025 and 2026, and the Office for Students reported that 36 per cent of English institutions were in deficit, with more expected to follow. When budgets tighten, subjects that cannot show quick returns are the first to be cut, and history, for all its popularity with students, is rarely judged to pay its way.

Within history, the fields Corbett worked in have fared worst. In 2018 Hal Brands and Francis Gavin set out the American evidence in an essay with a title that still stings: “The Historical Profession Is Committing Slow-Motion Suicide”. Diplomatic historians made up 7 per cent of practising historians in 1975 and 3 per cent by 2015. Four decades earlier, 85 per cent of history departments had employed one. By 2015 it was 44 per cent. In one academic year, just three of 572 history jobs advertised through the American Historical Association were in diplomatic or international history. Military and naval history have followed a similar path. Their argument was that the profession had largely done this to itself, by turning inward, specialising ever more narrowly and withdrawing from questions of war, statecraft and policy. Britain is not identical, but the direction of travel is familiar.

Into the space history vacated came theory. It’s apparently more sexy to come up with a theory without evidence, package it nice for out government and miltoiry and they lap it up: quick solutions for people with no time, and some question the effectiveness and efficiency of our military, no wonder if they are being taught to embrace chaos. Strategy and security are now taught and researched largely within international relations and political science, disciplines that prize models, frameworks and general claims over the patient study of particular experience. They do in some circumstances, bring rigour to concepts, test arguments systematically and ask questions historians sometimes avoid. But something important has been lost in the exchange. Strategy is an art, not a science, and the art depends on judgement formed by experience. A theory can be elegant, internally consistent and widely cited while explaining very little about how real governments made real decisions or actually what the practitioner experienced at sea, in the air, on land or even in space. When the study of strategy is dominated by theory, and history is pushed to the margins, the result is not more rigorous strategic thought. It is thinner strategic thought, more confident but far less grounded. Theory protected from evidence can gain institutional authority while losing explanatory power. Corbett, who insisted that history was the final check on any theory, would have seen the danger at once. However on raising his voice, his email inbox would likely explode or he would have been ostracised with a kind of social culture more befitting the class system of old, with people under their breaths saying: “Oh my, what a disturber of the peace.”

The pressure is felt earliest by those starting out. Doctoral students and early-career researchers (post-docs and research fellows) are routinely advised to choose safe topics, to position their work within an established debate, and to avoid challenging the interpretations of the people who will examine them, review their articles and sit on their appointment panels. So what is the point of a forum or a university then? Research that genuinely tests an accepted account, by going back to the archives and asking whether a familiar story is actually true, carries risk, and young scholars are taught to manage risk. So historical myths survive not because the evidence supports them, but because no one has the security to question them. Institutions add their own caution. Departments and centres measure their performance partly by reputation, and reputations are built on established positions or protecting their network of funders and supporters. A challenge to the perceived view can look less like scholarship and more like disloyalty. Seminars and conferences, which should be the open forums where ideas are tested, too often become places where established positions are restated and the awkward question is left unasked. Corbett spent much of his career overturning the comfortable myths of his own service. It is hard to see where a scholar would be encouraged to do the same today. I know, I tried, but that’s a story for another time.

Then there is the machinery by which academic work is judged. Peer review is meant to guarantee quality, and at its best it does. But it is under visible strain. More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023, a record, many of them from mass clean-ups of fraudulent publications and manipulated peer review. Let alone intellectual warfare is a real thing between nations and actually, we often ignore, the governments with access to the best minds, talents, skills and more is going to have an advantage if shove comes to push in conflict and war. Most of the worst cases lie in the sciences rather than the humanities, but the underlying pressures are common to all fields: the demand to publish constantly, too many submissions for too few willing reviewers, and incentives that reward volume over substance. Even where the system works honestly, it tends to reward work that fits established debates and penalise work that crosses disciplinary boundaries or challenges a field’s assumptions. In small fields the problem is sharper. The handful of senior figures who define a subject also review its articles, assess its grant applications and examine its doctorates. Anonymous review gives them the power of gatekeepers without the accountability, while most use it fairly, in a system in which the people with the most invested in an interpretation decide whether a challenge to it is published is not designed to welcome new thinking. This easily extends to PME, think tanks and more. Corbett’s best ideas would have struggled in front of a reviewer committed to the conventional wisdom he was overturning. Let that sink in.

Research assessment adds its own distortions. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework shapes hiring, promotion and departmental survival. Its latest iteration, REF 2029, has been redesigned yet again, with outputs weighted at 55 per cent of the overall assessment. However well intentioned, such systems teach scholars to think in assessment cycles. A book that takes ten years, a career spent bringing history into policy, or an essay that changes how a government thinks but is not easily scored: none of these sits comfortably in the spreadsheet. Can ideas flourish in a system designed above all to measure them? Some do, through the determination of individuals. But they flourish despite the incentives, not because of them and increasingly young people see their futures in the real world than being consumed by a system designed against them, not for the benefit of ‘society.’

Of note, Corbett’s relationship with the military was never easy, and that is part of the lesson. Many naval officers resented a civilian, and a lawyer at that, lecturing them on their own profession. His emphasis on communications and limited aims, rather than the decisive fleet battle, offended officers raised on the opposite creed. The Admiralty was forced to insert a disclaimer into the third volume of his official history of naval operations, published in 1923 shortly after Corbett’s death, distancing itself from his views on seeking battle. Yet, the friction was productive. He was close enough to be heard and independent enough to be uncomfortable, and the navy was better for having to argue with him.

Today the relationship between universities and the armed forces is often worse, and less productive. Parts of academia regard defence as a subject to be kept at arm’s length, and defence research as faintly disreputable. Parts of the military regard academics as slow, theoretical and unaware of operational reality. Each side has some justification, and the result is a gap where Corbett once stood. Officers rarely have the time to become serious historians (military personnel have other things to do and be good at), and historians rarely have the access, encouragement or career incentive to work with the miltiary. Too often the military turns instead to consultants and in-house analysts, who are quicker but rarely independent, and who are seldom paid to say that a cherished assumption is wrong.

The final obstacle is distance. Corbett’s value lay in the combination of independence and proximity. He could tell politicians and Admirals what they did not want to hear, because he did not depend on them, and he was close enough to them that they listened. Universities today often struggle to offer either, the class system is very much alive in it, morphed in new ways. Much academic research is written for other academics, in journals few policymakers read, while research that does reach government is increasingly shaped by funders, think tanks and institutional reputations to be protected. Plus unlike Corbett who knew how to write accessible, the art of English writing so even a complex idea could be understood by the politician or time pressed officer has died. The space Corbett occupied, the independent scholar trusted inside the room, has vanished.

None of this is entirely an argument against universities, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. They still train a few historians, some uphold standards of evidence, protect a degree of independence that few other institutions can (depending on their mood of the day), and house many people doing serious and valuable work––who eventually leave frustrated with issues of academia that really shouldn’t be their concern. Notably, Corbett’s own revival came from within them. Professor Bryan Ranft (1917-2001) and, above all, Professor Andrew Lambert restored him through decades of scholarship that only an academic career could have sustained. The problem therefore is not people: It is the incentives, structures and pressures under which they now work, which make the kind of scholarship Corbett practised harder to begin, harder to sustain and easier to cut.

What, where, whom would let a modern Corbett work? Secure posts for historians in strategy and security, not only in history departments are under pressure. Civilian historians embedded permanently in professional military education, with time to research and the standing to disagree are being pushed out. Routes that let scholars move between archives and government without sacrificing their careers or their independence: vanished. Funding judged by long-term value rather than short-term outputs no longer exists. Meanwhile doctoral training rewards students for testing accepted accounts rather than steering them away from it. Ways of giving new ideas a hearing that do not depend on a single gatekeeper’s approval: reviewers drawn from more than one discipline, editors willing to publish a challenge alongside a response, and genuinely open forums where officers, officials and scholars can argue in public without career penalty. And a willingness within the study of strategy to treat history not as background colour for theory, but as the evidence against which theory must be tested.

These are not new ideas. They describe, more or less, the informal ecosystem in which Corbett himself flourished: the Admiralty, the War Course, the network of officers, officials and scholars who preserved experience and carried it to the people who had to decide. That ecosystem worked largely by accident, and it was easily lost. American’s understand this too, as do Australians, French, Japanese and others, who all are asking the same question: If we want another Corbett, or more importantly: the system to work, a feedback loop of practice, research and education, it will have to be built on purpose.

To conclude: I should be honest about where I stand. I have spent a considerable amount of my life in and around this system, and I know from experience how hard it makes the kind of work Corbett did. I agree with him on what strategy and education needs, and I recognise every one of the obstacles described here, even experienced them first hand. I could say a great deal more about academia, and perhaps one day I will. For now it is enough to say this:

The tragedy is not that Corbett would have hated the modern university. It is that the modern university would probably never have produced him, and we would never have heard of him. We should all worry about what the future of strategic studies looks like.

Nations rarely create new armed services. The United States has done it twice in eighty years: in 1947, when the air force became independent of the army, and in December 2019, when it created the Space Force. These events are rare and rightfully so, they matter because they force open questions that are normally kept firmly shut mostly out of lack of education and equally of where the answers may lead. How many services does a nation need? What should each do? How should they be organised, funded and directed to serve a national strategy?

In 2019, those questions were not asked, while the United States accepted that space needed its own service, they then placed it inside the Department of the Air Force and moved on. It was a decision made to close a debate, not to open one when it should have. Even at the time it was a compromise. The administration’s stated goal had been a separate Department of the Space Force, “separate but equal” to the Air Force, but its request to Congress in March 2019 placed the new service within the Air Force, on the model of the Marine Corps within the Department of the Navy. Arguably, an old score from the 1940s the USAF want to settle with the U.S. Navy. The result is a service that exists because space demanded something new, housed in an institution built for something else just as its own pilots and other services warned during the opening years of the so called ‘space race’. Space did not require a new service grafted onto an existing institution. It required, in fact Space demanded, an institutional arrangement designed for its particular strategic character, and the creation of the Space Force should have prompted a fundamental reappraisal of defence organisation as a whole.

Any honest argument must begin with the Air Force’s record. For six decades its excelled at various parts of America’s military space mission, and every service now depends on, or having worked in conjunction, with what it built: launch, missile warning, communications and navigation. That achievement deserves recognition, and the people who delivered it deserve respect. But that record is exactly why the question matters. Space outgrew the arrangement that nurtured it. The issue is not whether the Air Force did its job well. It is whether any institution built around one domain should be the permanent home of the service built for another. This is an argument about design and strategy, not about people.

Space is not simply another domain to be added to a list, this isn’t the same argument as cyber. It is the domain through which all the others now connect: a commons, like the oceans. A warship’s communications, an army’s navigation, an aircraft’s targeting, a nation’s financial transactions and its weather forecasts all run through orbit. Take space away, and modern military power and modern economic life would struggle to work. Space is also where military power is more tightly bound to commerce, science, law and diplomacy than anywhere except the sea. Commercial constellations carry military traffic while scientific missions share orbits with reconnaissance satellites. A single anti-satellite test can scatter debris that threatens everyone’s use of the environment for decades, including the country that fired it. No other military domain is so thoroughly shared, or so easily ruined for everyone.

An environment like that demands institutions designed for it. It needs a culture built around persistence rather than sorties, sustained presence rather than individual missions, and integration rather than ownership. It needs an organisation able to think across the civil, commercial and military boundaries that space erases. None of that comes ready-made from an inherited structure, the last, it could have been was abolished by 1964. With that in mind, space deserved something unique. America’s dependence on it made providing that a strategic necessity, not a bureaucratic preference.

The history of defence organisation teaches a lesson that keeps being forgotten: organisation is never neutral. The department that houses a service educates its officers, writes its doctrine, controls its budget and supplies its vocabulary. A new service placed inside an existing department inherits all of that, whatever anyone intends. This is not a charge of bad faith. It is simply how institutions behave. The Space Force’s advocates spoke of a blank slate, but a blank slate cannot sit inside a department with settled assumptions, relationships and priorities. The slate arrives already written on. This will hold American’s military space mission back and potentianly its civilian one too.

Behind the 2019 settlement lay a belief so familiar that it is rarely questioned: that space is naturally an air force matter, a vertical extension of air power. It is a cultural myth, and as new archival research shows, the historical record does not support it. The earliest institutional strategic thinking about space came not from an air force but from a navy. In 1945 the British Admiralty was already considering what rockets and operations beyond the atmosphere might mean for national strategy. In October that year the US Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics set up the first American military study of satellite feasibility, and the Army Air Forces’ famous RAND study of 1946 was, in part, a response to it. The Navy built America’s designated satellite programme, Vanguard. It fielded the world’s first satellite navigation system, TRANSIT, and the first electronic reconnaissance satellite, GRAB. Its people formed the nucleus of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and naval officers made up more than half of NASA’s astronauts in the programmes that reached the Moon. That’s without plunging into the record before the Second World War where the record of the Royal Navy and U.S. shines.

The Air Force’s primacy was real, but it was made, not found. Its staff claimed satellites as early as 1946, arguing that they would essentially be an extension of strategic air power. The argument rested on an assumption it never tested: that air power was strategic in the first place.That claim became policy through an administrative directive in March 1961. One of the Navy’s chief space planners concluded at the time that nothing beyond the Air Force’s own insistence had made space its mission. The directive stood until 1970, and six decades of practice turned a bureaucratic decision into what looked like a law of nature. When the Space Force was created, the myth decided its house.

The two environments work differently. Air power is exercised in pulses: aircraft fly a sortie and return. Space power is exercised through persistence. A satellite on station operates continuously for years, far from home, with little capacity to be repaired or recalled. That is closer to a warship on a distant station than to a sortie. Even the language records how the thinking narrowed. The civilian agency created in 1958 was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Aeronautics” literally means air-sailing, a word that acknowledged shared roots across traditions. “Aerospace” dropped the nautical half and turned a common endeavour into one service’s domain, extended upwards. Doctrine that still calls space “the ultimate high ground” shows how far that inheritance reaches. In orbit there is no up or down, and advantage depends on energy and position, not elevation. The template has spread well beyond the United States. France renamed its air force the Air and Space Force in 2020, and allies have too often adopted the same model by imitation rather than by analysis of their own circumstances or asking the questions that matter, what again, space demands, space deserves.

Creating the Space Force should have triggered a fundamental review of defence organisation as a whole. Whether NASA was or is independent from the air force or space force is an open question, one I answer elsewhere but on the defence side, a reset would have asked how many services a modern nation actually needs, and whether the divisions set in 1947 still reflect how warfare works or that taxpayers are caught paying for a Cold War juggernaught which in itself was based on dodgy analysis of the Second World War. It would have asked what each service’s roles should be now that every domain depends on space and cyberspace. It would have asked how resources should be allocated so that budgets follow national priorities rather than inherited shares. Above all, it would have asked how the parts should fit together to produce a coherent national strategy, rather than a collection of service doctrines competing for attention.

These are not new questions. They are the questions unification in 1947 claimed to settle. It did not settle them, and each new strategic demand since has been met by adding structures rather than rethinking the whole. Goldwater-Nichols in 1986 strengthened joint commands and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but left the service departments intact. US Space Command was re-established in August 2019, and months later the Space Force was placed inside an existing department. Each addition was followed by fresh efforts to integrate what the additions had divided. Unity of effort, a naval contribution, unification’s founding promise, has been pursued by multiplying organisations and coordinating them afterwards.

Had those questions been asked, one option deserved serious consideration: a department built on the naval, or better, a maritime model. The irony of 2019 is that the Space Force was explicitly modelled on the Marine Corps within the Department of the Navy, yet the analogy borrowed the wrong lesson. The Department of the Navy does not work because one service sits inside another. It works because it is organised around a strategic environment, the maritime, rather than a single domain, and because it has long integrated forces that operate across several domains at once. The Royal Navy’s closer cooperation with the British Army in the Age of Sail shines as an example of coordination by command than forced subservice by unification. For America, the U.S. Navy sits under one civilian secretary, it brings together a navy on and under the seas surface, a Marine Corps on land, and aviation of both services operating from carriers and ashore. It is, in effect, a multi-domain department that predates the term. Navies always have been to some degree because they want to not just have the advantage at sea but influence over at land, a perfect analogy for space. A department built on that model, bringing together naval, Marine, air and space forces around the environment that connects them, from the seabed to orbit, should have been on the table: this for now the model I believe in although is dependent on lawmakers taking the future of defence organisation seriously again. The struggle between navy and air force has been disastrous for defence in many nations, when they are the inheritors not viewing the world as it is, not some dogmatic view of land-battles, but far more complex and now it could ruin space. But such a merger of navy and air force would have forced the right question: how to organise defence around the connections through which a nation lives and fights, rather than around the boundaries between its services.

Instead, the moment was spent on the narrowest question available, where to put the new service, rather than the broadest: whether the structure around it still made sense. The costs are already showing, and many are structural. In the 2026 NDAA, Congress required the Space Force to train and assign equal numbers of operations and acquisition officers, reflecting a divide that long predates the service itself. Debates over who should advocate for the Space Force are sharpened by its position as a service without a civilian-led department of its own. A May 2026 draft NDAA even proposed dissolving the Space Development Agency and the Rapid Capabilities Office, two Space Force organisations with semi-autonomous acquisition authority. Reorganisation continues piece by piece, with no reset to guide it.

The deepest argument against the 2019 settlement comes from how warfare now works. The communications that bind a modern force run from undersea cables on the seabed, through the sea and the air, to satellites in orbit. Cut a cable or blind a satellite and the whole system suffers. National strategy today must be conceived as one continuum from the seabed to space, not domain by domain. That continuum demands structures that cut across domains and integrate them on equal terms around a national purpose. Nesting one service inside another does the reverse. It builds hierarchy where there should be integration. It subordinates the newest and most connective domain to the assumptions of an older one, and it reinforces exactly the domain-based thinking that seabed-to-space strategy exists to overcome. You cannot integrate from the seabed to space by placing space beneath the air.

I make no secret that my research is rooted in naval and maritime history, and some will read the argument for a naval model as special pleading. It is not a claim that space belongs to the Navy. When the question was live in the early 1960s, naval leaders were themselves divided: some argued for a combined, all-service approach, while others warned that taking on space would strain a navy already under pressure to justify itself. The maritime tradition matters here not because of who owns it, but because it was built to think about environments as connected wholes, and that is exactly what space now demands. The same principle applies to every service. When a mission becomes a means of justifying an institution, institutional purpose begins to displace national purpose, and the organisational boundaries of defence become the conceptual boundaries of strategy. That is wrong whichever service benefits. No service has a permanent claim on relevance simply because of its past. This is now about seeing Earth and Space as maritime, something air force and navy can do if they choose to, now naval and air power.

Critics of reorganisation are right to warn against moving the deck chairs. Analysts have cautioned that any future Department of Space would need clear objectives, or risk simply reshuffling boxes. But that caution cuts both ways. The problem in 2019 was not too much reorganisation. It was reorganisation without strategy: a new box added to an old chart, without asking what the chart was for.

The Space Force was the right decision. Its house was the wrong one, and the reset its creation should have prompted never came. Space demanded an institution designed for it. The integration of warfare from the seabed to space demands that the whole of defence organisation be looked at again, starting with national strategy rather than service boundaries. What that should look like is a larger question than one essay can answer. But it will be answered. The only choice is whether it is answered by design, or forced by failure.

Note, this paper also marks the retirement of Professor Andrew Lambert, from King's College London. My long term supervisor and continuing mentor that I owe so much.

A country can educate its naval officers and still leave much of its political and military leadership poorly equipped to think about the sea, to think ‘maritime’ and what this means in practice. Professional expertise within a navy does not automatically become understanding in government, business or public life. The people who attempt to shape national priorities, allocate resources, organise trade and explain events to the public require an education of their own. If maritime understanding is to inform national strategy, it must reach the places where those responsibilities are exercised.

This is an educational problem with institutional consequences. Who introduces a future civil servants or federal employees to the relationship between maritime power and political purpose? Where does a student entering business encounter the history of the systems through which goods, capital and influence move? Who helps a future journalist distinguish the possession of warships from the purposes they serve? These questions concern the intellectual foundations of society where maritime cannot be ignored. But what is fact, is that they cannot be answered solely through the education of its armed forces.

Civilian universities have a particular responsibility here. Their students will enter professions that collectively shape the state’s capacity to understand its interests and act upon them. Naval history offers students a way to examine how commerce, diplomacy, finance, geography and force interact. Sustaining that education requires scholarly communities with the expertise, continuity and independence, veterans, practitioners and scholars to make the subject accessible without reducing it to institutional advocacy.

The Historical Foundations

The relationship between naval history and strategic education was central to the work of John Knox Laughton (1830-1915). A Royal Naval instructor who became Professor of Modern History at King’s College London in 1885, Laughton helped establish naval history as a discipline grounded in the critical examination of documentary evidence, to some degree he is the modern father of military history and war studies, long before former army officers could claim the title. His participation in the foundation of the Navy Records Society in 1893 supported that undertaking by making historical sources available for systematic study.

Laughton’s historical work developed amid rapid technological change. Steam propulsion, armour and new weapons encouraged a new wave of technological false prophets to have belief that earlier experience had ceased to matter. These same types of prophets exist today, growing in number after 1945 with the various new weapons and ideas for the military have come along. Think: strategic air power, nuclear weapons, stealth, cyber, drones, RMA, hybrid navies and so on. Yet, the introduction of new equipment did not remove the need to judge how it should be employed, what purposes it could serve or how an opponent might respond. Those questions required an understanding of war (the art of war and peace) broader than technical proficiency. Historical study provided experience beyond the limits of an individual’s career, including failures that peacetime confidence could otherwise conceal. The enduring educational task is to distinguish what technological change has altered from the problems of judgement it leaves unresolved.

The significance of his work extended beyond improving accounts of battles. Understanding why decisions had been taken, what information had been available and how naval action related to political objectives required historical analysis. A record of victories could celebrate professional achievement but more important, an education in history could examine the assumptions behind that achievement, the circumstances that made it possible and the limits of its relevance to another situation. In short, experience was all there was to study, because theory and guesswork, even assumption was equally dangerous to the military as enemy action was.

Laughton’s work connected professional naval education with the emerging standards of academic history. That relationship placed obligations on both: historical inquiry needed sufficient knowledge of naval affairs to ask informed questions while the naval profession needed to accept that serious scholarship might revise familiar interpretations. The relationship contains a productive tension that still persists today. Academic inquiry continually seeks better answers and, more fundamentally, better questions. Armed forces need a sufficiently settled understanding of the past to support professional education. The task is to keep that understanding open to correction as scholarship develops. The tension is that the military often want static clear answers when the study of humans (humanities) at war, spanning strategy, doctrine, tactics, operations and more is greyer than that.

This remains a foundation for thinking strategically. History teaches students to reconstruct choices within their circumstances, distinguish intentions from outcomes and recognise alternatives obscured by hindsight. It also makes institutions themselves available for examination. The arrangements through which a state exercises power become historical choices whose purposes and consequences can be investigated.

Corbett and the Education of Strategic Judgement

Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922) developed this relationship between historical inquiry and strategic thought. His writing examined the use of maritime power within a wider political conception of war. Political direction, economic pressure, limited objectives and cooperation between the services belonged within the same inquiry. The fleet’s activities acquired meaning through their relationship with national purposes.

Corbett’s approach explains the practical value of historical study for strategy, policy and defence. He is to some degree, Corbett was a true philosopher of strategy by examining how political purposes, economic circumstances and military action interacted, he developed a framework within which strategic choices could be understood and debated. Policymakers, defence officials and military professionals can use that approach to test assumptions about objectives, resources and the consequences of employing force. Its value depends on critical inquiry: establishing why a course of action worked in particular circumstances, and judging whether those circumstances bear comparison with the present. Selecting an attractive precedent to justify a preferred policy reverses that process. History should expose a proposition to examination, including evidence that might overturn it. Again, evidence, not theory is paramount and why the study of strategy cannot be grounded in the contemporary ‘fields’ of so called ‘international relations’ or ‘political science’.

Corbett’s position on the roles of civilian universities developed through experience. As late as 1910, he doubted whether a university could sustain the subject in the way the Admiralty could. After all, true Admiralty is about educating the state to strategy, not merely an operational command post. By 1916, he had taken up Laughton’s proposal for a university department of naval history, capable of training researchers and opening the accumulated experience of the service to more systematic examination. He lectured at King’s, including within its history teaching, and returned to the departmental proposal in his 1922 Creighton Lecture. This development matters: the case for a university forum emerged from close engagement with professional naval education and the difficulties of sustaining historical inquiry within it. In short, what we know as ‘private military education’ or to use Corbett’s words from his own treatment by some naval officers ‘the whims of naval officers seeing their own glory over that to a higher cause.’

The difference between what an officer and a civilian need to know is consequential. An officer may need to understand how naval operations contribute to a political objective. A civilian decision-maker must also judge the objective, its costs, the available alternatives and the relationship between military action and other instruments of policy. Both require strategic understanding. Their different responsibilities make the education of one an insufficient substitute for the education of the other.

Corbett’s experience also reveals the difficulty of sustaining critical scholarship in close proximity to institutional power. Professor Andrew Lambert’s research on Corbett’s account of the Battle of Jutland (1916) documents the pressure to alter the official history to meet the demands of Admiral David Beatty (1871-1936) and officers associated with his battlecruiser command. The Admiralty ultimately prefaced the published volume with a disclaimer distancing itself from its conclusions. The dispute concerned the interpretation of a battle, but it also exposed the vulnerability of historical judgement when it challenged influential professional reputations, let alone future planning. All of it could undermine government understanding and support for seapower. Exactly what Corbett wanted to avoid.

That episode should not obscure Corbett’s productive relationships with naval officers. Those relationships made much of his work possible. It does, however, demonstrate why historical authority cannot rest entirely with the institution whose conduct is being studied. The value of scholarship depends partly on its ability to reach conclusions that its professional audience finds uncomfortable. Corbett’s significance is thus twofold, first his conception of strategy required an understanding broader than the internal concerns of a service and second, his experience demonstrates the importance of forums in which the resulting arguments can be examined without official approval determining their legitimacy.

The Civilian University’s Mission

Professional military education (PME) has an essential responsibility to prepare officers for demanding professional and strategic duties. The value on this is different between military services and has support of it has changed over decades from within them towards it. Civilian academics contribute substantially to that work. But the presence of academic expertise within military education does not discharge the university’s wider educational responsibility. A society requires opportunities to study maritime questions outside a curriculum organised principally around service needs.

The distinction between training and education is essential here. Preparing officers to undertake known tasks cannot exhaust the preparation required for uncertain responsibilities. Education develops the capacity to examine unfamiliar situations, question assumptions and exercise judgement. Rigorous historical scholarship and cooperation with academics support that professional development. The civilian university can contribute directly to service education while maintaining a purpose that extends beyond immediate professional requirements.

The institutional setting of professional military education nevertheless matters. My research on defence organisation in Britain and the United States has examined how the organisation of a defence establishment shapes the way it thinks: something vital to understanding the future of strategy. Unification brought professional military education within the single department it serves, and a curriculum set there tends to be shaped around that department’s agenda: its established responsibilities, organisational assumptions and requirements to prepare personnel for particular duties. These give education a necessary purpose, but can also narrow the questions a curriculum permits itself to ask. The aim shifts from developing officers of the highest intellectual calibre to producing officers fluent in the prevailing conception of defence, a framework they learn to apply without sufficient opportunity to examine its historical origins or strategic limitations. The modern overbearing emphasis on ‘jointness’ is one of the examples of this, that sometimes neuters being able to have true debates. Where critical scrutiny weakens, inherited interpretations can harden into accepted truths, and a curriculum can reproduce assumptions whose evidential foundations or contemporary relevance deserve reconsideration. Civilian departments provide a forum in which scholars, students and practitioners can examine those assumptions without departmental requirements determining the boundaries of inquiry. This is an institutional risk to guard against, rather than a judgement on the quality or independence of military educators.

But concentrating the study of naval history, military history and strategy solely in professional military education is not the answer. PME is an excellent home for these subjects, but it comes with pitfalls. Everything taught there must ultimately pass the test of what PME is for, and that is a different question from the one asked here. The field must be advanced where inquiry is free to follow the evidence, and its findings must then flow into the PME curriculum without hindrance. Meanwhile, the field has come apart: its expertise is now dispersed and disconnected. The state of naval history and maritime strategy can be understood in the mirror of the condition of British seapower itself: in free fall, if not already deconstructed.

Where professional military education comes to treat independent civilian scholarship as a competitor rather than a source, it undermines the very work on which it depends. By the end of the twentieth century, British academics had become embroiled in debates over the methodology, meaning and practice of naval power, seapower, maritime strategy, and the future Royal Navy. Two schools rose to prominence: the "navalism and naval power" school led by Professor Geoffrey Till, closely associated with professional military education, and the method of Professor Andrew Lambert, which continued the Corbettian tradition of applied history and the philosophy of maritime strategy. Both have something to offer but the impact of this division went far beyond England considering the vast alumni and interactions both have had. Without a shared forum in which to test their differences, however, the ordinary divisions of academic life harden, and rival schools talk past one another rather than sharpen each other.

Something more must also happen: a continuing cycle between the practitioner and the professional thinker. Without it, none of this works. Laughton, Corbett and Lambert all understood this. Once the two retreat into isolated camps, problems follow. Theory not grounded in experience will not work; practice without theory is guesswork, and guesswork is the path to defeat.

Because maritime thinking and the study of naval affairs and history is central to strategic thought, its decline does more than weaken that thought. It creates an imbalance. A useful example, others can be found around the world, particularly for navies and marines, is the example of the Royal Navy's relationship with academia, which is strikingly weak. This example, set beside the ties the other services maintain with think tanks, academia and research groups, it is an embarrassment which says a lot more then meets the eye: within a unified defence department, that matters even more. The service with the strongest intellectual backing can make its case the loudest, whether or not its case is the best and to the determinant of national security, the loudest voice is often heard.

The difference lies in audience, purpose and the conditions of inquiry. Civilian students may enter shipping, finance, law, politics, journalism, diplomacy or the government service for example. Many will never regard themselves as maritime or naval, even military specialists. Nevertheless, their decisions may affect the country’s maritime interests, and their assumptions may shape how those interests are represented. Education reaches them often while those assumptions are still being formed.

A student does not need to become a naval historian to benefit. Studying maritime history can reveal why commercial activity depends on political arrangements, why military capability alone cannot secure every interest and why events at sea have consequences far inland. It can also expose the uneven distribution of maritime power’s benefits and costs, including the histories of empire, coercion and labour. Such an education equips people to assess maritime claims critically.

This is the broader sense in which a university educates the state. The state’s capacity for judgement draws upon the knowledge circulating through the society from which its officials, advisers and political leaders emerge. A university seminar cannot determine national strategy. It can help develop the habits of inquiry through which a future decision-maker recognises a strategic question, evaluates an explanation and knows when to seek expertise.

The university’s independence is therefore part of its contribution. Research questions need room to develop beyond the priorities of a current government or administration or the requirements of a sponsoring institution. Scholars, must be able to investigate failures, question doctrine and challenge accounts of national achievement. Public funding and professional collaboration can support this work, the role of veterans is key, provided they preserve freedom over questions, methods and conclusions.

Nor are civilian universities automatically immune to conformity or institutional pressure. Their contribution depends on maintaining academic freedom in practice: protecting critical inquiry, sustaining specialist knowledge and allowing arguments to be assessed on their evidence let alone defending free speech. That is a continuing responsibility, especially where scholarship addresses institutions with considerable public authority.

Institutional Homes are Required

The Laughton Naval History and Maritime Strategy Unit at King’s had provided a practical expression of this civilian mission. Established under Professor Andrew Lambert in 2001, it brought naval history and maritime strategic research into a community encompassing students, scholars and professional participants. Its published purposes included education from undergraduate to doctoral level, international scholarly exchange and engagement with audiences beyond the university. It was built to operate at scale while support from trusts, sponsors, and charities funded an additional academic post, administrative support and research scholarship. Subsequently naval history teaching provision doubled, so teaching, research and public access were connected parts of the undertaking. The Unit was deliberately placed within War Studies, who was initially supportive, in a place where naval history and the study of maritime affairs could contribute to wider questions and encounter other disciplines.

The long-running King’s Maritime History Seminars illustrate how such a community works. Hosted by the Unit alongside the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War, and organised with the British Commission for Maritime History, Lloyds of London, and the Society for Nautical Research, the series has provided an open forum for presenting and discussing research. Its significance lies partly in the continuity of that exchange. A seminar allows a new scholar to test an argument before an audience capable of questioning it. It brings different periods, methods and kinds of expertise into conversation. Established researchers encounter work beyond their immediate specialisms, while students learn how evidence is debated and interpretations revised. Over time, these encounters create relationships through which supervision, collaboration and further inquiry become possible.

But the subject’s future rests with its students: their questions, their independent research and their willingness to enter scholarly debate. Their careers take them in many directions, but they carry an understanding of the sea’s place in history with them. This is where a university’s educational mission acquires its wider significance. Its graduates take that understanding into settings a naval curriculum cannot reach on its own.

Teaching also contributes to the production of knowledge. Preparing an argument for students requires a scholar to make its assumptions explicit, explain its evidence and answer questions that established specialists may have ceased to ask. Students can expose weaknesses in familiar interpretations, while their research opens subjects that a senior scholar could not pursue alone. The relationship between research and education therefore runs in both directions. A university sustains a field partly by creating repeated opportunities for its explanations to be challenged by people entering it for the first time.

For transparency, my own relationship with King’s and its ‘research community’ provides more than access to individual expertise. It offers an intellectual setting in which questions can develop, connections become visible and emerging scholars find an audience. Its contribution extends through the people it educates and the discussions those people subsequently carry into other institutions.

Laughton’s own experience reveals why this needs an institutional home. He sought a department that could develop researchers and give naval history a continuing place within university life. Its failure to materialise left the subject more dependent on individuals, and the loss of Laughton and Corbett weakened the connections they had sustained. Their books survived, but books could not appoint successors, supervise new research or secure a place in the curriculum. Intellectual achievement requires arrangements through which another generation can question, extend and renew it. Preserving a legacy includes maintaining the capacity to move beyond it. Today, not just in Britain, but around the world, naval history, the study of maritime strategy and ultimately the art of war and peace is becoming on the individual rather than forums or communities. It has gone full circle.

Seablindness as an Institutional Problem

Seablindness is for many a handy term to politely explain failure in education about the seas importance to government and nation. The superior way, as I have argued, is the institutional conditions under which maritime understanding is sustained, communicated or weakened. In my doctoral work and subsequent writing on the Admiralty, the Royal Navy and U.S. Navy, I have argued the way expertise is organised shapes the weight it carries in national strategic thought.

The educational implication is that understanding cannot simply be demanded from an otherwise inattentive public let along government We must ask where people encounter the subject, who has the expertise to teach it and what institutions sustain that work. This is more important, again, when ‘Admiralty’ no longer exists. Awareness may begin with an event, a news report or a public campaign leading to wrong conclusions, but it is informed judgement develops through opportunities to examine causes, relationships and competing explanations.

Educating more naval officers cannot, by itself, resolve the absence of those opportunities elsewhere. Officers can explain their profession and contribute to public debate, within civil-miliary relations rules. However, naval and marine officers are supposed to focus on being the ultimate sea (fighting) professional. Yet, time and again they have proven to be ill-prepared if not incompetent at public relations, administration and managing the education of the state to seapower. This is acceptable as that is how true navies have worked since the 1500s as such tasks even in naval organisations resided with civilians not naval personnel (aka Admiralty). Military personnel cannot collectively provide the education of every civilian profession whose decisions bear upon maritime affairs or more widely anything the military maybe involved with. Nor should the public have to depend exclusively on a service’s explanation of its own significance which can also get easily distorted by its own culture. Nor can uncritical navalism or the understandable concern of veterans fill the gap entirely. Navalists and veterans bring their own agendas, and some strengths from practical experience, but there are also issues with it as much of the ‘quality’ of today’s media debate shows. Equally academics and scholars should not attempt to best practical experience or things they know little about when others do. What is important is that independent scholarship gives citizens and decision-makers the means to evaluate the explanations put in front of them.

Civilian maritime education consequently has strategic value even when its graduates never work for a navy. Its influence may appear in the questions an official asks, the assumptions a journalist challenges or the connections a business leader recognises. These effects are difficult to capture through a simple measure of immediate policy impact. They belong to the slower formation of an informed public and a capable, educated state to the influence of the sea and today, the nature of war and conflict from seabed to space.

Sustaining the Capacity to Think and then Act

But danger is not new when it comes to resting on a few minds or many of the issues raised earlier. The field has been warned before that an apparently flourishing subject can lose ground through changing academic priorities, the departure of leading figures, service indifference and public apathy. The answer then, as now, is to widen the field’s conversations: to ask questions that engage other scholars and audiences, and to resist intellectual isolation. That remains a demanding standard. Sustaining naval history means giving it the capacity to renew its questions, develop its students and contribute to debates beyond its own community.

Laughton and Corbett help us understand why this work matters. They connect the critical study of history with the development of strategic judgement, while Corbett’s experience also exposes the pressures that can arise when historical conclusions inconvenience professional authority. Their legacy calls for continuing intellectual work: educating new audiences, developing scholars and maintaining forums where arguments can be tested freely. Sadly today, understanding of this within academic and the military is ebbing away.

The question of who will teach the state to think about the sea therefore has an institutional answer. It requires civilian departments or ‘homes’ able to teach the subject, supervise its future researchers and sustain exchanges across academic, professional and public life. Cooperation with military education enriches that undertaking. Its wider civilian purpose must remain explicit and supported.

A society, educated to the sea, (you can even apply this to space!) needs people throughout its institutions who can understand its relationship to national purposes, way of life, its success and exercise judgement about it. Universities help educate those people before their responsibilities become specialised and long after policy priorities have passed. Sustaining that mission is part of sustaining the state’s capacity for strategy.

Laughton began that work at King’s. Corbett extended it, and Andrew Lambert renewed it for a new generation in the challenging world of a disinterested higher education establishment. Each faced an uncertain future for the subject; none faced one as unclear as today’s. What is at stake is not simply recording naval history for future generations, nor even remembrance. It is learning how to think about strategy and how to act strategically. In the years ahead, from seabed to space, nothing will matter more.

Further reading

• Andrew Lambert, The Foundations of Naval History: John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the Historical Profession (Chatham Publishing, 1998).

• Andrew Lambert, Laughton’s Legacy: Naval History at King’s College London, inaugural lecture delivered in the Great Hall, King’s College London, 14 November 2002.

• Andrew Lambert, The British Way of War: Julian Corbett and the Battle for a National Strategy (Yale University Press, 2021).

• Andrew Lambert, “Writing the Battle: Jutland in Sir Julian Corbett’s Naval Operations”, The Mariner’s Mirror (2017).

• James W. E. Smith, “Seablindness and the Royal Navy after 1964”, The Naval Review, 112, no. 2 (Spring 2024).

Abstract:

I reflect on a case study at the heart of my research: what navies losing their voice reveals about defence organisation and a state’s capacity for national strategy. The article also introduces the wider questions explored in one of my forthcoming books, currently due 2027.

When a state reorganises the institutions that produce its strategic thinking, it does more than redraw an organisation chart. It changes who has standing to speak, which kinds of experience count as expertise, and which questions get asked in the room where decisions are made. Those changes reach well beyond the administration of the armed forces. They affect a state’s capacity to understand its own circumstances and decide what to do about them.

I’ve spent years investigating that relationship through the history of defence unification. This article looks in more depth at the case study that sits at the heart of both my doctoral research and the book that’s grown out of it: what happened to the Royal Navy after Britain abolished the Admiralty in 1964. My doctoral thesis, Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification, examined Britain and the United States across the two decades either side of that date, and it’s worth walking through the Royal Navy case in full, because the consequences reach well beyond ships: a navy’s difficulty being heard can be the most visible symptom of a much larger change in how a state thinks about strategy and how to act strategically.

The usual explanation for why the Royal Navy struggles to make its case is ‘seablindness’: politicians and the public don’t understand the sea, their dependence on it, or the forces that protect their interests there. It’s a useful shorthand, and it’s easy to see why it’s stuck. Most people don’t live on the sea, rarely see naval operations, and have little reason to think about maritime connections until something interrupts them to impact their lives. But the term, used carelessly, does something unhelpful: it turns an institutional problem into a public relations problem. It implies that if the Royal Navy (and navies) posted better content, ran more open days, or found a compelling spokesperson, the underlying difficulty would resolve itself.

That’s not correct. In the debates of the early 1980s, “seablindness” served as an alarm about declining maritime understanding, raised by people — naval officers, academics, civil servants — who still remembered a Britain in which government, media and public all had some baseline fluency in what the sea meant to the country. They used “seablindness” as an alarm bell, not a diagnosis. Four decades on, the alarm has been ringing so long it’s become background noise. An alarm is not a diagnosis, and repeating the word cannot answer the question underneath it: why did the mechanisms for connecting maritime strategy to national decision-making weaken, and what would it take to rebuild that capacity? Asking politicians and the public simply to ‘understand and get the sea’ better, without asking who used to do that work and what happened to them, is the mistake that’s been made for generations, one I’ve addressed in my research.

The past can guide us: in 1964, Britain abolished the independent existence of an institution with centuries of accumulated experience. The Admiralty, with its own political leadership, civil service and historical expertise, was brought into a unified Ministry of Defence alongside the War Office and Air Ministry. The familiar account presents this as a rational consolidation of what was deemed a divided, dysfunctional and mismanaged defence setup. That description leaves the real question unanswered, one purposefully left unanswered: what happened to the strategic functions the institutions being amalgamated had actually been performing?

The Admiralty had done more than administer the Royal Navy. It carried out the sustained work of turning naval and maritime experience into knowledge a government could use — connecting professional expertise to political judgement, preserving that experience beyond any individual’s career, and explaining why maritime power mattered to national purposes, something far beyond just ships. I developed this account through what I’ve called the “art of Admiralty” in my doctoral research (2021) and subsequently rearticulated by 2023. Much of it was carried by civilians rather than admirals: the Admiralty Secretary and other officials, historians, political leadership, businesses, traders, money leaders and supporters worked alongside naval professionals but distinct from them. Institutional continuity did the heavy lifting. They let experience survive changes of personnel and kept relationships intact across government, so that naval officers could concentrate on being the ultimate sea professional, while a civilian institution built for the purpose did the work of being understood in Whitehall.

It’s worth pausing on Lord Nelson here, because the counterfactual is instructive. He died a hero at Trafalgar and never got the chance to become First Lord of the Admiralty — the civilian-facing role, not the uniformed one. Had he lived, his fame might have gone to work explaining seapower to Parliament in a way no serving First Sea Lord, bound by the ordinary constraints of civil-military relations, ever quite could. The Admiralty helped ensure that officers like him didn’t have to carry that political burden themselves, and could concentrate on the profession they’d trained for.

Imagine, instead, a minister or senior civilian-decision maker today asked to choose between competing defence priorities. A technically correct account of naval capabilities is not enough, something both navalists and naval officers seem to only articulate now. The minister needs an explanation of consequences, alternatives and national interests — what a capability makes possible, what becomes harder without it, how it sits alongside diplomatic and economic instruments — and that explanation takes sustained work long before the meeting, delivered by someone with the standing and continuity to be heard once inside it. But the art of Admiralty reached further than winning a particular case. Institutions help decide which problems reach the minister at all. They preserve the experience through which an emerging situation gets recognised in the first place, connect it to earlier choices, and put alternatives on the table before anyone has to ask for them. Their influence starts before advice is ever delivered; it shapes the questions government knows to ask.

None of that has the visibility of a ship entering harbour or an aircraft taking off. But it decides whether those visible things get understood as instruments of national policy, or as expensive hardware competing for budget against everything else. The latter is the trap, a well laid one, have fallen into today.

Information can move house without the capacity to interpret it moving equally well. Records survive; the people who understand their significance retire or move on. Responsibilities get reassigned; the relationships and authority that made them effective are much harder to reproduce than the organisational-chart line suggests. Expertise stays somewhere in the system, but the routes by which it used to reach a decision can be weakened or closed through reorganisation.

This wasn’t a surprise to everyone in the past. The last Admiralty Secretary, Sir John Lang, and the Admiralty-era First Sea Lord, Sir Caspar John, both raised exactly this objection before the change went through: that losing the Admiralty meant losing the function, not just the name. Caspar John was actively sidelined by Lord Mountbatten, who had his own reasons for wanting the reorganisation to go ahead. Dismissing their warnings as service resistance to change ducks the actual issue — where would the Admiralty’s functions live afterwards, and would they carry the same weight? Naval officers inherited the additional job of explaining the service’s place in national strategy, on top of everything they already did: something they were never prepared for, were useless at and continue to be so. Operational expertise doesn’t automatically come with the time, political access or institutional memory that job needs. Nor does one gifted individual reliably substitute for a system built to outlast any individual. The message went out because the people who used to keep it going no longer had a place to work from.

But to be mindful that understanding the Navy is only part of understanding the sea. Maritime strategy concerns the relationship between national purposes and a world of trade, resources, communications, diplomacy and military power. Naval strategy and power is narrower: the development and use of naval power within that wider setting. Collapse the two together and a national strategic argument shrinks into a request for particular ships or missions — which is exactly the shrinkage that’s happened to disastrous effects by 2026.

Great historians saw this coming. Sir Julian Corbett, one of the worlds best historians and strategists was one of them. His maritime and strategic thought placed armed force inside a much wider understanding of national circumstances and political purpose, and at the start of the 1920s he questioned if unified defence would actually produce unity of effort or simply let one strategic tradition become subordinate to another. Bringing organisations together, in other words, doesn’t guarantee their knowledge gets integrated on equal terms. Sometimes it just decides, quietly, whose knowledge counts.

My research connects the eventual triumph of unified defence with a wider displacement of Britain’s maritime conception of national strategy by continental military thought — two traditions rooted in different historical experience and different ways of understanding national power, whose significance went well beyond a preference for fighting at sea or on land. Institutions gave each tradition its authority, preserved its knowledge, and carried its arguments into government. Change the institutions, and you change which tradition gets to keep arguing.

An organisation can manage defence effectively and enable its armed forces to operate jointly without possessing every capacity needed to develop national strategy. That wider task means connecting military means with the political, economic, diplomatic and other resources through which a state pursues its purposes. Defence forms part of that task; its organisational boundaries should not become the boundaries of strategic thought.

The American experience gives another angle on the same institutional problem. In the 1950s, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke challenged parts of President Eisenhower’s defence reorganisation, over exactly the questions that matter here: whether the services could still offer candid advice, and what concentrating authority does to political oversight. The Navy Department survived inside the American defence structure, though under arrangements very different from its old independent standing: degrading slow over time as various reforms moved further away from the debates of the 1940s.

That history also puts recent developments in context, and it’s worth being precise about what happened. In September 2025, a US executive order authorised “Department of War” as a secondary title for the Department of Defense — it explicitly left the statutory name controlling unless Congress changes it. That’s a narrower step than a full renaming, but for most of American history the Departments of War and Navy existed as separate departments established by statute, each connecting its own body of expertise to civilian authority. That older arrangement was itself a choice, not a default. Whether a change in title eventually changes anything about who gets heard, or what counts as expertise, is a question about what the institution does — not something the name settles by itself. But names are rarely just names, and this one is worth watching.

The case study of Royal Navy and U.S. Navy is important. The Royal Navy’s interests aren’t automatically identical to the national interest. Naval assumptions need scrutiny too, including the habits and preferred capabilities that get treated as too obvious to question. Recovering the art of Admiralty means identifying which functions are worth rebuilding, then asking what arrangement could perform them today — not simply putting the old sign back over a different door.

Step back from ships entirely and the larger shape of the problem comes into view. A department gets folded into a common structure and its responsibilities transferred on paper. The knowledge, relationships and habits of thought it used to sustain don’t automatically transfer with them — and that gap is where the real cost sits. Reorganisation can improve coordination while quietly narrowing the sources of advice a government hears from. That trade-off must be investigated case by case. It can’t be assumed away just because reform happened and seemingly the lights stayed on.

There’s a second trap worth naming: once a new arrangement becomes familiar, its creation starts to look inevitable, and the objections raised against it get remembered, if at all, as obstacles that were rightly overcome. The history later told about an institution can end up justifying its basic shape, so that reform only ever asks how to make the inherited structure work better, never whether the assumptions underneath it still holds. Lang and Caspar John’s warnings are a small, specific case of exactly that trap — dismissed at the time, and largely forgotten since, despite being right.

That’s why this history matters beyond the fate of one department. Why were proposals for unification rejected for so long before they finally succeeded? What strategic choices were being made inside decisions later described as pure administration? How did one account of those choices come to be treated as settled fact? And what possibilities quietly disappear when a government inherits an organisation without ever seriously asking whether the purpose it was built for still holds? These questions cross the same boundaries that separate military capability from commerce, technology and communications — from the seabed to space, national interests increasingly depend on relationships that departmental structures can make easier or much harder to see. A navy struggling to be heard is one especially visible place where that difficulty surfaces. Its real significance is what it reveals about the state’s capacity for strategy generally.

Want to read more? This article is a primer built around one of the central cases in my forthcoming book. The book follows the history of defence unification and its relationship with strategy making and thinking about strategy. It spans across four centuries and the Atlantic, examining how states built strategic knowledge, reorganised the institutions carrying it, and came to believe the choices they’d made were the only ones available. It asks what happens when an organisation built to serve strategy starts, instead, to decide the limits of what strategy can even imagine.

Organisation doesn’t make strategy. It conditions it. The full explanation, and the evidence behind it, is what the book is for. Due in 2027-2029.

Find out more about the book.

Reading list for defence Professionals and Military Personnel

James W. E. Smith, The Naval Review (and US Naval Institute):

• ‘The Admiralty and the “Art of Admiralty”’, vol. 111, no. 3, Summer 2023.

• ‘Seablindness and the Royal Navy after 1964’, vol. 112, no. 2, Spring 2024.

• ‘Reforge Britannia’s Trident or Close the Shop?’, online version dated 20 August 2024.

• ‘Endgame for Seablindness: Defence Organisation and the Future of the Royal Navy and the United States Navy’, vol. 114, no. 1, Winter 2026.

Doctoral research: Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification. Abstract at King’s College London.

For the American naming and constitutional distinctions: Executive Order 14347, 5 September 2025; US Constitution, Article I, Section 8; Act establishing the Navy Department, 30 April 1798.

NB: the term ‘seablindness’ was not created by Professor G. Till but the Admiralty Secretary after 1957.

For more than twenty years, I have studied the relationship between organisation and thinking about strategy and acting strategically: how institutions preserve experience, shape advice and determine which choices reach political authority. My PhD at King’s College London, Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification, ^(2021, 1) examined how the process of defence unification––the creation of defence organisations in Government like the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and U.K. Ministry of Defence (MoD)––reshaped strategic thought and national strategy. That research, convinced me that the problems of modern defence organisation reach into its foundations and subsequently the clock was ticking on when the next fundamental change is due.

A series of articles before publication of my book have been written since and referenced in this article, based partially on the PhD, to keep the conversation alive. In Is it time to Revisit Defence Unification?,2 I asked whether we should reopen questions that generations of defence reform had largely avoided. My answer now is unequivocal: fundamental change is overdue, and replacing institutions that repeated reform cannot repair or improve must be a serious option, with all options on the table.

I should be clear about where my loyalty in this argument lies, because it is not where readers of might expect. It lies with national strategy. If getting that right means fewer armed services—mergers, retirements, outright abolition—then so be it. If it requires new services, commands and forms of organisation, those must be possible too. That includes institutions whose history I know best. I’ve used naval and maritime history often as the case study because it’s been the best example in which to expose failures that run far beyond their own domains and out into the wider organisation of defence. Other examples exist in my research spanning all services and defence as a whole.

The case for the particular unified structures Britain and America built (amongst other nations) was never as settled as sixty and eighty years of institutional repetition have made it feel, or to be precise, how government and defence have wanted many to believe. Today, their familiarity has become a substitute for justification and their survival has acquired the appearance of vindication. An irony considering they replaced institutions far more proven and older, yet were swept away with little care. We can learn from this and show care as we boldly think about the next version of defence organisation. But the fact that generations have worked within them without being encouraged to examine whether the reasoning behind their creation withstands scrutiny.

Three failures compound each other in these histories: foundations of the case for centralised unified defence organisation were built on rushed, bodged or self-interested analysis of wartime and various circumstances, like technology of the then not the now or tomorrow. Resultingly political and financial power was concentrated at the expense of effective scrutiny, and a habit of treating dissenting professional advice as disloyalty rather than information in a vital forum of debate. Together, they can prepare defeat in peacetime, long before war or conflict exposes it.

Understanding those failures requires returning to the arguments through which unification and centralised defence acquired its authority. The familiar explanation is designed to be reassuring to politician and public alike: the experience of the Second World War and new post-war technologies demanded cooperation while separate institutions generated rivalry and waste: centralisation supplied coherent direction and better command and control for all. The historical record is considerably less reassuring.

In U.S. Defense Unification and the U.S. Navy,3 I examined how interpretations of wartime experience, political pressure and service rivalry shaped the struggle over American defence after 1945. Influential Army advocates, working alongside proponents of an independent air force, pursued a settlement that would privilege their strategic, tactical and operational assumptions wrapped within their institutional priorities and agendas. Unification offered the means to change whose arguments, voices and positions carried authority. Claims about better strategy when I examined them, where in short, lies.

The label attached to the Navy’s response tells the same story from another direction. In The Revolt of the Admirals and Today’s Battle Over the Defense Budget,4 I challenged the framing of 1949’s institutional dispute as a “revolt”—a term promoted by media consultants working for the Department of the Air Force to make legitimate testimony to Congress sound like insubordination. Once disagreement becomes “revolt”, the substantive questions about strategy, capability and oversight are easier to dismiss. Organisational language can prejudge arguments before they are heard on their merits.

Britain’s experience adds another dimension. In The UK Ministry of Defence at 60,^[5] I argued that concentrating political power and financial control was central to understanding the settlement. The claim that this necessarily produced superior national strategy confuses the justification presented for change with the interests and purposes that drove it. Making decisions easier to impose does not make their strategic foundations sounder.

The Admiralty’s abolition in 1964 removed a distinct, authoritative institutional route through which Britain’s circumstances as a maritime, trade-dependent state were represented to government. Many voices, mostly Navy and some Army, warned of this and were sidelined during Lord Mountbatten’s personal drive for an integrated Ministry of Defence. Their concern extended beyond service prestige to the preservation of strategic knowledge and its influence on political judgement. The transfer of administrative responsibilities could not, by itself, preserve the experience, institutional memory and access to authority upon which that contribution depended.

Nor does the naval profession escape criticism. In Endgame for Seablindness: defence organisation and the future of the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, I criticised its retreat into narrow technical concerns, nostalgia and poor communication, an outcome of unification that did a disservice to navy and nation as a whole,. That has also now failed in 2026 as seapower has collapsed, replaced by naval power undermining national and global security.5 No service earns permanent strategic relevance through its history when it fails to educate why that history is useful to the state. The institutional interests of every service require scrutiny wherever they conflict with national purposes.

The push and pull of centralisation and decentralisation runs through this history. Central direction can enable common action; independent institutions can preserve expertise and challenge assumptions. Either can also protect power, obstruct judgement and frustrate cooperation. The strategic question is what should be brought together, what should remain distinct, and why. Neither centralisation nor decentralisation deserves to become an article of faith, and to some degree why Britain achieved a better setup in the 1920s and 1930s, not without flaws, of its Committee of Imperial Defence along with an Independent Admiralty.

That scrutiny becomes particularly important when governments create new institutions. The creation of the United States Space Force in 2019 should have forced the underlying questions of defence organisation back into the open, for every service and for the entire defense bureaucracy. Anti-Fedalists and those who seek better national fiscal control should have had a ‘field day’ at that moment but were suspiciously silent.

Space demanded expertise, resources and sustained attention. Establishing that need did not settle whether another armed service, nested inside the inherited structure, was the right answer. Instead, Space Force was placed within the Department of the Air Force, carrying inherited institutional relationships and cultural assumptions into the new arrangement. A move I believe will hinder America in space, not benefit it, in the long run.

The need for specialist knowledge became an argument for another organisational division, requiring further coordination with the rest. Unity of effort was among unification’s founding promises yet in the end became a slogan than reality. Yet the response to a new strategic demand was to multiply institutions and then address the resulting requirements for closer integration: something the Admiralty and U.S. Department of the Navy were concerned about during the first space race.

That calls the underlying model into question. The arrangements for American defence organisation itself created an independent Air Force in 1947, but counting services is never sufficient and more does not mean better. The issue is whether the whole structure serves a coherent national strategy, one based on experience, and whether that question gets asked before another component is added or yet another reform complicates things further. Space Force should have made continued acceptance of the inherited structure impossible without renewed justification. It did not. In short, Space Force shouldn’t have existed before a big STOP sign kicked in legally, to ask questions about not just about creating another service but if defence organisation was fulfilling its core duties as it should.

Its stakes reach beyond any service’s remit. Space connects communications, navigation, infrastructure, commerce and science, as well as the influence of armed force. In From Seablindness to Spaceblindness,6 I explored what maritime strategic thinking can contribute to that problem: both environments demand attention to the connections through which a state lives, communicates and exercises power. Reducing either to a single service’s operations narrows the problem before strategic judgement begins.

The organisational boundaries of defence risk becoming the conceptual boundaries of strategy itself: something entirely antithetical to thinking about strategy and then acting from it. A department may become more integrated while remaining strategically impoverished and its command lines more nebulous than clear. Better coordination within the military cannot compensate for an inadequate understanding of national purposes and power and ex complex overlaps between services and their technologies.

This is why the answer must begin with the circumstances of the state. Britain and America reached different settlements. Their geography, resources and strategic experience differ enough that no single organisational template transfers cleanly between them, let alone to a third country adopting an ally’s habits by imitation. The implications of these histories reach defence organisations worldwide, but each government must answer for its own circumstances. Ultimately, there is no universal model that relieves a government of the responsibility to think. Nor does renaming a department resolve its weaknesses. In A ‘Note’ about a U.S. Department of War, 7 I argued for preserving a forum where competing services could contribute without one worldview dominating. A change of name can revive an old imbalance while leaving deeper problems untouched.8

Reconsidering those problems must permit consequences far greater than a new name or another redistribution of responsibilities. Endgame for Seablindness9 explicitly entertained replacing institutions that repeated reform cannot repair. That possibility needs to become a an option now. Governments must examine the survival, scale and function of every element through which they exercise defence authority. That examination must include the possibility that some should cease to exist independently.

If the Pentagon needs to be sold off or demolished, why not? Its five sides offer no strategic value. The serious point, is that neither the building nor the institutional arrangements it symbolises should be beyond reconsideration. The same applies to Britain’s Ministry of Defence and its equivalents elsewhere. Just because they are familiar does not confer a right to permanence or in some cases, if the setup for many has become too comfortable, then that comes with too much baggage over time to run an organisation well.

This is about the future. Entirely new forms of defence organisation must be possible. New or merged military services and commands may need to emerge, with responsibilities that cut across inherited boundaries while others may need to disappear. Warfare, as integrated as it is: ‘from seabed to space’ now demands that we reconsider how the whole is organised. We cannot indefinitely meet new requirements by adding institutions, or ‘fiddling around the edges’ while protecting the assumptions governing everything around them.

Warfare, as integrated as it is: ‘from seabed to space’ now demands that we reconsider how the whole is organised.

A review that guarantees the inherited structure’s survival has already restricted its conclusions before it starts. This is mistake made over reforms made since the 1980s in the U.K. and U.S.

The inquiry must begin with national circumstances: geography, dependencies, resources, political purposes and exposure to disruption through conflict, or even war. The strategy that flows from that geography and the experience it has shaped will decide direction, which could be equally back to an old system, refreshed as much a building something new. Asking questions about modern defence organisation must establish what knowledge decision-makers need, how competing professional advice reaches them without being filtered by whichever institution controls the process (or can shout the loudest), and which responsibilities require common direction or an independent voice. Some functions may need more independence while others may need consolidation. Some may need to leave defence altogether. A ministry may need to shrink substantially or be replaced. A service may need to merge with another. The institutions and those with vast power over defence, like the Treasury, under review cannot be the sole judges of their own necessity: another mistakes of the reforms since the 1960s.

Furthermore elected representatives need independent research, professional evidence and access to arguments that established channels may exclude. Effective civilian oversight depends upon the quality and range of information available to those exercising it.

But note, there is no organisational utopia at the end of this. That was the lie at the heart of the Cold War organisations known as the ‘DoD’ or MoD’ when everyone knows and yet will not speak it, that its fallen far short of promises. The Admiralty warned this would happen and it has.

Reconstructing defence through haste, selective evidence or political theatre would repeat the failures the history of defence organisation exposes but be mindful the record held in many nations is full of simplifications, full of inaccuracies, wrote by those who wanted the system and maintained by those who want to keep it.

Importantly, change must preserve readiness and expertise while transferring responsibilities and authority. But those requirements strengthen the case for beginning deliberately now. Defective organisation can distort preparation, procurement, advice and operational choices long before the consequences become publicly undeniable. The people eventually ordered into danger may then be asked to compensate, through courage, for what political and institutional leadership failed to address through judgement. Their professionalism cannot absolve that leadership but history shows us both positively and negatively that organisation can make or break the success of the efforts of those serve. Something I proved in the PhD was that Royal Navy under Admiralty notably, by every metric, has outperformed the version under the MoD. For many this was a too bitter pill to swallow because the sandcastle built in careers in service to centralised defence had done the very thing they were not supposed to do: degrading efficiency or undermining effectiveness. You cannot have both, in perfect alignment but that defences have degraded under unified defence, in a form that has changed little since the Second World War, is a damning indictment of political inactivity on the topic. For the political body the reality being that the broken promises of what unified defence would achieve when it did not (that few have called out) left such a bad taste in their mouths that they would not touch the topic again. The price was simple: chaos, and from that, questions were asked that never truly got to the bottom of the matter. You can pick the case study, Afghanistan? Iraq? Vietnam? The Falklands War? Or what about other matters: budget management? Procurement? Private defence companies? The possibilities are endless when the door is open to ask: is defence organisation working the best it could or is there something more rotten, more fundamentally broken?

If anything my research showed that governments and the military are frankly too scared to open this door.

My forthcoming book sets out the historical foundations of this argument: how the choices made during defence unification reshaped strategic thought, how their contested origins became obscured, and how the resulting institutions narrowed the possibilities for defence. The price was strategy, and I lay that out as study of the past but a warning for the future. More than twenty years of work have convinced me that adjustment within unquestioned foundations is insufficient and therefore radical change in defence organisation is now well overdue. Its purpose must be to restore the ability to develop and execute national strategy, one that accepts the integration of seabed through space, and whatever that requires of the institutions or services currently arguing for their own continuation must be dealt with directly.

My fear is that the institutions and interests capable of postponing that reckoning will keep doing so until failure becomes impossible to explain away. Equally, it’s time for people to pick a side, national strategy or the comfort of service loyalty or the status quo of current defence organisation?

The body bags will probably pile up before the political will to replace failing structures finally arrives. That is the prospect we should be working to prevent. Waiting for casualties to make an argument already supported by evidence is itself a failure of responsibility as well as, duty.

For decades navies were asked to prove their relevance, a combination of factors aligned to keep these questions alive through sneering interservice rivalry, geopolitical events, technological change and the classic excuse that many misguidedly use : ‘changes in warfare’.

In 2026, events rendered this question out of step, if not obsolete. While there have been years in which the argument had either advanced or set back, 2026 saw events override them. For much of the post-Cold War era, navies have existed under a peculiar intellectual burden. They have repeatedly been asked to demonstrate their relevance. What are navies for? What is seapower? Are aircraft carriers obsolete? Can surface warships survive modern attack? Will drones replace everything? Why maintain expensive ships when aircraft and missiles can reach across continents? What contribution can naval forces make to operations ashore? And so on. It was like every major study of navies spanning centuries might have been unwrote because seemingly for all the efforts, debate was unending.

These questions generated conferences, doctrines, books, defence reviews and endless arguments about the future of every aspect of navies. Yet, there was always something fundamentally wrong with the premise, which is why they continued to roll on. It was not that the sea has become less important, it was nations and ultimately people, even those you would expect should, have become less capable of thinking about what the sea means. This is quite natural with hostile environments without an education system in place to communicate what the oceans mean to nations.

In January, I described the British manifestation of this problem as the progressive separation of tactical naval competence from the maritime strategic understanding that ought to give it purpose.1 The starting point, I argued, needed to be ‘Planet Ocean’ rather than ‘Planet Earth’. How nation states understand how geography influences how they conceive strategy, organise themselves and ultimately exercise national and military power. What followed during 2026 turned that intellectual argument into observable reality.

Events in the Black Sea demonstrated the possibilities of autonomous naval warfare. The Middle East exposed the enduring power of maritime geography. Merchant shipping once again became an object of coercion. Undersea infrastructure demonstrated that the digital economy remained dependent upon physical maritime systems. The Indo-Pacific continued to demonstrate that the principal long-term competition between great powers was inseparable from oceans, islands and shipping.

But perhaps the defining strategic image of 2026 was simpler. It came down to a classic naval and seapower matter: the chokepoint.

Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, and, for Britain, the English Channel.

The irony was extraordinary. At precisely the historical moment when the international system was being forced to rediscover the political power of the sea, some nations that had once understood seapower––in Britain’s case invented it––best appeared increasingly incapable of exercising it.

For all the technological sophistication of twenty-first-century warfare, geography staged an extraordinary comeback in 2026. Except, of course, geography had never gone anywhere. It was almost for all the prophets in think tanks, PME, defence companies, and the military who sounded the drum beat of the next technological revolution, history and geography decided to slap them hard in the face and back to reality. You can see this at sea, on the land and in even in space.

The Strait of Hormuz supplied perhaps the clearest demonstration. Before war began in February, approximately 125 vessels passed through the strait each day and roughly one-fifth of global crude oil and LNG supplies moved through it. By September, traffic had fallen dramatically amid attacks, blockade and insecurity. The effects travelled far beyond the Gulf: into insurance, shipping rates, energy prices, inflation, financial markets and ultimately the political calculations of governments.

Then came Bab el-Mandeb. Pressure on one maritime artery did not make maritime dependence disappear. It transferred vulnerability towards another. The Iran-aligned Houthis advanced along Yemen’s Red Sea coast towards one of the great gateways of international commerce. Their position around Bab el-Mandeb gave Iran and its partners growing leverage over the movement of shipping between the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Suez Canal and Mediterranean. The narrow passage carries a significant proportion of global energy and merchandise trade. Even the apparent alternative to Hormuz demonstrated the same problem. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline could move oil towards the Red Sea without passing through Hormuz—until that infrastructure itself came under drone attack.

Of course, ships could sail around Africa and oil-redirected and suppliers found elsewhere, but every alternative imposed costs in distance, time, money, capacity or political dependence. Geography was once again having its revenge, dictating strategy.

From this, an uncomfortable question emerged.

Where was seapower and the navies?

Where were the supposedly naval powers whose fleets, alliances, defence budgets and military establishments had been justified for decades partly by their ability to sustain the international maritime order?

Of course, navies were not missing in the literal sense. American, British and French (and others) warships remained at sea. What increasingly appeared missing was the political effect that such naval superiority was supposed to produce. The paradox was more troubling than a simple absence. The ships were present; the expected consequences of naval superiority increasingly were not. The fact that civilians and military in our vast monolithic defence ministries should know that threatening a chokepoint amounted automatically to loss of command of the sea secured embarrassment for all.

That raises the real question of 2026: what is naval superiority worth if an ostensibly inferior opponent can still dictate the conditions under which strategically important seas are used?

Iran does not have to destroy the United States Navy to exercise maritime leverage at Hormuz. The Houthis do not need to defeat an American carrier group in a fleet action to exert maritime power at Bab el-Mandeb. They need only make the use of those waters sufficiently dangerous that other people behave differently, diverting them from their goals. For example: shipowners alter routes, insurers alter premiums, energy traders alter prices, Governments alter policy and ,ilitary forces are diverted: Diplomatic negotiations change.

That is political effect produced through the global commons that the oceans.

One of the worlds best strategists and historians, Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922), would have recognised the distinction immediately. Command of the sea and advantage at sea was never simply a question of destroying fleets. The strategic object concerned the ability to use maritime communications, or prevent an enemy from doing so, in pursuit of political purposes. That is why a conventionally inferior actor need not defeat a superior navy to achieve a maritime strategic effect. It need only interfere sufficiently with the use of the sea to alter political and economic behaviour.

In 2026, some of the supposedly weaker maritime actors appeared to understand this rather better than the great (and once great) naval powers. You can bet, other unfriendly forces and nations, looking close to their home have watched all of this with interest.

This is why the simplicity of navalists counting warships tells us remarkably little about who is actually exercising seapower. One of the most uncomfortable spectacles of 2026 was that actors possessing a fraction of Western conventional naval strength repeatedly demonstrated an ability to influence maritime behaviour, while some of the world’s most lethal naval powers struggled to guarantee the freedom upon which the system supposedly rested. That should trouble naval establishments considerably more than another debate about whether a frigate carries enough missiles or how many drones can cut the pension bills for sailors employed.

Later in the year, for Britain, the problem of the Royal Navy and seapower deepened, as the English Channel became a front for more reasons than one. The most symbolically powerful demonstration of the collapse of seapower occurred much closer to home.

Before continuing, it is vital to, understand the English Channel is not merely another stretch of water. It is bound into the historical identity of England and subsequently Britain as a seapower. To some degree it has defined seapower to other nations and their navies nearly as much. It is an expanse of water that across commerce travels, fleets concentrated, invasion threatened and the strategic identity of the English state developed. The modern navy was born there. The Channel was simultaneously highway, defensive barrier and gateway to the wider maritime world.

Yet, throughout 2026 Russian naval and state-associated shipping became a recurring feature by their presence in Britain’s maritime approaches. The Royal Navy shadowed some Russian warships and accompanying vessels through British waters. By June, it (questionably) reported maintaining an unbroken watch on Russian frigates and associated shipping for months. But then came an episode that should have attracted considerably greater strategic reflection: a Russian frigate fired warning shots at a civilian yacht in the English Channel before subsequently escorting a shadow-fleet tanker through the waterway. Tankers, the British government was reluctant to intervene with unlike America and France. Seemingly the spirit of old in England faltered and such it is worth thinking on that for a moment: A Russian warship fired warning shots at a civilian vessel in the English Channel.

Yes, the Royal Navy responded professionally: British ships and aircraft-maintained surveillance and Royal Marines later boarded a sanctioned shadow-fleet tanker in a substantial operation involving warships, helicopters, RAF aircraft and law-enforcement personnel. But this is not an argument that Russia had somehow conquered or legally controlled the Channel. Foreign warships possess navigation rights, and shadowing them is an entirely normal naval function.

The significance of this is far more fundamental.

The Royal Navy did its duty. The question is what the circumstances requiring it to do that job revealed about the state behind it. The fact that a hostile power could deploy a warship repeatedly through the maritime approaches of the British Isles, fire warning shots in the Channel, support state-associated shipping and require scarce British naval assets to maintain an increasingly persistent watch while again, geography had not changed, but Britain, once a seapower state, had.

For centuries Britain’s strategic identity rested upon an assumption so deeply embedded that it rarely required articulation: the waters surrounding the British Isles constituted the first strategic environment of the state. A critical function of an entire government department of state—that Britian decided to create: the Admiralty––was to educate to the realities of being an island. This was never merely about preventing invasion. The Channel and wider maritime approaches connected Britain simultaneously to Europe and the wider world. Their security permitted trade, communications, naval concentration and political independence. Control and use of surrounding waters were integral to the development of England and later Britain as a seapower. British power began and ended at sea, where a national strategy, saw all the services and components of defence working to that fact.

The reality is that in 2026 Russian naval activity around those same waters had become sufficiently routine for the Royal Navy itself to describe maintaining a near-continuous watch. Something that navies, friendly or otherwise in the past would not have dared attempt unless desperate. They smell weakness. In The Royal Navy 1546–2026?2 that Russian warships appearing emboldened in the English Channel mattered precisely because this was the maritime space that had helped define English culture, identity and defence for more than half a millennium. In other words, its embarrassing Britain on the world stage, and showing that the English are weak, if not they are not who they once where––back to education. You could perhaps find some form of analogy in South East Asia but then Asian navies seem far more determined to assert themselves, than European ones.

Perhaps there really was a message in that: because being a seapower or an actual naval power is not simply a matter of possessing warships. It is a state that understands the sea as either central to its political existence and subsequently organises national power accordingly or that an active effort to commit power at sea is because they understand how the seas influence global affairs.

For Britain, the last seapower state, the Royal Navy was only one component. Merchant shipping, ports, shipbuilding, finance, diplomacy, overseas bases, intelligence, hydrography, science, industry and the Admiralty existed within a much larger maritime system. The impact of those now purposefully deconstructed are playing out in front of British taxpayers eyes, 2026 was just the watershed when the decline once constrained to naval circles was fully exposed in doing so opened the door to more then debates in the UK about British defence.

To step more broadly, is then to compare the three maritime gateways beside one another.

A) At Hormuz, Iran demonstrated that a state facing vastly greater aggregate Western military power could nevertheless impose extraordinary costs upon the global economy through its geographical position and ability to threaten maritime communications.

B) At Bab el-Mandeb, the Houthis demonstrated how an actor without anything resembling a traditional great-power navy could use missiles, drones, geography and political purpose to influence the behaviour of international shipping.

C) At the English Channel, Russia repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to employ naval force and state-associated shipping in the immediate maritime approaches of ultimately, histories seapower.

While these are different situations, where the legal circumstances differ, the actors differ and military forces are equally different, they collectively illuminate an singular strategic problem. It can best be summed up as:

Those willing to think geographically and act politically through the maritime environment have rediscovered forms of leverage that supposedly superior naval powers spent decades teaching themselves to overlook.

That is the key scandal at the heart of 2026 defence debate in the West. For decades Western navies were encouraged to become more ‘joint’, more efficient, more technologically sophisticated, more integrated and increasingly capable of generating military ‘effects’.

But to what strategic purpose? Navies are strategic, armies and land-based air forces are not, so if there is no strategic purpose does 2026 actually not say, why do we have navies? Of course this is swept under the table. British navalists are the perfect study case for this as they continue to debate weapon systems and equipment costs over the core issues that need looking at, such as seablindness, not realising they are doing exactly what those in the unified defence ministry and political circles want them to do: not talk about the near fiscal and material collapse of Britains defences. This should come as little surprise as the military personnel and government civilians have been educated in places like PME and King’s College London (amongst others) to a false narrative to the national strategy. This is because the truth, being maritime is not an option, wouldn’t fit their short-sighted continentalist tactical view of defence. Something that also conveniently fits in nice neat fiscal and political timelines.

On another matter, if some of the most technologically sophisticated warships ever constructed coexist with an international maritime system in which hostile actors can repeatedly alter the terms upon which merchant shipping uses strategically vital waterways, then technological sophistication cannot by itself constitute naval success. The entire ethos of navalism and naval thought after 1945 is now dead: technology wont save you. Plenty buried their heads in this scapegoat, particularly naval officers, but in reality, it’s the big questions now being exposed which many have ignored for so long that should have been addressed long ago.

The example is again Britain: if Britain possesses nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers and sophisticated destroyers yet struggles to generate sufficient force for simultaneous maritime demands while Russian warships become a recurring feature of the English Channel, repeating that the Royal Navy remains ‘world class’ is probably one of the biggest lies the English have let them tell themselves in a thousand years.

This is an opportune moment to remind that the purpose of naval power is not to win a comparison of technical specifications. It is to produce political effect through the use, control and influence of the maritime environment. That is why 2026 matters. The great maritime contest was not simply between ships. It was between those who understood the political leverage of the sea and those who had spent decades reducing naval strategy to the management of naval capabilities, this includes the United States.

To some degree, this why the events of the Middle East were so damaging for Britain. In Seablindness Rules Britannia, I had already argued that Britain’s land-centric defence had detached naval activity from national strategy. Yet as 2026 unfolded, Britain confronted one of the oldest questions ever faced by an island trading state: where is the Royal Navy? British citizens, merchant shipping, energy interests and wider political interests were exposed, yet Britain struggled to generate meaningful naval presence at the required scale. The problem is more serious than the media or even the U.K. Parliament could get at before the news cycle moved on.

Britain had failed some of the elementary tests of naval power and seapower: protecting shipping, concentrating useful force and providing government with meaningful choices at and from the sea.

That distinction matters.

Warships (not unmanned drones) give governments choices. They can escort, observe, deter, reassure, evacuate, intercept, blockade, clear mines, strike, collect intelligence, demonstrate political commitment or simply remain present while a crisis develops. The exact mission cannot always be predicted when a ship sails. That is one reason versatile naval platforms have survived repeated declarations of their obsolescence. When ships do not exist, cannot deploy, lack ammunition, lack personnel or are positioned according to the wrong strategic priorities, governmental choices contract. And when choices contract, political influence contracts with them.

In Britain has Failed in the Basics of Naval Power,3 I therefore argued that the crisis exposed not merely insufficient numbers of ships but reduced British diplomatic clout and increasing national vulnerability. The problem was not simply that Britain possessed fewer hulls, it was that the relationship between nation, sea and naval power was being dismantled. That is considerably harder to repair and last time a crisis of such depth happened, the King empowered an Admiralty to oversee change.

Elsewhere in 2026, it produced the predictable counterargument. Perhaps all this merely demonstrated that traditional navies themselves were obsolete. Ukraine’s extraordinary employment of unmanned systems in the Black Sea has inevitably become Exhibit A of the supposed crime scene, that techno-prophets claimed the next military revolution was inescapable.

While technological transformation is real, unmanned surface craft, aerial drones, distributed sensors and increasingly autonomous systems are useful to the tactical environment of naval warfare and an augment other systems, they also have limits that cut options. But technological transformation does not automatically amount to strategic transformation.

This distinction matters because Britain appears dangerously close to learning precisely the wrong lesson. Unmanned systems risk becoming a convenient mechanism for avoiding the fundamentals of naval power. The argument was never that AI, drones and autonomous vessels are useless. Quite the opposite, instead the error is believing that because new technology can augment naval power, it can automatically substitute for naval power. History shows us this time and again through supposed revolutions, such as:

A) The torpedo would render major warships obsolete.

B) The submarine would make surface fleets impossible.

C) Aircraft would end the warship.

D) Anti-ship missiles repeatedly made carriers and major surface vessels ‘obsolete’.

Every technological development changed naval warfare. None abolished the requirement to use the sea. Successful naval innovation normally involves integrating new technologies into an evolving fleet and strategic system rather than destroying that system in anticipation of technological promise. The distinction between the Black Sea and the Atlantic alone should make this obvious. A weapon or platform that performs brilliantly in a constrained operational environment cannot simply be projected universally across oceans characterised by different distances, sea states, weather, logistical requirements and political purposes. The lesson from Ukraine is therefore not: warships are finished, it is: warships will once again, adapt.

Another hot topic of 2026, is the maritime problem ends at the surface. The infrastructure upon which supposedly immaterial modern societies depend remains remarkably physical. Data does not float magically through ‘the cloud’. Energy does not materialise at the consumer. Goods do not teleport between continents. The global economy depends upon merchant vessels, ports, terminals, pipelines and undersea cables. Much of the digital economy physically crosses the seabed, supported by space.

This has created another paradox: the more technologically sophisticated civilisation becomes, the more important parts of the maritime environment can become. For example, a fibre-optic cable on the seabed can therefore matter to national security as surely as a frigate operating above it.

The maritime problem now extends vertically: from seabed infrastructure through the surface and air above it into the space-based systems upon which navigation, surveillance and communications increasingly depend.

This does not mean navies have become obsolete. It means the maritime problem has become larger than the twentieth-century conception of a navy. That is precisely why naval strategy cannot substitute for maritime strategy. Maritime being at the core of a national strategy.

Not every element of the maritime century needs a fresh 2026 headline to matter. The Indo-Pacific has been the structural backdrop against which this year’s individual crises played out. Taiwan, the South China Sea, freedom of navigation, shipbuilding capacity, submarine fleets and the sustainability of long-distance alliances all remain governed by the same distinction argued for throughout this piece: the difference between possessing a navy and exercising seapower.

China has spent two decades building the former while explicitly pursuing the latter — expanding its fleet, its shipyards and its ability to reinforce and resupply across contested waters, in service of a form of a maritime strategy the state has articulated with considerably more clarity than some of its rivals have managed for their own.

That contest did not conclude in 2026, and it will outlast this year’s chokepoint crises by a wide margin. But it belongs in the same frame, because it is the long-run test of whether the states currently relearning the lesson at Hormuz and in the Channel absorb it in time to matter in the Pacific.

This brings us full circle to the intellectual failure preceding 2026.

For decades navies increasingly accepted the burden of demonstrating their ‘relevance’ inside defence structures that often-conceived strategy predominantly as the employment of military force. The question consequently moved downwards. Instead of asking how the maritime environment should shape national strategy, discussion increasingly asked what useful contribution navies could make to an already established land-focused military strategy. This is political science gibberish: theory, assumption and from that, chaos. The same kind of attitude as exposed by the policy of that nations can ‘bomb their way out of every foreign policy problem’, clearly not.

Again, navalism fell short, eventually the argument about the navy becomes an argument about equipment. And once that happens, the intellectual defeat is nearly complete. A navy is then being asked to justify individual ships rather than the state being asked to explain how it intends to secure its maritime interests and how that fits in the wider whole, from seabed to space.

For Britain this reversal is particularly serious. For centuries the British strategic problem worked in the opposite direction. The starting point was the character and circumstances of the state. Britain was an island dependent upon maritime communications. From that condition came political requirements, generating requirements thus maritime strategy. While, naval power existed as one of the principal instruments through which that strategy could be pursued. instead, today, Britain possesses ships and asks what might justify them.

This is why I have repeatedly returned to study of defence organisation, its relationship with strategy and the Admiralty

The argument is frequently misunderstood as nostalgia for an old government department. It is nothing of the sort. The importance of the Admiralty was not merely that it administered the Royal Navy. It represented an institutional concentration of strategic experience capable of communicating with the state. It helped educate government about why the sea mattered in the first place, as did to some degree, the independent U.S. Department of the Navy. Educating about hostile domains and domains outside of land to a national strategy is called the ‘Art of Admiralty’. There was nothing technologically romantic about that earlier prescription for a restored Admiralty. It concerned institutional competence — because ships without sailors, sailors without sea time, weapons without ammunition, fleets without logistical support, technology without experience and naval operations without strategy do not constitute seapower. This is why I subsequently raised the deliberately uncomfortable possibility of dating the Royal Navy: 1546–2026?

Not because the White Ensign disappeared nor because Britain suddenly possessed no warships let alone that history ends neatly on a particular date. The argument was that Britain had crossed a threshold. It had dismantled not merely ships but parts of the institutional knowledge, strategic culture and political understanding that had sustained its relationship with naval power. I called that date “a live point of debate” when I first raised it, I am not so sure I do still. Rebuilding a frigate is comparatively straightforward while rebuilding several generations of lost understanding through education is not — and whether it happens at all remains genuinely open.

This, then, was the great contradiction of 2026. At almost exactly the moment Britain reached the nadir of its modern maritime understanding, the international system supplied increasingly brutal demonstrations of the importance of the sea. There could scarcely be a more perfect historical inversion. A state that had done so much to develop modern thinking about seapower reached a maritime watershed struggling to perform some of the elementary functions for which British naval power had been maintained for centuries.

Meanwhile the vast continental nation with all its might at sea through naval power, America and the U.S. Navy, have proved what some of its greatest minds had worried about decades ago: America cannot police the world, let alone at sea. That the full weight of securing the oceans fell on the U.S. Navy’s shoulders has made the case, America is not strong enough, let alone: should it? Gaps exposed in America’s naval defences, are no fault of its sailors and marines, but it raises questions of higher naval command, the Pentagon and Congress. What the future of the U.S. Navy is, or American naval power, particularly at the juncture of the 250th birthday of America, is a question Congress should pursue with haste.

There was another uncomfortable novelty. Navies had always existed partly to protect maritime communications and merchant shipping, and historically warships were expected to accept danger in doing so. Yet in 2026 the relationship sometimes appeared to have been inverted. The vulnerability of increasingly scarce and expensive warships became a reason for limiting their exposure even as merchant vessels remained exposed to attack. Rather than naval forces accepting risk to preserve the use of the sea, commercial shipping could be left to absorb the risk—or avoid the contested waters altogether. We can easily explore this: something else happened at Hormuz that had not happened in living memory. Shipping companies made near-daily requests for naval escort through the strait. The U.S. Navy, the most powerful naval force in the world, repeatedly declined, citing risk too high. When an escorted-transit scheme was eventually attempted, it was paused within a day — and shipping operators soon began avoiding it anyway, on the calculation that sailing near a warship now made a vessel more likely to be targeted, not less. The last time American warships ran this waterway under comparable threat, during the Tanker War of the 1987–88, they escorted. In 2026, for the first time since, the world’s dominant navy judged the risk to itself greater than its obligation to the shipping it existed to protect.

That is more than an operational problem. It raises an elemental question about what a navy is for? If a warship becomes too scarce, too expensive or too vulnerable to be risked protecting the maritime communications upon which the state depends, then the means have begun to defeat the purpose.

There is nothing new about admirals calculating risk, preserving fleets or refusing foolish battle. Corbett himself would have understood that perfectly. What was striking in 2026 was something different: the possibility that protecting the warship had begun to take precedence over protecting the maritime system for which the warship existed. This is wrong and again raises a question over the state of intellectualism, training and education in defence both civilian and military.

Equally, both Britain and America should be asking that with all their experience and intellectual might why they couldn’t bring seapower to bear on problems to end them or secure them. As I have said before, the relationship between education and decision-makers, between academics and military, between taxpayer and defence isn’t working in many ‘Western’ nations.

I would not call the twenty-first century ‘the century of the navy’. That would repeat precisely the intellectual error I have spent years criticising. The answer to land-centric military thinking is not naval-centric military thinking. National strategy cannot be reduced to institutional advocacy for one military service over another. Defence organisation looms in the background as ever but no one will tackle it until the body bags really pile up. The lesson is larger, instead the twenty-first century is revealing itself as profoundly maritime. Trade, energy, communications, resources, climate, food, critical infrastructure, technological competition and military power intersect at sea. Naval forces operate within that environment. They do not define the whole of it. That distinction separates naval power from seapower and naval strategy from maritime strategy. The most natural ally to strengthen this point is events in space, which are seeing the same kind of debates take place: a profoundly maritime environment but disconnected from understanding that due to debates over space warfare.

It also explains why simply buying more ships won’t solve many nations problems. Ships in numbers matter vastly, but so does ammunition stocks, industrial capacity and logistic paths and vitally people and readiness matters. But they become strategically meaningful only when a state understands what it wants them to accomplish and why. Otherwise, we merely construct a more expensive fleet without recovering the strategic understanding that gives the fleet purpose and it must be that navies push the door open on the reality of seabed to space strategy, then doctrinal straightjackets of old to get people talking in the right direction again.

In conclusion, 2026 was a watershed for navies but historians should always be cautious about declaring watershed moments while living through them. Events that appear decisive can later prove transitional. Apparently minor developments can become transformative, but events of 2026 are hard to ignore: the Black Sea demonstrated that inexpensive technology could transform the methods of naval warfare without abolishing its strategic purposes. Hormuz demonstrated that geography could still hold enormous parts of the global economy hostage. Bab el-Mandeb demonstrated that an armed movement without anything resembling a traditional great-power fleet could nevertheless acquire extraordinary maritime leverage. The seabed demonstrated that the supposedly virtual infrastructure of twenty-first-century civilisation remained physically vulnerable beneath the oceans while in the Indo-Pacific, it continued to demonstrate that great-power competition was inseparable from oceans, islands, merchant shipping and naval power. The English Channel demonstrated something different again: hostile naval activity had become part of the new normal in waters integral for centuries to England’s identity as the historical core of a seapower state. The strategic environment had not changed nearly as much as Britain’s relationship with it.

None of this proves that Britain, France or the United States (and others) has ceased to possess powerful navies. Clearly they have not. It reveals something more concerning: possessing naval power and exercising seapower are not the same thing. Progressively losing the capacity—or political willingness—to shape the maritime environment upon which its prosperity depends has come to a head. Conversely, actors possessing a fraction of that conventional military strength may achieve enormous strategic effects if they understand geography, vulnerability and political purpose. Imagine what a more powerful enemy could do, if it were so organised. The leadership of a navy, in desperate need of a powerful reformers, may now define the future success or failure of nations naval service more than ever.

This was one of the points made by Corbett a century ago. The fleet was an instrument while the sea was the strategic environment. Political purpose determined what command, advantage or use of that environment was meant to achieve: 2026 exposed what happened when the distinction was forgotten.

Many nations spent decades asking whether aircraft carriers were obsolete while hostile powers rediscovered chokepoints. They debated whether drones would replace warships while merchant vessels once again altered routes because governments could not guarantee passage. Armies and Air forces celebrated ‘jointness’, transformation and exquisite military technology while Iran and the Houthis demonstrated the elementary political power of geography. In Britain, the state of the Royal Navy droned on while Russian warships became sufficiently familiar in the English Channel to require an increasingly persistent watch.

The irony is almost too perfect: at the very moment the maritime world reasserted itself, some of the states that once understood seapower best appeared least prepared to exercise it. That is why 2026 should be remembered as a watershed for navies: not because navies returned in the mind of the public and decision-makers alike but because the consequences of their absence became visible.

For thirty years, navies were repeatedly required to answer the question: What are you for? In 2026 the maritime world supplied the answer. The sea remained the great highway of the international system: the carrier of commerce, energy and information; an arena of diplomacy and competition; a barrier and a bridge; a source of vulnerability and opportunity; and, when political order failed, an arena through which states and other actors could exercise coercive power.

For Britain the irony could scarcely be greater. The problem is no longer how to make the Royal Navy relevant to twenty-first-century strategy. It is how to make British strategy relevant to the maritime world in which Britain actually exists. It requires recovering the ability to think from the sea towards the state rather than from the defence establishment that sees the sea as optional. Elsewhere, it requires remembering what naval power is intended to achieve while remembering the distinction between possessing a navy and exercising sea power.

And, above all, it requires confronting the question that 2026 has made increasingly difficult for the naval powers to evade: If hostile powers can contest at sea so easily, when they could not before, where, exactly, are the navies?

Space presents strategists with something of a paradox.

Few environments are more dependent upon science and technology To reach space requires extraordinary knowledge of physics, mathematics, engineering, materials and communications, embedded into technological packages. The aspiration to advance in space is going to require even more. Clearly, human progress beyond Earth has therefore understandably been narrated through scientific and technological achievements: rockets, satellites, computers, astronauts, Moon landings and, today, reusable launch systems and increasingly ambitious plans for sustained activity beyond Earth. Equally air power dominated interpretation of space history has doubled down on this techosci-babble surroundeing misleadingly all elements of debate on space from policy, to warfare, to exploration.

Yet, this creates a temptation. Because space is understood through science and accessed through technology, we increasingly assume that the strategic problems associated with it can also be solved scientifically or technologically. They cannot. Science helps us understand the environment or even better, the geography of space. Technology provides the means to operate within it but Strategy gives those means purpose.

That distinction matters because strategy has always been an art rather than a science as much as the efforts of some fields have been since the 1960s to say otherwise- yes, I am looking at IR and PS. Its subject is ultimately human beings: their political purposes, ambitions, fears, interests, judgements and mistakes. History teaches this, should you be enlighte4ned enough to not just read history but study it. It must contend with uncertainty, competition, friction and an opponent who is simultaneously attempting to impose their own will. None of those things disappears because the strategist has chosen to depart Earth’s atmosphere.

The false prophets of technological change have appeared before. New technologies have repeatedly produced claims that warfare—and sometimes strategy itself—has fundamentally changed. Aircraft generated extravagant predictions about the ability of strategic bombing to determine wars. Atomic weapons appeared to make conventional forces obsolete. Missiles, precision weapons and computers subsequently generated their own forms of technological determinism. False prophets litter debate on defence, war and military history. It’s probably one of the biggest problems facing sound thinking on strategy, operations, doctrine and ultimately policy, it is an infection that runs deep.

Space is particularly vulnerable to the same problem. The technological barriers to operating there are so considerable that capability can easily become confused with strategy. Discussion consequently gravitates towards satellites, launch systems, weapons, resilience, targeting, orbital manoeuvre and increasingly sophisticated technical solutions. All of this matters, but none of it constitutes a strategy. A revolution (revolution being a word any sound thinker spits their tea or coffee out on hearing) in the means available to the strategist should not be mistaken for a revolution in the nature of strategy.

This is one reason I have increasingly argued that our understanding of space needs to move beyond space warfare. Space is already fundamental to communications, navigation, finance, intelligence, weather forecasting, scientific research, commerce and national infrastructure. States and societies are increasingly dependent upon capabilities operating hundreds or thousands of miles above the people who depend upon them. That dependence is frequently invisible until something goes wrong.

I have called this problem spaceblindness:1 the failure to recognise and understand the strategic significance of space despite becoming increasingly dependent upon it for security, prosperity and national power.

But recognising dependence is only the beginning. The larger challenge is understanding what kind of strategy such dependence requires. Strategy in space cannot begin and end with preparations for a future space war. Competition occurs before conflict while diplomacy occurs during competition. Commerce, communications, alliances, scientific cooperation and national interests continue during both peace and war. Indeed, much of what will determine the future strategic character of space may occur without a weapon ever being fired, you can find similarities throughout naval and maritime history.

This is where history one again proves its value. Space is not the first hostile environment to humans in which humanity has had to develop strategy for an environment it cannot naturally inhabit, and the richest body of experience for thinking about it comes not from the air or from earlier space efforts, but from the seas and oceans.

Humans had to develop technologies to travel across oceans. They learned to navigate enormous distances. They developed methods of preserving food and sustaining crews during long voyages. Science and exploration preceded and accompanied commerce. Commerce created infrastructure and therefore human dependency on systems. Communications became strategically vital while governments developed laws, institutions and diplomatic arrangements. Military, maritime and naval forces eventually protected national interests, trade and communications of which national and international matters depended.

Technology transformed this maritime world repeatedly. Sail gave way to steam while timber gave way to iron and steel. Industrialisation transformed shipbuilding around the world, weapons became more lethal and logistics went global, beyond anything earlier age of sail Admirals could have imagined. Yet, through every one of those changes, the underlying strategic questions remained essentially unchanged: how to protect what a nation depended upon, how to compete for advantage short of war, and how to convert technological superiority into durable strategic effect.

That is the lesson space strategy has yet to learn. We have spent a generation treating space primarily as a warfighting domain in waiting, and comparatively little time asking what a mature strategy of space competition, dependence and statecraft should actually look like. 2 The sea took centuries to develop that maturity, but the direction of travel shows space does not have that long. While concepts like space control get bounded about with no real proof com testing behind it; again the seas showing us like sea control and command of the sea -space as fleeting. Spaceblindness will not be cured by better satellites or even space forces. It can be addressed by strategy.

There will always be those who ask why we go. Why return to the Moon when there are problems on Earth? Why spend the money? Why accept the danger? Why persist when technologies fail, schedules slip and exploration proves more difficult than what is promised on paper, social media and Congressional statements?

History suggests that these are often the wrong questions.

The people who complain about the risks and expense of Artemis are the anti-intellectual descendants of those who would never have boarded a wooden ship to cross an unknown ocean, but whose societies subsequently prospered because others did. They would not have climbed into the fragile machines of the first aviators, yet today think nothing of boarding an aircraft and crossing a continent in hours. They would have questioned technologies whose consequences could not possibly have been predicted, yet now live lives shaped by precisely that process of experimentation: modern medicine, communications, computing, entertainment, global transportation, weather forecasting and satellite navigation to name a few.

Civilisation has always contained a strange contradiction. We are suspicious of the cost and danger involved in creating the future, yet remarkably quick to regard the benefits of that future as necessities once somebody else has created it.

This is why Artemis IV – the next moon landing matters.

We only have to look to the seas for guidance. Humanity does not naturally belong at sea. For most of our history, the oceans were deemed too hostile environments, let alone the reality that we could neither breathe nor permanently survive. Humanity, nevertheless chose to go, develop skill, to learn to sail and build great machines to go faster and further. Ships were developed, navigation, preserved food, medicine and communications, and eventually new forms of propulsion amongst other things. Tentative journeys became exploration; exploration encouraged science and commerce; commerce produced infrastructure and networks; those networks became highways of communication between societies; and eventually the oceans became an indispensable commons for human civilisation for both defence and civilian activity.

This is why maritime affairs must be understood as something considerably greater than navies or warfare — a point I have made at length elsewhere. The subject encompasses the broad spectrum and interrelationship of politics, economics, science, technology, exploration, industry, trade, foreign relations, communications, law and culture. Naval power is part of the maritime world, but it is not the whole of it.

Space is no different in principle, however different it may be in physical character. It is another hostile environment in which human beings cannot naturally survive. We must choose to go there. We must build the machines that carry us, learn to navigate across it, sustain human life while travelling through it, communicate across enormous distances and construct the infrastructure that eventually permits us not merely to visit, but to remain.

And just as maritime history was never simply the history of warships, the history and future of humanity in space cannot be reduced to rockets, astronauts or military satellites, air forces or the dogmatic views of air power theorists. Science, exploration, commerce, technology, politics and strategy are intertwined. This is a case I have made previously in examining the foundations of future space strategy: the civilian and military histories of space cannot be neatly disconnected, and thinking about the strategic implications of humanity reaching beyond the atmosphere began before what we have come to call the Space Age. By 1945, before Sputnik and before Apollo, the British Admiralty and U.S. Department of the Navy was already considering rockets, operations reaching into space and the possibility that international interests would eventually emerge there.

That historical perspective matters because judging Artemis IV according to whether it produces an immediate economic return fundamentally misunderstands exploration. The sailors who crossed the Atlantic could not have produced a spreadsheet demonstrating the global economy that would eventually depend upon oceanic communications. Nor could the pioneers of steam propulsion have foreseen every transformation in commerce, transportation and naval power their technology would enable, any more than the first aviators could have explained modern mass tourism, overnight freight networks or an aviation industry connecting almost every major city on Earth. The early developers of computing, communications, the internet and satellite technologies were no different — none of them could have completely anticipated how deeply their inventions would become embedded in everyday life. Many which we take for granted.

Transformative technologies create possibilities before societies discover everything they will eventually do with them.

Nor should we imagine that progress follows a neat upward line. Ships sank. Expeditions disappeared. Aircraft crashed. Rockets exploded. Technologies failed. The cost in human life was painful but lessons were learned and insight from experience (for that is all we have) was gained. Subsequently, designs, plans, doctrine, and knowledge accumulated. What was experimental became reliable; what was exceptional became routine; and what had once appeared unnecessary became something societies could scarcely imagine living without.

So, when I say Artemis IV must not fail, I do not mean that every component of the mission must work perfectly. A spacecraft can fail and launches can be delayed let alone a programme can encounter technical problems. Exploration has always involved setbacks precisely because it involves attempting things humanity has not yet learned to do routinely. The failure we cannot afford is a failure of will, something we should know, the public should be educated about, from seabed through to space over multiple millennia’s.

What we should be much more concerned about is losing the political, cultural and strategic determination to continue than about encountering technical setbacks while doing so. The words of some journalists or those who ironically take for granted that their free speech to criticise is today using technologies and an entire civilisations built on those people who took risks through civilian enterprise or defence of nation. History matters here because experience provides a foundation upon which we can think about unfamiliar strategic problems. Humanity’s future in space should not be approached as though every problem beyond Earth has suddenly appeared without precedent — a point that follows directly from my earlier work on this subject. We possess thousands of years of human experience in confronting hostile environments, expanding communications, developing technologies, creating commercial networks and building institutions to govern them, like Admiralty. The maritime experience is especially valuable precisely because humanity had to learn how to operate for sustained periods within an environment in which human beings could not naturally live.

The process is more important than any individual destination: exploration leads to greater scientific knowledge; science and necessity stimulate technology; technology enables communications and commerce; commerce demands infrastructure; infrastructure permits sustained presence; and sustained presence eventually makes settlement possible.

We should therefore be careful about describing Artemis simply as another “race” to the Moon. A race has a finish line. Becoming spacefaring does not. This matches maritime history closely.

NASA’s 1960s Apollo programme demonstrated that human beings could reach another world and return. The challenge facing this century is different. It is to begin turning extraordinary voyages into sustained activity: learning how to travel further and more reliably, how to operate for longer periods away from Earth, how to build infrastructure, how to sustain people, and eventually how to create the scientific, commercial, political and strategic systems that will accompany permanent human activity beyond our planet.

There is also a still larger reason why this matters. For all the legitimate arguments about budgets, national priorities and the speed at which we should proceed, there is ultimately no permanent choice between remaining an entirely Earthbound civilisation and becoming a spacefaring one, no different to how island nations had no choice but to be maritime and continental land masses realised they needed dominance at sea through civilian or military presence to have influence in the world around them.

Earth is our home, and we should protect it and address it issues but they can not consume us to the point we give up on space, we must be mindful it is not a permeant home.

The timescales are almost incomprehensibly long, and the eventual evolution of the Sun is obviously not an argument for the budget of one lunar mission today. But the underlying civilisational reality should give us some humility about the scale on which we think. Neither our planet nor our star will exist in its present condition forever. If human civilisation aspires to a future measured not simply in decades or centuries but in geological and ultimately astronomical time, then at some point humanity has no alternative but to learn how to live beyond the world on which it evolved.

That process will not begin with some magnificent starship suddenly departing Earth centuries from now. It begins through accumulated knowledge: one voyage followed by another; technologies tested and improved; infrastructure constructed; mistakes made and understood; people learning how to live and work further from Earth for longer periods.

There is something deeply familiar about that process.

We once learned to leave the shore. We learned to navigate beyond sight of land, to survive long voyages, to cross oceans, to establish distant communications and commercial networks, and ultimately to construct a civilisation whose prosperity and security became inseparable from the maritime world. The oceans ceased simply to be barriers at the edge of human existence and became great connecting spaces through which civilisation itself operated.

Space may represent the next great expression of that same human impulse.

The ultimate significance of Artemis is therefore not simply the Moon. Nor is it another twenty-first-century “space race”. It is another tentative step in a process humanity has undertaken before: learning to cross an environment that does not naturally sustain us, then learning to work within it, navigate it, communicate across it, trade through it and, eventually, live beyond the shores from which we departed.

We became a maritime civilisation because geography, necessity, ambition and human curiosity drew us across the oceans. In the very long run, astronomy gives us an even less negotiable imperative. Human civilisation has no permanent future confined to Earth. It must eventually become a spacefaring civilisation — and I would argue that, in character, organisation and strategic outlook, it will become an increasingly maritime spacefaring civilisation.

That future will not be created by Artemis IV alone. But neither will it be created without generations willing to take steps like it.

Artemis IV must not fail because going back to the Moon is not really the point. Learning how to keep going is.

The concept of ‘seablindness’ has traditionally been associated with societies that actively choose or innocently overlook the significance of the maritime domain. Although prosperity, trade and national security depend upon the sea, maritime issues rarely occupy sustained public or political attention except during moments of crisis. The challenge for maritime thinkers and strategy has therefore never been simply to explain ships, fleets or naval operations, but to persuade governments and the public that the sea is a strategic environment upon which national power fundamentally depends.

Today, a remarkably similar challenge appears to be emerging in relation to space.

Contemporary societies rely upon satellites for communications, navigation, intelligence, finance, weather forecasting, disaster response and military operations to name some. Few aspects of contemporary life remain untouched by space-enabled infrastructure, yet public understanding of space strategy remains remarkably superficial. Political attention frequently oscillates between spectacular achievements—astronauts, rocket launches and ambitious exploration programmes, (NASA’s Artemis for example)—and discussions of individual military capabilities or threats to them which impact both space operations or military operations on Earth. Lost between these narratives is a deeper appreciation of space as a strategic environment. It’s a common growing strain, not just in space, but the pull of short-term thinking, budget management, and policy and doctrine being confused by decision-makers. This raises an important question. If ‘seablindness’ has long constrained maritime thinking in government, are we now witnessing the emergence of ‘spaceblindness’?

Building upon my earlier work formalising the concept of ‘seablindness’, this essay extends that framework by introducing the concept of ‘spaceblindness’ as a means of understanding comparable patterns emerging in relation to space.

‘Spaceblindness’ is the failure of states and societies to recognise, understand and prepare for the strategic significance of space despite becoming increasingly dependent upon it for their security, prosperity and national power let alone the future of civilisation.

‘Spaceblindness’ is not ignorance of rockets or satellites. Nor is ‘seablindness’ simply ignorance of ships or oceans. Both describe a failure to recognise the strategic significance of domains upon which societies increasingly depend and they are long term, permeant commitments. They are manifestations of a deeper problem: the inability of states and societies to perceive, understand and prepare for the strategic consequences of dependence on environments that remain largely invisible in everyday political and national life. The reality is they are ‘over the horizon’ and humans struggle to think in anything other than terrestrial terms, or simply put ‘land think’, which includes the transitory environment of the air.

Sea-Space Dependency

The similarities begin with dependence. Historically, maritime nations often took the sea for granted precisely because it became an accepted part of national life. Trade arrived in ports, naval forces protected distant interests and the homeland and maritime commerce underpinned prosperity, yet the mechanisms that made these outcomes possible remained largely invisible. Public attention tended to focus on naval battles during wartime, overlooking the continuous strategic function performed by maritime power in peacetime.

Space increasingly occupies a similar position. Satellites have become so deeply integrated into everyday life that they are almost invisible. Navigation systems, financial transactions, weather services, communications networks and military command systems depend upon orbital infrastructure, yet these dependencies rarely enter wider strategic debate. The very success of space systems has made them easy to ignore.

In both cases, invisibility breeds complacency. This is perhaps the defining characteristic of strategic blindness. Societies rarely devote sustained attention to those domains that function effectively. Instead, strategic awareness often arrives only after disruption. Maritime supply chains become visible when they fail or come under attack. Undersea cables receive attention after they are damaged. Satellite constellations become strategically important only when they are threatened. Yet Strategic shock frequently becomes the first lesson in strategic dependence.

Technological Revolutions: Warships and Spaceships

A second similarity concerns the tendency to confuse technology with strategy. Maritime history demonstrates that fleets alone do not constitute maritime strategy. Ships are instruments employed in pursuit of political objectives. Effective maritime strategy depends upon institutions, education, logistics, industrial capacity, commercial shipping, alliances, legal frameworks and coherent strategic thought. Throughout history, navies have succeeded not because they possessed impressive vessels, but because those vessels formed part of broader systems capable of sustaining national power.

The same danger now exists in space, yet contemporary discussion frequently concentrates upon launch systems, anti-satellite weapons, commercial constellations and emerging technologies. These developments are undoubtedly important. But, technological capability alone does not constitute space strategy any more than aircraft carriers or submarines constitute maritime strategy. The critical questions concern how space capabilities support national objectives, how institutions organise them, how military and civilian expertise interact, and how governments translate technological potential into securing strategic advantage. Technology matters, but strategy gives all space technology purpose just as civilian and naval technology on the seas operate today.

Admiralty from Seabed to Space

A third similarity lies within institutions themselves. One of the enduring lessons of maritime history is that successful maritime powers cultivated institutions capable of thinking strategically over long periods. Admiralty, hydrographic offices, dockyards, merchant shipping, scientific organisations and professional education collectively sustained maritime capability across generations because they educated about a domain hostile and distant to day-to-day human life. Understanding of the sea and its impact upon life, emerged from those institutions

The same challenge confronts space today. Space is often discussed through the lens of innovation, air forces, and technological competition. Far less attention is devoted to developing the institutional foundations required to sustain strategic thought. Space forces, civil agencies, commercial providers, universities and governments all possess important roles, yet some of these institutions can either evolve, faster or slower, than the strategic ideas needed to guide them. The result is a growing imbalance between technological development and strategic understanding.

Perhaps the most important lesson offered by maritime history is that strategic cultures do not emerge automatically. Geography can only go so far to maritime awareness because seapower has always depended upon education, political leadership, institutional development and sustained public understanding. Without these, even maritime nations have repeatedly exhibited ‘seablindness’, the prime example is Britain in the 21^st century. The same could prove likely to prove true for space even with the true space powers like the United States and those who seek to disrupt that dominance, such as China. Like the seas, space, is a long-term strategic game, one a nation will either execute on or be left out from, the victor being one that understood the best of maritime strategy and used it in space, bringing civilian and military power together.

Growing dependence upon orbital infrastructure or space technologies, which does make the news, will not automatically produce strategically space-minded societies. Space awareness cannot be assumed simply because satellites and space assets both civilian and military have become indispensable. It must be deliberately cultivated through education, professional military thought, institutional experience and informed public debate.

The comparison, however, should not be misunderstood. This is not an argument that space is simply another ocean, nor that maritime history provides the perfect blueprint for space operations, it is the best fit and far superior to any air power theory. Space remains a distinct strategic environment governed by different physical realities, technologies and legal frameworks, again maritime being the closest to draw experience from, then use theory which some propose. Yet, simple analogies obscure as much as they reveal but we can only draw from experience in other domains to guide it and until that experience gathers pace in space itself.

However: the key value of maritime history offers something unique. Maritime experience demonstrates how nations learned to understand environments that were simultaneously distant, unfamiliar and strategically indispensable. It illustrates how institutions evolved, how strategic cultures developed, how commercial and military interests became interconnected and how national power increasingly depended upon domains extending beyond territorial boundaries.

Seen in this way, ‘seablindness’ and ‘spaceblindness’ are not simply analogous concepts. They are recurring manifestations of a broader strategic phenomenon. States repeatedly fail to recognise the significance of domains that quietly sustain their security and prosperity until crises expose those dependencies, only for them to be quickly forgotten again when the news cycle moves on. Strategic blindness therefore emerges not from ignorance of technology, but from deficiencies in strategic culture, institutional development and failure of education in politics and to decision-makers from policy, to doctrine, to business and beyond.

If maritime and naval history offers one enduring lesson to contemporary space strategy, it is this: strategic dependence must be understood before strategic crisis forces that understanding upon us. The challenge for the twenty-first century is therefore not merely to build better satellites, launch more spacecraft or establish new military organisations in orbit. It is to cultivate the strategic understanding, institutional maturity and intellectual foundations necessary to ensure that growing dependence upon space is matched by an equally sophisticated appreciation of its place within national strategy. One that must be seabed to space.

The danger is not that progress in space will stall, it is that nations arrive there still strategically blind when they reality is, they need not.

This article originally featured on the King’s College London website on 28 July 2026. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/from-seablindness-to-spaceblindness

(C) Dr James W.E. Smith, 2026.

In March 2026, Britain failed to adopt its own definition of maritime nationhood, sea power, and naval strength—a framework ironically crafted by its intellectuals based on centuries of accumulated cultural, political, strategic, and operational experience.

The outcome was stark. The central question became whether the subsequent criticism—from media, politicians, academics, and veterans—would alert, or more crucially, educate the state to revise its plans. Some warnings had been too little, too late, as if their proponents had suddenly realized Britain was an island and they existed on planet mostly made of oceans. A nation that had long been educated to understand the necessity of their own seapower to assert order over everything they were vulnerable to: supply chains for energy, food, goods, and capital; the very mechanisms of global interaction had vanished at an alarming rate over the past four decades.

What remained unsettling was this: many of those who had engineered seapower’s collapse—civilians, politicians, even veterans—now raged about a ‘course correction’ precisely when resistance had already been futile. The rot had been deepening for generations, their active choices and actions merely accelerating the outcome, it was more for some covering their tracks they had played a part in this eventual downfall. They seemed to now be complaining for frantic off-ramps from an endpoint already unavoidable: national seablindness and flowing from that, an irreversible fading of the Royal Navy into irrelevancy.

Of course this could have been avoided. Warnings about the Royal Navy’s precarious position had persisted since the 1950s, through the 1980s. More importantly, the Admiralty—home to centuries of Britain’s seagoing expertise and strategic experience—had explicitly predicted how the Royal Navy could be neutralized by political choice or misguided military advice.

This foresight was largely superseded in the 1960s by those who sought their own agendas. The creation of the Ministry of Defence, adherence to the Treasury, and elimination of professional discourse that had advised the political body on why Britain’s national strategy remained as it had, and even—amid the pressures of running a nation—why defense must be funded through long-term planning.

The problem wasn’t sudden abandonment but systematic devaluation. The Admiralty had traditionally educated the state about the maritime core of national strategy—a function naval officers, once Britain’s seagoing experts, were neither trained nor interested in continuing. When the Navy was reduced to staffing rather than leading its own destiny, this knowledge atrophy became an institutional blindspot: one of the pillars of its eventual downfall. Naval and marine personnel left to execute professional tasks at sea or on station deliveveref for Britain because that is where they were best place, they rarely wasted time networking in Whitehall. The British Army and its subsidiary service, the Royal Air Force, by contrast, were highly proficient in networking. Their capacity to articulate excuses—against hundreds of years of strategic, tactical and operational experience for Britain—enabled a gradual yet determined shift away from maritime strength toward land and air dominance in Europe.

The arguments here extend from decades of research that culminated in a PhD on organization and national strategy. Over several years, I’ve shared findings through papers, lectures, and articles—nothing I’ll repeat now. Consistently, I’ve argued that language like “terminal decline” or “rise and fall” distorts what’s happening or how things got from ‘A to B to C’. The collapse of British national strategy and the Royal Navy’s shift from relevance to failure aren’t sudden—not tragedies waiting for acknowledgment. They’ve been unfolding against a longer trajectory.

When I wrote in March 2026, I noted one final pathway remained before having to concede that organisational terminal decline was more than speculation: the relationship between sea, navy and nation must be addressed as the number one priority, in short, education. That threshold has now been crossed because that priority was not addressed.

With evidence established and reversal highly improbable, I think it’s time to accept that the Royal Navy is becoming history—and the moniker: ‘1546-2026’ is a live point of debate. It’s not the point of this article to write the pathway of how the Royal Navy, or more importantly, British defences, got to this point, I explore this fully in my forthcoming book based on the PhD, but why the threshold has been met to consider that moniker.

The reality is that terminal decline was avoidable. Others and I warned were ignored if not ridiculed over recent years for pointing out a change of course was required. This is, unfortunately, somewhat a ‘I told you so’ moment. It equally serves as encouragement to those engaged in research to keep plodding on, irrelevant of head winds you may face.

For some, the Royal Navy has become merely a metric of material power. But even there, presence and strategic reach matter more than ship numbers—unless meaningfully integrated with broader national strategy. Ultimately, the question persists: What is this service intended to accomplish, and how should it do so?

The challenges resonate across many militaries, particularly around funding. But funding is hardly a new issue, financial concerns have been its defining characteristic since Henry VIII’s codification of naval power to the state in the 1500s, with other countries following suit. What demands greater examination is something different: the culture and attitudes toward the Navy within the unified defence framework [the MoD], and critically, who ultimately shapes policy and makes final decision—Cabinet, or more precisely the axis of Treasury and Prime Minister.

It’s evident that efforts to educate the nation—and particularly decision-makers—about seapower have long been absent. Decades of issues in defence that Parliament and public were promised were solved by reform, have not been. Again, something the Admiralty predicated would happen because the roots of the MoD were not sound, so matters like interservice rivalry, generic bland civil servants, and collapse in proffesinoal expertise are now playing out with a compound effect.

In the British characterises, Generals and their evolution, Air Marshals, think in tactical, land-narrow terms. This becomes critical when a military leader trained primarily in these frameworks leads the Royal Navy as it does now. During Middle East events in early 2026, the head of the naval service was conspicuously absent from defence planning, leaving professionals like the Chief of Defence Staff to make statements like “the land is an aircraft carrier”, so forget seapower.1^[1] Consider this irony: The CDS, an RAF officer, employed language from 1960s RN-RAF disputes—specifically, the contested sea versus land air power. If the MoD and Joint Services College Shrivenham genuinely believe in jointness, how is it that an RAF officer used this narrow framework in the 21st century? How did he learn that? A hint that defence unification that controls service education was never about unifying anything.

The Admiralty in the early 1960s warned of something real: as defence thinking grows more ‘purple’—bruted through with the reasonable point of operational jointness—it becomes a front for army-RAF land-think. This shift matters because it fundamentally contradicts centuries of practical understanding about Britain’s strategic position and limited capability to influence events near and far. Remember: British power achieved great things through surgical application of that power, the relationship of army and navy, and based on experience—not on following the thinking of alien concepts that went against an island nation’s experience. Note that the CDS later claimed it was time to abandon historical understanding altogether.2Consider this: the greatest military operators from the classic period to 21^stcentury conflicts and civilian strategists consider the study of history as indispensable—precisely because it’s all we have over theory and guesswork. That is because theory and guesswork remains the clearest and most rapid path to defeat. Again, this raises questions about professional military education in Britain, Perhaps Shrivenham deserves more than academic scrutiny. Military personnel need to develop expertise and grow the forum to evolve the art of war into something that will operate, not just get a pass in some classroom exercise with a nice certificate attached.

Again, as the Admiralty warned, this attitude, is exactly what the structure of the MoD would end up creating. Grabbing, experience: cultural, political, strategic, tactical, operational, technological, the art and science of warfare, everything Britain had hard learned and threw it to the wind. The price would be the Royal Navy. The level of arrogance that today's generations know better than centuries of experience arguably makes them worthy of learning the hard lesson of defeat or disaster at painful cost.

Where was the professional head of the naval service promoting seapower options to government advisors in 2026? Note that this occurs even as the same leader celebrates remarkable achievements in his first 100 days—only for Britain’s maritime identity, naval force, and seapower to crumble around him.3Ships take weeks to deploy. Ammunition stocks deteriorate. Sailors leave in droves, bored and demoralised by leadership’s apparent indifference to morale while dark fleets go unchallenged in UK waters, Britain’s defences are proceeded in the North Sea and High North while Russian warships feel emboldened due to the weakness of the Royal Navy to do as they please in English Channel: the channel that defined English culture, identity and defences for over half a millennia which previous generations saw as the last line of British defences else the nation has fallen. Perhaps there is a message in that.

It may very well be demonstrated that the first Royal Marine in charge of the Royal Navy will be the one who seals its fate. To abandon a naval officer as the professional head of the naval service, maybe one that seals the navy’s fate with terrible repercussions, equally a terrible legacy for the honourable Corps of Royal Marines. History may judge him as the very model of a modern major general.

The White Ensign’s prestige fades with each naval or political decision. Elsewhere, no one questions why the Royal Naval College consistently appears on protégé-cut lists while RAF Cranwell and Royal Academy Sandhurst escape scrutiny. Many have tried to silence British navalists, it’s a form of gaslighting when the evidence is laid bare, anti-naval sentiment is alive and kicking because simply put, the combination of agenda with poor-education has resulted in this sentiment. Elsewhere, Junior and mid -grade naval officers with senior ratings despair as they realise the organisation they serve in, fulfils the definition of an organisation in terminal decline: every time a problem is solved, two more pop up. They have also watched with concern as senior leadership also turned its back on the civilians, veterans and academics who could help them restore education about the service and maritime strategy. In short, an organisation cannot generate a response because other issues pile up continually. To use a nautical analogy: every time water breaches a bulkhead, the pumps can’t keep pace, and another compartment fills, accelerating the sinking process. The Royal Navy is dysfunctional, disorganised and barely functioning where standards, qualities and uniqueness that made the naval service what it was have been discarded. This is where things stand.

Equally troubling: senior naval officers reports allies reject British ‘hard seapower.’ 4But the United States rejected this framing, and Middle Eastern partners also dismissed it, clearly there maybe something wrong with the naval staff to be not only out of touch with allies but also the fundamentals of defence and warfare where hard power talks and the presence to protect citizens and shipping, the life line of Britain is a must. One might argue this was a cover to hide that Britain was in a position to shape events in the Middle East to at least protect merchant shipping, something Britain depends on, but again it was land-think that removed those assets even though they were aware they maybe needed there, because ultimately, the complete distortion of British strategy by land-think to be about fighting Russia was more important than national security where the sea comes first?5 So, what is ‘soft power’? Seamanship? Naval and military training? How can this claim hold when expertise has atrophied due to a fleet rarely at sea, submarines alongside, and resources so constrained that sailors gain little practical skill—once a defining characteristic that delivered countless victories for the Royal Navy.

You cannot advise on something you cannot do yourself. The nation that defined seapower and maritime strategy remains clearly on the backfoot, even compared to continental powers. That in itself is shocking for not just British taxpayers but allies around the world. For example, Italy and Spain, along with other nations with less naval experience or less inherent need for sea power are attending RIMPAC,6 while the Royal Navy is absent.

So what is the government’s plan for the Royal Navy? Plans seems perhaps an award too far for the British government and MoD because if you analyse their defence decision-making at least since 2001, it would fit the definition of chaos. Why break a habit? So, by scrapping future frigates and destroyers, they show they have learned absolutely zero from decades of mismanaged programmes, wasteful exhumation of money and that any commitment to the navy is unthinkable. That would require an understanding of strategy: something seemingly so far out of grasp of those who apparently hold so many University degrees, but degrees does not mean well-read or understanding which may explain some of the MoD’s approaches.

So instead, championed by General in Chief of the Naval Staff, the so called ‘hybrid navy’ concept is the snake oil of the day. In other words, AI and autonomous maritime craft taking the place of warships. Let’s call it what it actually is: the Treasury does not want to commit to spending money on warships and long-term financial commitments and because land-think has hijacked British defence, misguided knee jerk analysis of the Russia-Ukraine War has drove a new technologist mafia to do what they have always done for hundreds of years: try to claim one weapon system as the next best thing since sliced bread. We’ve seen this before, strategic bombing, the big gun, tanks, stealth, cyber, space, nuclear weapons, some false prophet always lurks in the shadows to try and push something using dodgy data. Fortunately, history offers guidance. Naval technology has always evolved, even when the character and objectives of war remain relatively stable. The evolution of navies suggests a meaningful pattern: radical transformation often leads to disaster, whereas phased introduction, development, and perfection have allowed platforms like submarines and seaborne aircraft carriers to become indispensable over decades. The critical point is that these advancements have augmented—not replaced—naval power and seapower’s influence from seabed to space. To rephrase: the navy’s core has remained constant. A backbone of hard power, firepower, presence, reach, resilience, people, the best training and capability have always been primary considerations, ready and able before anything else. A hybrid approach—AI and autonomy—is no panacea: the core backbone of fleet must exist, augmented by new technologies. Throwing away centuries of proven platforms in frigates and destroyers, even submarines to some degree of no replacement or such low numbers to be of no major force, is boldly stupid. The Royal Navy has the hybrid fleet the wrong way around because the core fleet will not exist in sufficient form to be the enabler of national strategy and defender of security it should be. Either way, the rhetoric around hybrid navies it is dangerous. This must be accepted alongside the understanding that the sea is a complex environment, tough on equipment, and what works in test environments may not translate into the diverse geographic environments around the world.

This raises the point that the combination of government cost-saving measures and poor analysis of select events in Eastern Europe—then actually a naval technological revolution like that of propulsion or weapons from past eras—is now happening. Pinning the entire fate of the Royal Navy on it is reckless. What should concern us is that the naval staff and government have lost the expertise in seapower they once possessed. A good example relates to the hybrid navy: the Black Sea has seen drones used effectively by Ukraine against a substandard, poorly trained, and ill-defended Russian Navy. These successes occur on calm days in the Black sea and weather shielded ports, a far fetch from the Atlantic, High North, Pacific and the coastal turmoil of territorial waters. Yet the Atlantic—and by extension the high Atlantic—the area the MoD has informed government is the core focus of the navy, and therefore its hybrid approach. Here, the sea state differs radically: the Atlantic produces 15-25 times more waves and perilous conditions than a typical Black Sea day.

Yet the MoD wants to bet the entire Royal Navy on autonomy and unproven technology? Any sailor knows the sea—a cruel mistress—imposes real strain on equipment that requires human intervention often. Under the hybrid navy guise, vulnerabilities become obvious: systems can be hacked; defences will be built against them; connectivity may vanish; there is an acute shelf-life constraint. These technologies also deliver fewer capabilities than crewed warships: less reach, less time on station, less presence. Warships give nations capability and governments choices. They are platforms that, when built right, run right, and its people trained to the best they can be, become one of defence’s most potent tools and assets and not just war fighting such as diplomacy, disaster relief, and a vast range of other tasks. One-trick wonders cannot and will not provide what warships offer and knee-jerk responses to the sinking of Russian ships tells us little bar defend your ships, as its always been, and have enough of them because just like tanks and planes, they can be destroyed. Some of the childish thinking in defence commissariat demonstrated reactionary thinking for clicks then pausing to think while the reality of ‘having a fleet’ is now dissolving as existing fleet structure faces no replacement and only less capable hulls in fewer numbers.

Drones and AI will not make warships irrelevant, just like aircraft, torpedoes and missiles, they instead encourage reform of the offensive and defensive capabilities of warships.

The likelihood of the Royal Navy projecting any serious power is now unlikely as it will never be able to bring power to bear with the resources it has. This demonstrates that the fleet originally designed around the aircraft carriers should have been built, as planned in the 1990s. It has never emerged because it has been endlessly tinkered by pressured naval staff who are unable to generate naval answers to contemporary security questions quick enough, coupled with the fact that numerous governments saw the Royal Navy as a funding source to prop up other sectors of the nations spending, with questionable results.

Navies are long term projects that no British government has committed to after the 1960s, a benchmark every government thus has kept to. Meanwhile, the 2026 Defence Investment Plan reveals the RAF receives a new stealth fighter and nuclear-armed F-35s. Irony looms large: the hybrid navy exists to prove warfare is changing and technology enables easier neutralization of existing platforms. Consider too that British air-based nuclear deterrence was identified for cuts decades ago—the submarine option emerged as the ‘best case.’ The RAF’s mission to control nuclear deterrence and all military air power, including eliminating aircraft carriers—the oceans being one of the few places today easier to protect assets from compared to land–has never ceased because it is set out in their fabric of their identity since 1918 to become the senior service.

If any military service is willing to sacrifice best choices that maybe not under its guise and instead favours ideology, nostalgia and sentimentalism–tradition is different–they are not patriots to the defence of the nation.

The UK has long demonstrated a pattern of institutional ignorance: no internal knowledge exists for these decisions, a classic ‘reinventing the wheel’ scenario. Equally the Royal Marines who have no dedicated capability to go anywhere or do anything get money to do what, they increasingly look like spare members of the ships company than a professional force with little to do by land and sea? Funding an amphibious minded fleet for that is not something the anti-naval establishment in Whitehall will do because no one can answer what the navy is for as no one wants to think intellectually about the defence and national strategy as Britain once did.

In all, this is the MoD’s legacy as military and civilians predicated between the 1920s and 1960s would happen in a generic defence department setup as the UK has today: no strategy, no thought, short-term band-aids at every turn. They cannot generate a meaningful response because of generic civil servants, poorly educated military professionals, and a government that has deconstructed the very repositories of wisdom decision-makers need to navigate complex matters and educate themselves with.

This is but a taste of some of the issues that I could talk about, these points made are not abstract theory but active choices military and political leaders have made and have done so since 1964. Since completing my PhD in 2021 on the relationship between defense organisation and UK-US strategy making, I’ve databased these decisions — recorded tens of thousands of choices across levels of governance over twenty years of study. What emerges consistently: disaster is a tale of many small choices and mistakes compounding into one major problem. It’s easy to deconstruct or destroy; regeneration and reconstruction remains difficult but the fact that the UK Gov cannot find a way out of a defence mess is the fact that no-one understands the problem because it is long in root, complex in form and few have the willingness to face reality. This is always the problem with power and centralisation, generic solutions, generic thought, loss of expertise, grey thinking, too many moving parts of anyone to grasp coupled with that UK defence reviews would never work as they designed to suit the processes of a continental nation, the United States, alien to the UK process which had a fixed strategy and if that fixed strategy was followed things would easily flow from it. This won’t happen today as it would tear down vast portions of defence, cut the size of the MoD and simplify procurement: things that have been artificially inflated and generated to support the deceit that has replaced of what British national strategy should be.

Generic mindsets, collapse in expertise and centralisation is one of the ‘pillars’ of why the Royal Navy is no longer the navy it was, it has lost its way and so has the nation on defence—the Royal Navy remains in name but in reality, does not exist as it has for the most part over centuries since 1546—but also connected to why Britain is no longer a maritime nation, nor naval power or seapower. The character of the British way of war has always depended on expertise — strategic thought, seamanship, military skill across services, a holistic understanding that now has vanished. A cohesive way of thinking about the art of war and peace that emerges from decades of shared practice, geography, and institutional learning, now lost.

The point of this article was not to dissect every decision that got to the point but show some of the pillars that have now pushed the threshold in which to consider the end of the Royal Navy, as there are complex factors spanning decades across geopolitics, foreign policy, finances, culture, technology and more. However, I’ve tried to articulate: higher organisation matters; education shapes national capability; the relationship between nation and domain understanding (geography) determines victory or defeat. Our forebears knew this, the Admiralty warned in the 1960s of what might happen and has now happened as they predicted: a navy would be made to be seen as irrelevant and subsequently impact British security and world standing for they are tied as one.

Britain did not lose its power solely because it lacked ships—it lost it because it dismantled the institutions, expertise, and strategic culture that had sustained sea power for centuries, and rebuilding ships alone will not restore what has been discarded. The British people, the taxpayer, can not ignore that older generations today were handed better defences than those they hand on, yet they continually make decisions as they have for decades that amount to this point and yet many continue to trust them, it is perhaps time for younger generations to take them to account.

But as great philosophers and historians note, all organisations fall if they are not maintained and wisdom preserved while keeping a constant eye on the future, being open minded but no so opened minded they lose their way. So, the reality that the Royal Navy has been defeated without a single shot being fired fits in the trends of history, that all great things come to an end in less then obvious means. The Royal Navy’s defeat fits historical patterns of initial quiet, non-obvious decline that grow and evolve with time into something compounding to a runaway train. Great things don’t end dramatically, Rome didn't —they erode through slow shifts that decision-makers normalise as status quo particularly when the command and control function that was equally about educating the state, through the Admiralty, has been disbanded which would challenge that status quo.

Land-think—army and airforce— thinking versus maritime, is the battle the Royal Navy has lost. It’s why everything happening to the Royal Navy falls within expected parameters, as long predicated by the Admiralty, for there is insufficient understanding of the navy and of education of national strategy, which in the case of islands, is built on maritime foundations. The navy no longer has the intellectual heft to counter the land-think that the entire weight of the MoD and Government supports.

The philosophical point holds: wisdom requires active preservation, not assumption. The Royal Navy’s story isn’t anomalous; it reflects the tension between adaptation and identity, learning and decay, and now, likely the only path back would be to restore Admiralty, or a simplified version to enable education of the state to maritime strategy and about the Royal Navy. This won’t happen because it means those accustomed to centralised power, which also created the mess of British defence as is, won’t give that power back to decentralisation. After all, the art of Admiralty–educating the state to a national strategy with a maritime core–would present a dissenting voice against a land-think continental minded MoD who does not serve the military but its masters in the Treasury. Ultimately the end of the Royal Navy as it once was, in nation, in spirit, in an organisation of maintaining peace and winning at battle, is due to the culmination of decades of structural, cultural, and strategic drift in Britain, long warned about, with the intellectual foundations so vital to its success, discarded to now not be able to rebuild.

All of this discussed here, I explore this more in my forthcoming book, where I discuss all the ‘pillars’ over centuries that shaped the relationship of defence organisation in the U.K. and U.S. with thinking about strategy and acting strategically at the national level. I examine what the future may hold and explore these questions through the insight offered by a case study: how one of the world’s most successful fighting forces—the Royal Navy—was deconstructed, to the destruction of a national strategy.

Selected Further Reading:

• Warships IFR Magazine (2026) | “How Britain squandered its naval might”. Warships IFR Magazine (2025) | “Timid Britain is afraid of Maritime-led Global Strategy”

  Warships IFR Magazine (2025) | “Restore the British Way of War & Keeping the Peace”

  Warships IFR Magazine (2024) | “Restoring British National Strategy and the Future of the Royal Navy”

  Warships IFR Magazine (2024) | “Understanding Seapower transcends a change of Government”

  Warships IFR Magazine (2024) | “The Art of Admiralty”

• The Naval Review Journal (2024) | “Seablindness and the Royal Navy after 1964”

  The Naval Review Journal (2024 | Reforge Britannia’s Trident or Close the Shop?

  The Naval Review Journal (2023) | “The Art of Admiralty”

3

As directly quoted below from this speech seen here:

The end of British seapower happened in 2026. It’s remarkable that a few months ago, commentators, politicians, scholars, journalists and the public were transfixed by news of the Royal Navy’s seemingly steep and terminal decline.The crisis had been exposed to the wider gaze of the British people by events in the Middle East. These exposed that Britain had little hard punch at sea, reduced diplomatic clout and was more vulnerable than ever. The options available to the UK Government in a crisis had been reduced to little, partly of its own making. At the heart of the matter - like a ghost from history - was a question the British public have often asked feel about their security have asked across nearly five centuries: ‘Where is our Navy?’

There was a realisation that we are living through what is possibly the lowest ebb for the Royal Navy in its history. The answer to the crisis - so typical of the politicalised land-think dominated Ministry of Defence (MoD) and adjunct of the Treasury - was a plan of hopes and dreams set called a ‘hybrid navy’. That is, lots of drones to make up for a lack of warships. Brushed under the carpet was the fact that Britain is no longer a seapower, a naval power of consequence or, worst of all, no longer a maritime nation.

It is a state of affairs 500 years in the making, with the Navy decades in the deconstruction.

It was warned about by plenty of people. The architects of its demise - and there are many – might wish for the news cycle to rotate, so the story could be forgotten. It did so and they were all effectively off the hook. They only had to wait a while and, if asked, suggest that it was not their fault.The harsh reality is that governance and accountability of British defence remains a case study of failure in contemporary politics and the State, and a far cry from the days of Admiralty.

The so-called ‘hybrid navy,’ therefore, is an admission of failure, intellectually and practically. It’s a scape goat concept that while it functions to point out warfare is changing - as it always is – is symptom of what all militaries do when they’ve run out of ideas. When stranded in a deep hole they cling to the concept that sunny technological uplands will save them.

Yet the reality for the Royal Navy is there is no money, no resources, declining personnel, combined with ‘seablindness’ has completed its work of ruination. Few within government understand the sea - or want to - and that’s a mindset shared by most of the general the public. Even fewer know what national defence strategy should be. Meanwhile, the national pursuit of seamanship as part of best defence seems to have been tossed to the wind, but then that is inevitable when land-centric warfare doctrine tightens it grip to choke the truth from every being spoken.

The hard work of centuries - achieved by sailors, marines, and civilians - seems lost because some in Whitehall and even in the Navy believe they are smarter than the full weight of strategic experience gained through 500 years of being an island nation. Military education led some there, it clearly isn’t working else we wouldn’t have seen statements and comments from politician and service leader alike as has seen the like the past six month. At the end of the day, the navy lost its brain with the abolition of Admiralty and has never recovered.

Fortunately, history offers guidance. Naval technology has always evolved, even when the character and objectives of war remain relatively stable. The evolution of navies suggests a meaningful pattern: radical transformation often leads to disaster, whereas phased introduction, development, and perfection have usually allowed platforms to mature, for example submarines and aircraft carriers have become indispensable over decades.

The critical point is that these advancements have augmented - not replaced - naval power nor seapower’s influence from seabed to space. To put it another way: the Navy’s core has remained constant. Hard power, firepower, presence, reach, resilience, people, training and capability have always been primary considerations, ready and able before anything else.

A hybrid approach – via Artificial intelligence (A.I.) and autonomy – is, therefore, no instant panacea and the rhetoric around it is dangerous. The sea is a complex environment - tough on equipment - and what works in test environments may not translate to the diverse geographic environments around the world. Attempting to replace all core capabilities with a single technological approach is essentially a pretext for acknowledging that the British government cannot maintain a robust Royal Navy. Some bury their heads in sand, thinking everything is well by totally embracing the hybrid navy concept while history shows time and again, a manned British warship, somewhere in the world has been the enabler of options and guarantor for pathways to warfare but more so, diplomacy and deterrence.

Meanwhile, warships take weeks to deploy, submarines are laid up, ammunition stocks are low, and sailors leave the Service in droves out of boredom. Getting the fundamentals right should be the priority, not risking everything on a technological utopia. What these new technologies enable us, is to think about the offensive and defensive capabilities of warships in the future, not give into sweeping statements of the relevancy of navy.

History shows such approaches won’t deliver near the promises made. For every offensive weapon or platform, someone invents a defence as they will for drones. Past examples of the ‘silver bullet’ range from the atomic bomb ending all war, to stealth and missiles reshaping the military and war fundamentally. Eventually they revealed as not the perfect solution some suggested. What sounds revolutionary in theory often rationalizes into something more realistic over time.

We must remember that technology cannot be held accountable, nor is it effective, for governance. Therefore, we must be careful about taking the human element out of war. The White Ensign on the horizon, with British sailors and Royal Marines enables diplomatic heft with the threat of force underscoring it, far beyond Britain’s other means.

A hybrid navy becomes more palatable when pressing issues – such as no attack submarines at sea, and no frigates reduced to pathetic numbers - receive attention and are made better, with the core of British seapower remaining intact.

Open-mindedness toward new technologies is wise, but so too is recognizing that if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Learn from it, create a tradition of excellence. Extreme openness undermines institutions, possibly enabling a dangerous willingness to embrace change which risks everything, such is the ‘hybrid navy’. One can not ignore the rushed concept of a hybrid navy is based on some dodgy analysis of events in the Ukraine war, many that operated in environments different to what other navies face or circumstances unique to that setup. This is dangerous line of thinking that time and again, history shows, when military services kneejerk react, it can lead to disaster.

It is an approach that deflects from a fundamental question: why do generations who inherited a superior navy pass on a weaker, poorer one? The ‘hybrid navy’ concept risks functioning as an excuse, allowing those accountable off the hook for failing to maintain British seapower’s core. That core must be manned, capable, superiorly trained, well equipped and globally deployable assets in the form of warships and they must be in numbers to deliver the presence needed. However the core is now so weakened it cannot even deter adversaries’ actions in the English Channel, such as the recent episode involving the Russian frigate RFS Grigorovich - action other than by the Royal Navy’s choosing in the channel was something unacceptable for centuries politically, publicly and the entire military establishment, even during Britains darkest hours of World War Two. In that example alone, you can see just how far Britain is failing in the basics of naval power: the nation that not only wrote the book on it, through experience, but led other navies to aspire to equal if not best it—like the United States Navy. The hybrid navy is a smoke screen for many to hide behind from accountability to the reality that Britain has failed as a naval and sea power.

Want to read more?

A version of not the article is available in print and e-print. The publishers website is:

https://warshipsifr.com/

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In the May 2026 edition of Warships International Fleet Review, (on sale in e-version and print in the UK & abroad after 20 April 2026), I argue the surface level arguments about the state of the Royal Navy such as seen in the media and social media, does not come close to reality of the actual peril that Britain’s seapower and the state that its national defences are in.

The full article is available in print and e-print. The publishers website is:

https://warshipsifr.com/

Please support publishing where and when you can.

BRITAIN FAILS AS A SEAPOWER

In the week of the 2nd March 2026, the Royal Navy failed the definition of a seapower, a naval power and Britain as a maritime power. Amazing to think that with British citizens, service personnel and allies under attack from the Iranian regime with shipping and mariners vulnerable, there was not, at one point, a single naval British naval presence in most, if not all the world’s oceans and seas. The following days, exposed not only what so many had warned about and feared for decades, but warnings from deep within history that the country would cease to be a power of any form at sea and the organisation of defence had failed at nearly every level from 10 Downing Street, to the MoD to naval operations and fleet planning. The subsequent public and political discussion was brutal, but equally honest, at the heart a key question: where was the Royal Navy? The beloved navy the British public–– England––had depended on for the best part of half a millennium.

There is plenty of blame to go around, if the truth will out, is an open question. Many knew that national and governmental seablindness was heading to a critical moment and it arrived in March 2026. In simple terms, the metrics are clear. Britain wasn’t a seapower because it had failed to guard the lifeblood of the nation through shipping, it wasn’t a naval power because its assets could not be concentrated into a powerful influence at sea, the air and over land, instead warships languished in port. Meanwhile British maritime power all but failed, after a long painful drag over decades, the world accepted the Royal Navy and London’s influence insurance markets and political punch was no longer part of picture when it came to sea security.

Should people be angry? Absolutely. The unfolding mess created in Whitehall by those who thought they know better than to listen to centuries of experience of defending Britain and its interest, effectively trashed 480 years of naval and maritime progress. Much of our maritime and naval institutional knowledge and experience was already forgotten but this could be the nail in the coffin. Effecevitely, humiliating the White Ensign, demoralised our sailors and marines and exposing UK citizens and interests. Some of the most ancient charges for an island nation like defending shipping were thrown in the bin along with an extra punch in the gut when continental nations, rallied their naval forces to the challenge. The British response, slow like a drunkard riddled with slurred Orwellian newspeak to avoid any politician, serving military or civil servant taking the blame for the failure unfolding before the British public’s eyes.

Crisis? Disaster? Failure? The rose-tinted spectacles, nostalgia, overzealous pride for the past and taking every recent decision ‘on risk’ in defence from policy, strategy, procurement and more, rebounded in the face of government. The reality the Royal Navy had proven itself in the Middle East against drone and missile attacks in 2023/2024 and concentrated expertise like keeping shipping lanes clear of mines, to then be withdrawn, shows a fundamental breakdown occurred somewhere in Whitehall and the military command structure.

Some might say ‘good’, a good hard kick in the stomach was what British defence needed in an increasingly fragile world. It’s not the first time policy-makers in London have had a hard wake up call, 1982 or the 1930s stand out clearly. But looking at the political and public decision, it went the direction many expected: shallow, based on numbers of warships and funding when the rot is deeper and goes back decades far beyond the navy. Yes, politicians are to blame but be mindful, they must be educated and advised about defence and in that, we could probably find where this went wrong.

But objective reality over what happened is taps into something greater: that British national strategy, something learned over centuries, has been rejected. British national strategy begins not with abstract conversation but with objective reality. Britain has always had one core defensive imperative: protecting its island territory. This isn’t optional—it’s the very foundation of ‘national security’. The strategy isn’t complicated––as many would lead you to believe—it’s simply what British seapower entails: a non-negotiable all service maritime core to defence that addresses the harsh realities of being an island. Britain has no choice in its defence strategy, because it always had to address maritime commitments, near and far from home, that were directly about the security of the nation. In short: defence of the island realm come first, before any discussions about broader strategic or foreign policy objectives. Geography demands a specific kind of military approach coupled with the fact that Britain has never had meaningful choices about its defence posture—it’s been constrained by its very existence as an island.

History shows even broken and impoverished, England understood that when a foreign power threatened them or issues arose, island survival demanded more than rhetoric—defence from invasion, securing resource lines to sustain the population, and preventing subjugation or manipulation of a nation that had cherished self-government than falling into the tyranny of an foreign power. A duty for all time, renewed and refreshed to reflect the times and what technology enabled. This is the price islands must pay to protect themselves before they even think about anything else. It means having presence of warships at sea to influence the area around them, protecting shipping and bases, guarding the seabed resource lines and data cables, monitoring the GIUK gap and controlling access to the Atlantic and Mediterranean. That Britain has stepped far from this, used soft power like words to try and cover up reality is shameful. The nation ultimately sacrifices its future by not being realistic to the facts of just how delicate island economies, the cost of living and defence of a ‘Western way of life’ stands.

Looking to the future, this maybe an opportunity for the White Ensign and UK defence to consider the best approach is to go back-to-basics. Restore policy and strategy to things history shows we can have confidence in, non-relenting reform of the MoD maybe overdue if any politician will tackle that toxic topic, while restoring both national and international trust in British naval power and the strength of its seapower needs to happen urgently before weakness becomes a further invitation to our enemies to test our resolve, disrupt our country, hurt our allies, or worse.

Historians generally resist speculation—yet this tendency creates a fascinating paradox. The study of past experience offers profound insight for the present and future, and historians are often the first to emphasise just because something is old that it is not neccesarily irrelevant.

The Admiralty’s structure—and how British defence was once organised: through committees rather than centralised management—likely would have prevented the situation where many claim that the Royal Navy is under strain, come [terminal] decline.

This invites an exploratory question: if Britain re-established an Admiralty independently or part of a vastly downsized and streamlined Ministry of Defence, what course might it chart for the Royal Navy? Drawing on two decades of my research into organisation and strategy—including long-term study of the Admiralty itself—I can offer some informed speculation.

For this exercise, the latest UK Defence Review will be discarded because it is unfunded, outdated and defence reviews an a foreign import to the British mindset, and the current funding model relatively maintained–although it is universally agreed, an uplift in real terms of the UK defence budget is needed. Also, the reader must be mindful, the Admiralty Board sets the overall direction. How that overall direction is resolved is handed to ‘experienced and trained professionals’ at multiple levels of the organisation. It should be understood, part of the success of the ‘White Ensign’ over centuries was that the Admiralty entrusted civilians and military execute on the tasks given to them, this is called decentralisation. This is an alternative to the approach of recent decades of micromanagement and backseat driving by centralised authority, that includes poorly educated civilian servants.

The Admiralty’s Proposed Framework:

The Admiralty Board, as the ultimate civilian authority over the Naval Staff, would likely direct through these prioritised lenses:

Immediate: Save from terminal decline; stabilise.1

Intermediate: Define actionable plans; resolve blocking issues. Understand timelines. Future planning, shape and scope of the fleet.

Long-Term: Educate against seablindness; rebuild national strategy with the other military service[s].

Direction:

The Admiralty rejects the notion of active choice by decline—both in Britain’s power status and in core strategic principles essential to national defence, prosperity and national success in the future. The navy is central to this imperative. Therefore the following immediate steps need to be take place as a cohesive whole:

The ‘back to basics plan’ for the HM Government and the Naval Staff:

• Restore ammunition stocks

  • Replenish weapons inventory to drive up shipboard combat readiness.

  • Restore frequency of live weapon firing training exercises.

• Revise equipment stocks

  • With limited warships, submarines and aircraft, the management, protection and survivability of those assets is vital.

  • Fit naval assets with defensive and offensive weaponry to protect survivability. Eliminate culture of ‘fitted for but not with’.

  • Investigate logistic chains for parts suppliers.

• Reestablish Greater Asset Presence at Sea

  • Reduction in maintenance times and issues must happen, failure should result in severe penalties.

  • Availability of all naval and maritime assets must be driven up, ensuring a mission capable fleet posture.

  • Restoration of time for sailors in the fleet to engage in training, data gathering on performance analysis by being at sea to reduce gaps in deployable readiness.

  • There is to be emphasis placed on seatime. His Majesty’s ships, submarines and aircraft of the fleet, need to be at sea more, driving the important of ‘experience’ in the suitably qualified and experience personnel of the fleet.

    • History informs us that experience has often been the determining factor or difference in the performance of one navy over another, which cannot be gained anywhere but being at sea.

• Accelerate Naval Asset Delivery

  • Admiralty would work with HMG/Treasury to enable a ‘one for one’ swap, of assets: warships, submarines and aircraft.

  • Delivery of new warships and retirement of old accelerated.

• Abolish, Pause or Reform the ‘Hybrid Navy’ plan:

  • Faceless and untested technology, including faith in that technology to take the place of more powerful and capable assets is misguided. That less assets but more technologically can counter balance numbers of proven assets, like warships, is out of touch. Technology has always been a factor in warfare.

  • Until core issues are addressed, future fleet composition ,which is currently guesswork or untested technology, is too risky. It is not to say that autonomous or AI has a role to play in the future of naval warfare but getting the basics right, must the priority.

    • Note: warnings from history about technological utopias and false prophets are numerous.

    • Beholden to lessons of one theatre or war, is misguided.

    • Rates of attrition of equipment are too high, considering core equipment like warships and the fleet in being concept is vital.

    • Defences against drones and AI will emerge.

    • Environments are harsh, as is the sea on equipment, that often require human oversight or involvement.

  • Numbers and availability of warships, submarines and aircraft matter, enable options for HM Government simultaneously near home and further abroad. Rising threat levels demand responses, it should not be left to ‘risk’ where a choice is forced of ‘one threat or another’ where plausible.

  • Those the navy serves, such as the protection of the merchant mariner, wish to see sailors and the White Ensign present, not technology. This is additionally a powerful deterrent to foes and diplomatic power for Britain.

• Eliminate Redundant Planning:

  • Scrapping conceptual waste like ‘Atlantic Bastion’ would yield improvements. Britain’s strategic reality and naval role have changed little; unnecessary academic exercises must give way to practical strategy. History provides the answers, whereas rebrands and new concepts that are a redress of once known things are wasteful. Nor is the naval service a job creation scheme for experimentation when more important matters must be addressed, like the size, reach and scope of the fleet.

  • Operationally, restoring trust with the British public, even if choices are made by HMG, should result in a firm policy of the interception, deterrence or removal of an aggressor, irrelevant of the asset they are using, from British waters [from seabed to space, in partnership with other services].

• Reform of Naval Staff Structure and Naval Personnel:

  • Redistribute focus from theory and management back to focus on the fleet.

  • Value retention of experienced personnel over recruitment of new personnel.

  • Emphasise seagoing/frontline experienced officers and personnel in the upper-echelons of the service.

  • Remove underperforming civil servants and those who made promises who can’t deliver.

  • Permit early retirement for a small group of senior naval/marine officers and civilians who contributed to recent setbacks. Bringing new talent and experience, preferably sea experienced, up from lower levels and providing opportunity for new sailors and marines to gain experience at lower levels.

  • Reassert naval command and control by reallocating Royal Marine talent to investigate the future shape and scope of amphibious capability and ensuring the Commando standard remains world-leading.

    • Should Royal Marines believe they are a land-force than a maritime force they should be removed from the navy’s budget and handed to the army, if not disbanded.

  • Streamline decision-making, a natural process in the restoration of Admiralty.

  • Decentralise command and control to local authorities and those at sea.

  • Significant workload reductions for naval personnel by abolishing schemes, initiatives and programmes that distract them from their main tasks. That being getting ships, submarines and naval aviation at sea, training and gaining experience. Anything else is secondary or deemed irrelevant.

• Admiralty actions or investigations:

  • Admiralty-controlled PR/Comms office to counter misinformation and enable education without straining civil-military trust.

  • There should be no inhibition on valuing pride, heritage and tradition while equally moving with the times but the latter should not undermine the former. Restoration of fighting spirit.

  • Advice to HM Government about various matters such as the protection of shipping, protection of strategic chokepoints, risk adversity, use of naval service outside of NATO and allied frameworks. Realigning the Royal Navy to a British security profile first, followed by strategic alliances second. Reassess threat models and priorities including doctrine and wargaming.

  • Examine PME (Professional Military Education) effectiveness for naval personnel.

  • Investigate integration of other services and their experiences with the naval service and the effectiveness of so called ‘jointness’ at various levels.

  • Examination on the funding model of the nuclear deterrent.

  • Probe joint command integration mechanisms, placement and effectiveness for naval personnel particularly in operations and strategic level decision-making to avoid repeats of recent setbacks.

  • Explore academic relationships and advisory practices including use of institutional knowledge [the study of history, maritime strategy, national strategy and experience] and protection of corporate memory and recent tactical and operational experience. Reassess who has in the past counselled the navy and now who should.

  • Engage with other stakeholders, such as insurance and merchant mariners to assess their concerns and needs. Reassess international law and the impact of AUKUS.

END.

Losing seapower isn’t gradual decline—it’s active abandonment. This analysis examines how Britain systematically relinquished five centuries of maritime defense capability, dislocating national strategy from its geographic core. I challenge prevailing narratives of “managed decline” or simple “fall,” arguing that Britain’s post-2026 reality represents deliberate deconstruction of its seapower. The case study reveals how organizational inertia, technocratic bias, and political indifference can utterly undermine foundational defence principles—proving that geography offers neither safety nor ease, only non-negotiable survival demands. For scholars of national security, maritime strategy, or post-imperial defense, this examination exposes the sharp tension between historical reality and contemporary policy rhetoric.

In my 2021 PhD, ‘Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Unified Defence’ I predicted the end of Britain as an seapower, stating:

“Over the best part of five centuries, it was understood by some that seablindness is like a weed which needed to be pruned else could grow into a fatal cancer. If it was let out of control or the right circumstances aligned; they knew the eventual end of British strategy & seapower was inevitable for both are one and the same.”

The foretold end of Britain as a seapower began to emerge some time ago: with plenty warnings and ‘off ramps’ available. Since then, some have wrongly labelled it ‘fall and decline,’ while others call it ‘managed decline.’ Increasingly after the 1960s, understanding of seapower was purposefully reconfigured away from an understanding of the experience of how Britain developed the only national strategy it could. But Britain being a seapower is no more about foreign policy, the role of Britain in the world, defence asset numbers, or even resources than it is about anything else. It begins with geography and five centuries of how Britain [England] has defended itself.

More fundamentally, British national strategy begins not with abstract conversation but with objective reality. Britain has always had one core defensive imperative: protecting its island home. This isn’t optional—it’s the very foundation of ‘national security’.

British national defence strategy isn’t complicated––as many would lead you to believe for various nefarious reasons—it’s simply what British seapower entails: a non-negotiable maritime core to defence that addresses the harsh realities of being an island. Britain has no choice in its national defence strategy, because it always had to address maritime commitments, near and far from home, that were directly about the security of the nation. This has and should always be the charter of the island lands.

The real story is often reversed but the truth is conversations about defence of the island realm come first, before any discussions about broader strategic or foreign policy objectives. Geography demands a specific kind of military approach coupled with the fact that Britain has never had meaningful choices about its defence posture—it’s been constrained by its very existence as an island nation.

Since King Henry VIII founded the Royal Navy, few moments have seen decision-makers so consciously struggle with national defence: sometimes their hand forced, other times not so, equally, defence is not shielded from domestic issues. Domestic politics often forced hands, yet even when not, defence remained vulnerable to political neglect. What emerges is a consistent pattern: island security requires constant attention, never taken for granted. Yet through these trials, one truth persisted: when a foreign power threatened Britain, or issues arose or even internal crises emerged, island survival demanded more than rhetoric and was acted on.

Yet, history shows even broken and impoverished, England understood that when a foreign power threatened them or issues arose, island survival demanded more than rhetoric— It required a non-negotiable maritime core—defence from invasion, securing resource lines to sustain the population, and preventing subjugation or manipulation of a nation that had made and cherished self-government than falling into the tyranny of an foreign power [or alike]. A duty for all time, renewed and refreshed to reflect the times and what technology enabled. This is the price islands must pay to protect themselves before they even think about anything else.

2026 is truly a historical marker for the White Ensign and global military history. 2026 represents more than a date—it marks the point where Britain ceases to be a seapower. Without the ability to protect shipping lanes, choke points, fuel depots, or seabed resource areas; without control over Atlantic and Mediterranean passages; without the maritime programme that has defined British defence for five centuries—Britain is effectively declaring: “We do not care what once Kings, Queens, Parliament, Governments, and the public once understood: how Britain would be defeated”—and not necessarily directly by enemy fire. Whether through destitution or neglect, the nation ultimately sacrifices its future by not being realistic to the facts of just how delicate island economies, the cost of living and defence of a way of living stands.

The reality includes Britain’s only attack submarine based in Australia, naval assets idle while bases remain vulnerable, citizens abroad unprotected, and critical economic and security infrastructure exposed. Shipping travels unprotected; fuel lines and data pipes remain unguarded as a defence budgets prioritized imagery over substance. Warships proven capable of defending bases and civilian and military assets from air attack, protecting cargo ships, and securing food and energy processing facilities sit inert.

These are not accidents. They represent conscious choices about national security. A conscious choice to ignore centuries of experience. Hard power swapped for soft words and alliances undermined. The tradition of a navy and nation that acts, trashed. The lack of warships at sea undermines insurance, finance and trust let alone the taxpayer who asks a navy to be at sea not in port. The war with Iran, led by the United States, has exposed what many have warned about for sometime on the state of Britain’s Navy and illiteracy of British defence and security, which has been so often been more hot air then substance: the old adage talk is cheap in which to look good, but action is what matters. It should not be ignored Britain’s response to the Red Sea Houthi threat in 2023, was already a warning of the state of thought towards seas and threats to shipping, energy supplies and the global economy, all of which an island is vulnerable to.

Those wise, will not gloat at the situation but realise what this means, for the Royal Navy remains the undisputed naval fighting force by battle honours in history. Many other navies have taken inspiration, worked closely with, and grown alongside it, intellectually and practically to the benefit of global security. After all, the world should not ask one nation to bear the responsibility of all security on and from the sea. A sense of gratitude must be elevated to the steadfastness of the US Navy whose sailors, marines and intellectuals remain deeply connected with England’s, in more way than one.

Blame often falls on government. The reality, that I have researched, is there are many moving parts of how Britain got from A to B to C. But remember: civilian decision-makers can only act if educated, unless other reasons exist for them to avoid the insight of experience for after all, experience is all humans have. Instead look to advisors—both within and outside government—who hold answers of how Britain abandoned seapower. Unified defence: the UK Ministry of Defence, equally has a leading role in this failure. That is a story for another time, but few will admit accountability, hiding behind excuses. But they failed to understand the responsibility inherited from the past, by what it means to defend an island. Just because it is an old plan, doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant particularly when the receipts proved that a national defence strategy with maritime at its core works in which to address the unique needs of island, ignoring the temptation of land-think that drives continental countries to defend themselves differently.

For the Royal Navy, the circle is somewhat complete: a stain on its reputation, one not of their making yet will take the political ‘flak and ire of the public’. That they have not acted, even with the limited resources they have—an active choice by successive governments to reduce—only serves to prove the point of the fools who have sought to undermine national defence strategy and seapowers centrality to the island because now when protection and action is asked for, where are thou Royal Navy? Arguably something that has not happened before in the services history to such an extent. Navies want to give decision-makers options—and be known as "doing." Because no one can see what they're doing so they have to be known to be doing else the cycle of policy blindness towards them just deepens. In short: the end of Britain as a seapower is a series of smaller problems, over a long period amounting to an end state where few can track the origins of all the issues: classic deconstruction.

The sad reality for Britain and the world, is that Britain has some of the finest military personnel and defence intellectuals on offer, but government only had to be educated, a few who only had to pick up the book and read about how an island nation can be defended and has been successfully for generations. It’s not complicated when you inherit such wisdom from forebears who learned about it the hard way, developed the strategy from that difficulty and executed it. They also knew maritime included all-service participation with a naval core, one not blindly following theories of domain power which mean’t as technology evolved that the strategy stayed the same but the tools could be refreshed.

Those nations who understand the influence of the sea on national life, and the interconnectivity of seabed to space, as Britain once did, will defend and operate at sea with confidence and determination to the benefit of their security and prosperity.

The end of British seapower remains one of the finest case studies of the difficult relationship between organisation, policy, politics, agenda, and strategy—and of how unelected technocrats, bureaucrats, elites, and lawyers either believe they know better, have a different agenda, refuse to be educated, or simply refuse to listen to the easily accessible wisdom of history.

Either way, the Royal Navy did not ‘rise and fall’, nor was it ‘managed decline’, nor was seapower’s fate tied to Britain’s place in the world, its power status or Empire, it was actively deconstructed. This is where we are today: a day of reckoning.

In short, I revisit some arguments in my PhD and forthcoming title:

The myth of an American maritime “spirit”

The notion of an organic American maritime “spirit” is largely misrepresentative. Why?

This stems from a persistent assumption—also deeply flawed in much American naval thinking—that the United States can develop maritime argumentation through naval power alone and be by default a maritime nation. The concept implies some intrinsic capacity to be and think maritime, something few nations possess. Island states have relative advantages here; continental powers are often inherently skeptical or even hostile to the sea as they can retreat to land and have core security [food and fuel] without dependency on the sea, irrelevant of the prosperity that trade and more, that the oceanic forums enable for better or worse, which is a secondary matter.

American naval ambition is reactive, not organic.

American naval ambition hasn’t been spontaneous. It followed specific impetus:

• Beating the British and not just at war.

  • These are two different navies, and although the Royal Navy became subservient to the USN in the 20th century, the USN was never going to ‘best’ the RN in culture or spiritually because they exist for different reasons.

• Securing recognition of the US as maturing global power.

• Waging total war.

• Supporting American foreign policy objectives an era of super power and great power competition.

This isn’t an organic maritime spirit. Most of the time, American sea power has been a naval response to a naval question. This is far from an integrated maritime nation where every component—legal, inland seaways, business, enterprise, shipbuilding, naval, and more—aligns with culture, to work together. Shipbuilding has to be competitive globally, maritime products edgy, mariners trained and international laws influenced, rather than blindly accepted particularly when they tilt against good order at sea, if not against the ‘West’. The age of a happy world at sea, and trust of equals at sea through legal cooperation at sea that Britain and America wanted that came out of the Second World War, is dead, if not a fallacy either nation told itself in the first place.

In the past, America has been a maritime nation, but it is far from it today. Simply put, the concept of America is maritime nation and always has been is disingenuous to the truth and undermines the ability to think clearly about America’s navy and a broader American maritime future let alone a strategy of how the sea is going to influence what happens next. To be blunt, those peddling this myth, are part of the problem. Equally, teaching naval personnel–midshipman to Admiral–and civilians that America is a maritime nation or ‘inherently so’, isn’t helping the situation because they are effectively being duped into a false sense of security rather than being equipped to communicate who they are and what they are for. Education on the sea is a constant task, civilian and military must always be addressing it.

Attempts are underway, but actions, not just assertions, will determine whether a return happens at all, is short lived or longer lasting and this means uncertainty. Achieving true maritime national status requires vast support and significant investment across multiple fronts. It can’t resort to island arguments. This is which why in America naval matters get priority over maritime and civilian, but to be a maritime nation, this imbalance can’t last. It is also something that has accelerated the switch back from America being a maritime nation to a nation with a vast Prussian style tactical naval force.

The shifting dynamics at sea—real competition—notably civilian and military—suggest America’s naval advantage may be retreating, though this could itself generate impetus. It’s not the first time this has happened and plenty examples exist over the 19th and 20th century. Equally, consider the US Navy’s rebuilt strength after Pearl Harbor: astonishing resilience when pressed against the figurative seawall. Could America do it again? Afterall American naval ambition and enterprise, was something a wise Japanese Admiral observed and knew Imperial Japan’s fate was sealed by pretending to be a fake land power. An irony, the Royal Navy’s post-imperial decline directly corresponds to the biggest disaster in British defence: becoming continental minded and a fake land power. For American’s this is all you need to know why the Royal Navy is as weak as it is and how Britain discarded hundreds of years of institutional memory and corporate experience in one of the best national strategy’s the world has seen.1

But returning to America, it is critical to acknowledge, the naval advantage at sea was eroded largely from within the Western framework than outside pressure. Let us not permit those responsible for much of these outcomes escape accountability and equally, all the strain for keeping the peace at sea, or worse, fall entirely on the USN’s shoulders. Where are the other navies that were once part of great and powerful seagoing alliances?

Federal coordination to be a maritime nation remains theoretically possible, but it is also an all American enterprise right across the nation, though bureaucracy—often the genuine adversary of effective maritime and national strategy—will likely sabotage implementation. The deeper reality demands more than rhetoric; it requires sustained political commitment to rethinking America’s relationship with the seas with the USN just part of a picture, not the whole. Yes American navalists, this isn’t all about you and your shopping lists for naval procurement.

This framing obscures a deeper reality. As a continental nation, America has always required deliberate, sustained effort to be both a naval power and maritime power. US historical performance suggests oscillating fall and decline isn’t speculative but somewhat inevitable—making defensive navigation far more critical than patriotic assumptions about inherent seagoing competence in the minds of decisions-makers and lawmakers, let alone the US citizen: who has to fund it.

The core problem: Refusal to accept reality

The real issue remains that Americans refuse to accept a fundamental truth: its relationship with the seas has been “rather up and down,” and the Navy’s fate has often reflected those fluctuations. This volatility is somewhat natural for a vast landmass.

But the “sentimental drivel” of claiming America is a maritime nation—let alone that ghostly spirits of the past will easily carry forth to new glorious heights? That’s nothing more than navalism and misguided pride dressing up genuine difficulty in articulating what the US Navy actually needs or should do. It’s perfectly natural for a nation like the US to struggle with this, and that’s precisely why navalism itself exists but equally why navalism won’t go far enough to address it.

Until many acknowledge this, change will be reluctant and incomplete. It’s always been hard for America to be a sea power—it’s tough, grueling work that requires constant effort on multiple fronts. Quaint ideas and patriotic views are potent, but they cannot defeat the overarching problem. For serious strategists, this means nuance trumps nostalgia. The “maritime spirit” narrative serves more than analysis; it exposes genuine difficulty in articulating what the Navy actually needs and the interconnecting ligaments across the maritime sector and how it may survive into the future. The greatest cynic could see a future of a US Coast Guard, Army and Air Force: just as CNO King and SECDEF James Forrestal feared as they were forced to walk into the army built Pentagon building at the dawn of the defence unification era just after the Second World War having narrowly avoided the Department of War totally dominating the emerging Department of Defense….As Forrestal warned: the temptation for America and its navy to be ruled by an Army War Department, was an constant threat to American maritime power and one hard for America to resist nor dressing American naval strategy as ‘maritime strategy’ in an effort to convince America it was maritime. Cold War warriors take heed from King and Forrestal if you can bring yourself to accept this reality.

Why this refusal to see reality is particularly dangerous

To tip the scales of seablindness to disaster rather than something manageable—in island and continental nations–is usually due to lacklustre performance of continental thinking applied to the sea which infects thinking, debate and conversations towards a naval paradigm then a maritime one: distorting policy, destroying strategy and creating bigger problems for later.

Confusion steams on if America is a maritime nation from the geographic realities of America, flanked by two oceans: in short to go anywhere or do anything on mass, needs the naval and maritime component. Whereas, other nations, islands or those on continental land masses can clearly see their defence priorities: land and air together, or a maritime core to their strategy. That means Army and Air Force or, for others, a navy and expeditionary army. Either way, the culture of a continent overrides sound thinking on this, how the people feel safe, as we see in America is because of the lack of sea dependency which drives a paradox on exactly what the shape and scope of naval ambition and being maritime is.

A historical pattern

Again, many of our forebears on both sides of the Atlantic knew this. What makes this conversation urgent is its historical consistency. British and American figures from Washington, Adams, Mahan, Corbett, Sims, Knox, King, Forrestal, Burke, and others recognised these tensions, reflecting the times they operated. But today, it seems many either aren’t educated to understand it, refuse to study it, or lack the objective reality to confront it.

The narrative that America possesses an innate maritime character—from cultural DNA to strategic instinct—is widely held yet fundamentally flawed. Continental impulses will always override maritime ones in a vast land mass, like the US. Face this reality and make it the first priority, or in simple terms, fighting seablindness, and there are no limits for the US navy and the maritime sector to excel, from seabed to space.