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.

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).

The following is a primer for one of my forthcoming books

Governments are regularly urged to think more strategically. They are asked to look beyond immediate pressures, short-term political cycles, to connect their policies and bring national resources into a coherent relationship with national purposes. But through which institutions is that work supposed to happen? Who preserves the experience it requires, develops the arguments, advises political authority and helps turn strategic experience and judgement into something useful and actionable?

My forthcoming book investigates how states organise themselves for that task. It is worth being precise about what kind of question this is. The book is not concerned with how armed forces are organised for warfare — the arrangement of fleets, the disposition of troops, the shape of commands. It is concerned with how a state organises itself for strategy: a different and, I would argue, much larger question, because it is not really about administration at all. It examines the relationship between strategic thought and institutions through the contested history of defence unification in Britain and the United States. At its centre is a question that reaches beyond military administration: what happens to a state’s capacity for strategy when it changes the organisations through which strategic knowledge is developed, preserved and put to use?

The inquiry began with questions I first explored in 2005 about Britain and America’s changing relationship with the sea and space. Through my subsequent research, including my Master of Research and doctoral thesis, Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification, the problem widened. ‘Seablindness’ described an important condition, but tracing its causes led towards the institutions through which government understood maritime interests and related them to national strategy.

The book substantially rewrites, expands and reframes that research. The abolition of the Admiralty is its principal case study, examined alongside the experience of the American Navy Department — the most illuminating example available of a state consciously organised for strategy, and for that reason the clearest lens through which to examine what organising for strategy requires. It is not, however, the book’s subject in itself. Through their histories, it explores how strategic knowledge becomes embedded in institutions, what those institutions enable governments to do, and what is at stake when they are reorganised or abolished.

An institution carries more than its immediate responsibilities. It accumulates experience, sustains relationships and gives particular forms of expertise a place within government. It can preserve knowledge beyond individual careers and connect that knowledge to changing circumstances. A record can survive the retirement of everyone who understood what it meant; a responsibility can be reassigned on paper long before anyone works out that the judgement behind it went with the people who left. These functions help shape the questions political leaders consider, the alternatives presented to them and the means through which decisions become action. The power of professional forum in defence can not be understated.

That relationship works in both directions. Strategic requirements influence the institutions states create. Once established, those institutions influence how later requirements are understood. Organisation can sustain the capacity for strategy while also constraining it. Examining that relationship requires asking what an institution was built to accomplish, how it performed those functions and what happened when its position changed. Behind all of this sits the culture and geography of a nation.

Defence unification brings those questions into focus. The familiar account presents the concentration of authority as a rational response to the complexity of modern warfare. Separate military service departments meant duplication and rivalry; centralisation promised coordination and coherence. Seen from the existence of today’s defence institutions, the process can appear to have had an obvious destination.

Yet proposals for amalgamation were repeatedly advanced and rejected. Governments with direct experience of war and national danger considered alternatives to unified defence. Britain’s eventual settlement in 1964 therefore requires explanation on its own historical terms. Why did arguments that had previously failed succeed? What did their advocates expect unification to achieve? What did opponents believe would be lost?

The longer history is essential to understanding what was being reorganised. Beginning with the Council of the Marine in 1546, the book examines how experience became institutional knowledge and how that knowledge contributed to national strategic choice. The Admiralty’s responsibilities extended beyond administering the Royal Navy. It provided a historical embodiment of a wider capacity for strategic governance: connecting professional and civilian expertise, institutional memory, education and advice to the purposes of the state.

Different strategic experiences also produced different traditions of thought. The British maritime tradition and the continental military tradition associated particularly with Prussia developed contrasting understandings of national power. Their significance extended beyond the environments in which armed forces operated. They concerned how political purposes related to resources, geography, military force and the wider world. Institutions gave these perspectives continuity and authority.

My argument is that the triumph of unified defence accompanied a wider displacement of nations conception of national strategy where competing schools of strategic though sought the organisation to win against the other. Understanding that relationship requires bringing intellectual and institutional history together. The organisational dispute concerned the strategic assumptions through which nations such as Britain understood its interests, as well as the distribution of administrative responsibilities.

American experience is central to explaining the British outcome. The United States underwent its own prolonged struggle over defence reorganisation. Recovering the Navy Department’s perspective brings important arguments about strategy, authority and political responsibility into view. It also makes it possible to examine how American organisational experience, and the lessons attributed to it, entered British debate. The two histories illuminate different choices while also revealing connections between them but equally how wartime experience was manipulated to justify a course of action.

The book draws on government and departmental records, private papers and previously unavailable material from both sides of the Atlantic. Access to collections not available to earlier researchers, alongside material recovered through Freedom of Information requests, has enabled established interpretations to be tested against contemporary evidence. These sources help recover arguments and institutional perspectives that later accounts omitted or represented differently.

That evidence also raises a second problem: how the history of unification came to be understood. An account presenting reform as the necessary culmination of progress can make earlier alternatives seem irrelevant. It can turn strategic objections into little more than obstacles overcome. The book examines how a particular interpretation acquired authority, and why that mattered for the organisation whose creation it purported to explain.

The consequences extend beyond historical writing. If an institution’s origins are understood as proof of its necessity, later reform can concentrate on making the inherited structure work better while leaving its underlying assumptions unexamined. Recovering the choices behind unification restores the possibility of asking whether the organisation itself remains appropriate to national strategic purposes.

Those purposes extend beyond defence. Coordinating armed forces and employing them effectively are indispensable responsibilities, but national strategy must also connect political, diplomatic, economic, industrial and other means. An organisation capable of managing military power does not automatically encompass that wider task. Administrative integration and operational cooperation cannot, by themselves, demonstrate unity of national strategy.

The point of reference throughout is therefore the state’s capacity to think and act strategically. Neither an armed service nor an inherited organisational arrangement is treated as an end in itself. Where the evidence favours a particular service, capability or form of investment, the book says so; where it exposes institutional self-interest, inter-service rivalry, distortion or misrepresentation, it does not disguise them simply because they originated from a particular uniform, department or institution — the Navy’s included. Nor does setting aside service advocacy mean accepting the present organisation of defence as a neutral or permanent starting point. If organisation exists to serve strategy, organisation itself must remain open to examination. G. K. Chesterton described tradition as “giving votes to our ancestors” — a reminder that the historical record is not simply what has passed, but a body of experience with a legitimate claim on present judgement, if anyone still asks it. This book does not begin with a blueprint for reform, and it does not assume in advance what its conclusions should be. It begins with a historical question, and follows it through before asking what, if anything, it demands of the present. The loyalty here is to national strategy — its making and its application — not to the preservation of any particular institutional arrangement or military service. Whether the findings support adapting existing institutions, recovering neglected functions or developing new arrangements depends on following the evidence through to its consequences.

This is what the book offers: a history of the relationship between strategic knowledge, institutional choice and national action, examined through one of the most consequential transformations in modern defence. It asks how states learn, how they preserve what they have learned, and what happens when the organisation created to serve strategy begins to determine the boundaries within which strategy can be imagined.

The book is due in 2027.

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.

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.

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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.

From the Red Sea’s trade routes to Whitehall’s policy frameworks and into classroom curricula, a persistent issue emerges: seablindness, and now, it is breaking the Royal Navy. Land-centric thinking in Britain has repeatedly undermined national strategy, where maritime strategy is its core, leaving tactical competence decoupled from strategic vision.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve dedicated thousands of hours, acquired academic qualifications, and invested significant financial resources to examine how organization shapes strategic thinking and action. My focus has been on understanding the relationship between structure and behaviour—essentially, whether organizations can achieve desired outcomes. In the defence context, this distinction isn’t theoretical: it determines winning from losing. At the heart of my work is a world view, one of Planet Ocean than Planet Earth. How we perceive our world drives every strategic decision. The maritime perspective leads to a specific analysis: understanding phenomena collectively called “seablindness.”

Over the past decade, I’ve been disseminating findings through multiple channels. The “Art of Admiralty”1 approach emphasizes one thing first: communicating and educating about the seas becomes paramount. More directly, I’ve explored the actual reality of “seablindness”—understanding that while it cannot be vanquished, it can be tackled systematically. Alongside this, I’ve highlighted the practical and theoretical obstacles navies routinely encounter when genuinely addressing this challenge. You can read my summary from 2024 ‘Seablindness and the Royal Navy’, elsewhere I addressed differences between Britain and America including other nations on this matter through professional publications like the UK Naval Review. More recently, I explained what the endgame for seablindness is.

This article looks ahead to 2025 and beyond, examining urgent concerns about the Royal Navy and its persistent struggle with seablindness. I recommend you read at least the 2024 article as a primer before this one. However, what emerges is a genuinely grim assessment—one that must be told.2^[1]

What Naval Message?

“Silent Service” was always more than a nickname—it belonged to the submarines branch culture of secrecy. Yet it would be appropriate to extend the label to the whole naval service. Making visibility central to tackling ‘seablindness’ means acknowledging that navies work away from Whitehall and the public. This drives the need to exploit every opportunity to remind them they exist.

The 2025 Cenotaph service—complete with senior naval absence alongside Royal Household presence none of which were in naval uniform—represents a deliberate choice. Across events ranging from religious holidays to national public gatherings, the navy has retreated from visibility. For sailors and marines already battered by average 30% more deployment time, with the same pay, than Army or Royal Air Force [RAF] counterparts, this eroded representation sends a clear message: either the service has fundamentally diminished worth to the nation, or there’s a quiet omission — the navy is now so stretched it can’t afford things other services seemingly can. Visibility serves as a critical weapon against seablindness—especially for forces operating over the horizon. Yet those who claim to be rebuilding the Royal Navy seem still to have failed to grasp this fundamental truth.

This is a genuine chicken-and-egg dynamic emerges: declining conditions and resources affect the service’s ability to operate and do public relations and engagement, which in turn drives further decline. When a service cannot visibly demonstrate its value, political bodies unaware of the real cost become reluctant to fund it. And since beneficiaries cannot immediately perceive tangible benefits, they rarely feel the urgency to protect what matters most.

Royal Marine take over?

With no active four-star Admiral—for the first time in Royal Navy history—alone with the lack of a naval officer holding serious joint command across British defence, the service has broken centuries of tradition: a General leads.

Some might argue that should be the epitaph, the final curtain call. Their cynicism would be well grounded: if ever an analogy of the rejection of maritime strategic thought could be encapsulated, it could be in calling the head of the naval service “general.”

But the Royal Marines are no fools; that’s why they’ve often been given some of the toughest tasks in conventional British and special forces warfare. Yet if the recent cuts to Britain’s amphibious capability—reduced to pretty much zero—have left a chip on the shoulders of Royal Marine officers who now attempt to take over the navy, helping to give the boot to a previous ‘pro fighting seablindness’ First Sea Lord––for various reasons––then they have gone astray. It’s fair to ask, even if the marines reform themselves, how are they going to get into a fight when they are more limited than ever? Most Royal Marines, having been under threat of extinction for some time understand the value of public relations, and therefore should be sensitive to seablindness and naval needs, but these must be mindful of their traditional role, not one of a land force, from influencing their actions with the navy. However, if the marines seek comfort among the other services while the navy continues its own work, they should recall that the British Army has attempted to have the Royal Marines disbanded more than once. More importantly, since 1945 the Admiralty and senior naval leadership in the MoD era have time and again gone out of their way—often at real material cost—to protect Britain’s amphibious fleet and maintain Royal Marine Commando training quality. Institutions like Britannia Naval College, specialised equipment training and more broadly rating (sailor) training have suffered as a result. The charge that naval personnel have not taken marines, or what they uniquely bring as a fundamental part of the navy and broader defence seriously, would be a fundamental lie and stain on the reputation of corps if they believe it. Either way, for right or wrong, there is a theme emerging one of land-centricity that degrades the criticality of events at sea, and the seabed in favour of land operations, something out of step with events past and present on the oceans over the past few years and are now emerging.

Presence and Operational Matters: Land Centricity

This land-centricity in government was already apparent by the lacklustre response to attacks on shipping in the Red Sea in 2023. Educated Governments in the past, understood not just the importance of shipping to Britain as an island nation but also the impact it could have on global security such as through the economic markets. Letting Shipping being unsafe would have been anti-thetical once to Admiralty and government alike. Elsewhere while America3 and France4 openly seize, tankers operating under false flags for Russia, Britain has been reluctant to directly act [seize] bar then to try and ‘shoo away like a bad smell’ hostile actor ships from its waters.5 Power responds to power, and a gentle nudge from a service once versed in making tough choices, is hardly in the tradition of the habit of victory. If enemies at sea are smelling weakness in the White Ensign, the mythos and respect the RN once carried is all but dead. This is something further compounded as its fleet has withdrawn permeant presence entirely from ‘East of Suez’ while struggling to maintain presence in the Atlantic and Mediterranean: anyone who has bothered to study 500 years of British history, knows is vital for the RN to keep these secure. It’s hardly a global presence: ambition, reality and warship maintenance programmes seem to have been all disconnected in the minds of some.

In response to sustained attacks on merchant shipping, the Royal Navy deployed HMS DIAMOND, a Type 45 destroyer, to the southern Red Sea in late December 2023. The ship arrived formally in early January 2024 and immediately integrated with United States Naval Command and allied forces. Over subsequent weeks, DIAMOND achieved multiple engagements, successfully shooting down hostile Houthi unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The operation generated significant morale enhancement within the Royal Navy and reinforced confidence in the Type 45 air-defence systems. Recognizing the need for expanded protection, the navy ordered rapid augmentation. With no other immediately available Type 45 ships, HMS RICHMOND, a Type 23 frigate, underwent expedited re-tasking. Originally assigned to anti-submarine warfare operations in the North Atlantic and scheduled to join Britain’s Carrier Strike Group 25’s deployment, RICHMOND transitioned in short to open-ocean merchant ship escort. A useful reminder of the flexibility of well configured frigates––take note America. Differential performance emerged between the two vessels’ air-defence systems which was useful information. Either way, both ships spent months operating within high-threat environments. Prolonged periods at elevated readiness states: constant defense watches and action station became normal practice, granting ships companies with essential practice time, insight, data which is worth its weight in gold, when navies often fall short of having such experience: arguably some of the last times this type of experience was granted was in the 1982 Falklands War. This enabled changes across the fleet, honing experience into useful, practice improvements to systems, training and more. However instead of Britain maintain its presence, RICHMOND completed its tour and returned to UK waters by early May 2024. DIAMOND followed later.

No Royal Navy frigate or destroyer subsequently replaced these vessels in the region. The next meaningful RN presence materialized with Carrier Strike Group 25’s transit in summer 2025—a full calendar year later. The deployments remained notable for their rapid deployment characteristics, operational flexibility, and the practical insights gained through direct engagement with modern aerial threats. By comparison: The United States maintain a continuous, multi ship presence across the region. American surface ships view the southern Red Sea through a dual lens: as both a mission zone for merchant ship protection and as a deliberate training environment. Since the establishment of sustained Houthi threats, the US Navy has systematically cycled its ships through regional deployments. These missions expose sailors to real-environment operations. A distinctive feature of US Navy operations is the deliberate spreading of combat experience. By rotating ships through engagements, the service creates a distributed but credible experience base. This approach could yield significant value for potential conflicts in the South China Sea or around Taiwan within the next five years.

Other European navies demonstrate different approaches to regional presence. French, Italian, and Greek forces maintain consistent frigate and destroyer deployments. While their engagements remain less frequent to US operations, ships companies develop substantial practical expertise through prolonged, intensive interactions with adversaries.

A question remained: if this was a chance to test new systems and for sailors to gain experience that could contain great value for the future, why did the White Ensign essentially retreat?

The morale impact on the rest of the RN cannot be discounted. The work of DIAMOND and RICHMOND electrified the officer and rating cadres had been in the fight and had acquitted themselves well––in the highest traditions of the service. Subsequently an intriguing case study emerges from HMS DUNCAN’s 2024 Eastern Mediterranean deployment. The ship remained in the Eastern Mediterranean and did not transit into the Red Sea. Officers anecdote suggests this positioning was deliberate: DUNCAN maintained readiness to support a potential Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) from Lebanon. Importantly, it would have helped take pressure of a strained US Navy which has too much placed on it already by lacklustre commitment of some nations to step up at sea.

The decision appears linked to organizational biases. Army officers, particularly since the 2021 Kabul evacuation, demonstrated heightened NEO preparedness come paranoia and have advised government to this, particularly when they hold positions of senior command over all British forces. The fault to not cycle more British frigates and destroyers through the Red Sea was jointly an operational level and reality that the Royal Navy is so short on assets, it can’t meet the demands required of it––blame successive cuts which at their root, is seablindness. Go anywhere outside the UK and North Atlantic, UK forces come under CJO’s Operational Command (OPCOM) from PJHQ, army officers’ rule here who in this case had little care for training sailors in a real world environment but turned their eyes to land events—which notably, did not occur.

The fall of Kabul triggered changes in military training priorities that persisted through early 2024. A consistent pattern emerged: army and Royal Marine leadership became primary architects of NEO doctrine, again, remove from core British needs. Exercises shifted to emphasize evacuation procedures, with staff teams spending significant time planning hypothetical saves. Differences in training intensity became apparent. UK Commando Forces conducted a January 2024 exercise focused entirely on NEO planning for a Philippines scenario involving hurricane damage and regional tension. Parallel high-intensity scenarios—such as Royal Marines transiting across a contested North Sea or landings in northern Norway—remained unrealizable for the 1* staff. That real experience against UAV’s and alike was deprioritised in a world where, in Ukraine, Asia and elsewhere, technologies such as this are moving to the centre ground, speaks volumes. This suggests selective operational validation where high intensity warfare, something sailors need experience in urgently was an afterthought and this shone through in the management in the Red Sea situation.

Some of this can be debated in professional circles, but it exposes that Britains navy is too stretched. For all the talk of hybrid navies, the reality is presence, capability and power counts and that means hulls in the water. However more importantly, the Red Sea situation exposed exactly that, the naval service is lacking experience. This is because there wasn’t a hand on the tiller with the authority to do it when it should have and others turned a blind eye to the sea and naval service. Those who have read more of my work, will know my investigation into the strengths and weaknesses of unified defence––the monolithic organisations like the UK Ministry of Defence–– read in “Endgame for Seablindness”6 I said the next step in unified defence was necessary but it had to acknowledge some things needed to be reversed. An army general, lacking the knowledge of running naval service demonstrates there is a limit to so called ‘jointness’. The point where operational jointness––forgo the rhetoric on reducing inter-service rivalry, it was a lie in the 1960s to help the Treasury case, and it still is now––undermines the quality of service emphasises how unified defence is not working. It is not centralisation that is needed but decentralisation of authority to avoid exactly the type of situation the Red Sea demonstrated. Britain needs to empower its service chiefs, not seek bland solutions disconnected from the ‘frontlines’. In short, one must be mindful the MoD was build at a land-centric ministry, in service to the treasury, hence, taxpayers must seek refuge and trust in the military to manage themselves not a MoD that produced better defence reviews with 500 staff in the 1950s, compared to now with over 90,000.

British ‘Naval’ Thinking: Or, What Actually Is It?

The amount of energy required to now refute the drivel, technobabble, terminology ridden gobbledegook and nonsense of the land-centric thinking that all services have had to endure, is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. British military doctrine has been profoundly shaped by concepts like “warfighting”—a word strikingly absent from Oxford dictionary–– yet evidently adopted from continental traditions. Island nations that treat possessing a “warfighting capability” as if it guarantees security reveal genuine confusion over strategy, again exposing unified defence is a land-centric school of thought not a maritime one. The persistent promotion of this framework suggests more than accident: the takeover of British defence by land-focused thinkers has over time forced the British military in a position which now every day is bringing it into question of it can defend Britain. An irony, that embracing tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury but nothing of substance, has broken British defence: exactly as the Admiralty in 1961 predicated would happen. Some equally may called this land-centricity the “The Continental Commitment” but it goes beyond that and is probably one of the worse things to befall British defence, something growing since at least 1914–I will not cover that here.7 Either way, the question is whether this will ultimately leave Britain defeated when theory collides with reality.

Elsewhere, by the end of the 20th century, British academics had become deeply embroiled in debates concerning the methodology, conceptual meaning, and practical application of seapower and maritime strategy—issues spanning the Navy’s future structure and theoretical foundations. Two schools emerged with prominence: first, the “Navalism and Sea Power” tradition, systematically advanced by Professor Geoffrey Till through PME (Professional Military Education). The other, Professor Andrew Lambert’s approach—the “civilian department”—which continued what had become known as the “Corbettian” school of applied history and maritime strategy philosophy. In Britain, the dependency on external defence educators and historians is how, generally, at least for navies, much thinking has been done, for all its benefits and a few detractors. To say the students of either school had not clashed would be a misunderstanding. It may even be the case and may have only muddied the waters with education to those outside the military then already was taking place. When I attempted to disseminate twenty years of research on seablindness––including how to fix it and ‘right the ship’––the response from certain segments of the naval and academic communities would have prompted whispers I was one of the ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’.8 In fact, a few wrote to my mentor at the College asking me to be silenced. Why such sensitivity when everyone is supposed to be on the same side? Did they really think that twenty years of research, a PhD, and verification of my data by King’s and some of the world’s top historians, military personnel, and defence professionals was suddenly invalid because someone’s feelings had been hurt? This was exactly like when Sir Julian Corbett was given the boot by the Royal Navy in 1920: history reflecting reality was being used to point out failure and what needed changing for the positive, and that did require some constructive criticism and finger-pointing.

The point was that one school, who had become predominate because that ‘educated’ defence civilians and military personnel and therefore ended up in positions of influence, had avoided addressing the first and only issue that mattered: education about the sea and navy. They ignored that for terms like ‘seablindness’ to exist, it can only be seen as a complete failure where things once known and understood yesterday are not known today. Repeating the same tactics since the late 1980s, which have delivered little, is a sign of failing to understand the problem and is akin to madness to continue in this manner. The decline in understanding of seapower, maritime strategy and its interface with national strategy and policy does not occur overnight and will not be solved quickly. How can it be that warnings of the recent past have come to fruition? Why are the fundamental tenants of seapower, naval power or maritime strategy—questions solved by great historians like Corbett—seemingly not understood today in many quarters, particularly by some who should know better or claim they do ‘get it’? What have some been doing all these years, if still government and the public must ask: ‘What is the navy for?” The answer to “What is the navy for?” should have been thrashed out and resolved long ago; it was an easy task for the answers lay in the past, and from that, the answer communicated full volume to those at the highest level of decision-making in the nation. That this was left to linger by some past generations has caused turmoil that cannot be overlooked, particularly by those who present nothing but a negative message about the navy who had an opportunity prior to do something to avoid the situation the service now finds itself. Younger generations should be rightfully frustrated and equally seeking to give those with closed minds and status quo attitudes, the hard boot.

In the past, having the constant capability, institutional knowledge and corporate experience in place to be aware that educating on seapower was a constant task led by civilians to educate others about the sea and navy. Subsequently, it freed naval officers to be the best sea professionals. This was how Britain ended up with the best naval officers like Lord Nelson and quality trained ratings, which ultimately led the Royal Navy to become the successful force that it was. This was also because Britain had no choice regarding its national defence strategy, where officers had to be freed to focus on that task, for failure at sea meant doom for the nation. At the same time, civilians ensured that the Government, Parliament and the public were educated about the Naval Service and why Britain had no choice but to have a maritime strategy. The fact that anti-maritime and anti-naval voices after 1964 could even present to the government the illusion of choice other than maritime strategy or Britain is a ‘land power’ should have been squashed at inception if there was an active naval and maritime system to counter such ridiculous and unfounded claims.

Growing cognitive dissonance appears in terminology like “hybrid navy” and “Atlantic Bastion.” Britain’s naval strategy of locking down the GIUK gap and maintaining control of the Mediterranean has been fixed for centuries. So, why is it currently being called something new? An invention for someone to justify their wages or try and look smarter than they are? Or complete ignorance of island nation history? Probably a mix.9 Elsewhere, the hybrid navy approach raises questions: if sea-time experience has plummeted? Why? Because wouldn’t someone point out that the ocean’s ruthlessness on equipment knows no bounds and requires sailors, let alone to maintain it, or do we face a navy where no sailors want to go sea or even the ability to do so? If so, ‘game over’. If anything, “hybrid” may be merely political cover—a way of avoiding confrontation about the uncomfortable truth: Britain’s warship numbers are at historical lows, critical equipment programs remain unfunded, and to be a seapower you need hulls, aka presence.

Britain should lead global intellectual thought on naval and maritime matters, irrelevant of the Royal Navy’s size or power. We maybe at a turning point: those who deliberately apply historical wisdom to future planning—what I’ll call “inheritance thinkers”—seem increasingly likely to emerge from nations like the United States, Australia, and Japan rather than Britain. For those who resist historical study, the maxim “everything old is new again” takes on urgent relevance. The British Army insists on framing continental commitment as permanent purpose,10 rather than acknowledging its historically limited role for an island force that should operate primarily as an expeditionary service. The army unwillingness to accept its role has caused issues for defence and the navy for centuries but ultimately has undermined the armies own ability to manage its equipment and force structure: blaming government for the army, although partially true isn’t the whole picture and goes to the heart of the destruction of national strategy. Meanwhile, the RAF has effectively grounded its identity in nostalgia — the only narrative it can construct. Any serious thinker understands that this cognitive stagnation may be terminal, and that is without throwing into the mix the future of defence organisation, budgets, and the ever-changing technological landscape which is shifting at rapid pace––from seabed to space. The historical omission is not accidental; it’s strategic blindness.

As I argued in my PhD research: when an organisational culture is existing opposite to the truth, deliberately emphasises land minded centricity, a falseness, how can we expect meaningful change? Official positions—civilian or military—and governments seeking education remain closed to historical wisdom precisely because the system was designed to resist realignment. The irony is this: Britain has long claimed expertise in strategy through to Cabinet level, yet its defence institutions are fundamentally structured to prevent the integrated maritime approach that was proven to have worked for centuries.

The harsh message is clear: since the late 1980s, by every metric: every tactic attempted to address declining understanding of the Royal Navy and maritime strategy have failed—exposing the hollow promises of “solution” frameworks and false prophets in British naval thinking that treated a deep structural problem as if it were solvable through programmatic fixes. Navalism and calls for things like a ‘Navy League’11 demonstrate a fundamental ignorance of history and national strategy—and more importantly, of how seablindness has historically been addressed. The result? Nothing substantive has shifted. This remains the status quo and from that, don’t expect the future––or fate––of British seapower and Royal Navy to change.

Again, we can turn to the wisdom of the past, as Admiral of the Fleet John Rushworth Jellicoe (1859-1935) told an American audience: 12

The worst possible people to talk about and promote the Royal Navy, are Royal Navy Officers.

Conclusion?

These few points, if thrown into a mixing pot, represent a perilous situation. As ever, organisational failure is a series of smaller mistakes that amount to a bigger one. The last great Admiralty Secretary warned, as he did to the US Navy, that constant change is tantamount to chaos and here we are.

In short, this article was for me to go back and test ‘Seablindness and Royal Navy’,13 to see if anything had changed. It has not, in fact it’s got worse. The Royal Navy may need Parliament or Cabinet to treat it differently—perhaps as a failing department or local council under special status. This would require a civilian leader with authority surpassing the First Sea Lord. “First Lord of the Admiralty” or “Admiralty Secretary” seems no less appropriate, though ironically, the previous holders had warned that current trends would inevitably play out this way. The land-centric MoD was successful in suppressing their warnings, it never intended to let official acknowledgment occur of what they said.

Fortunately, this will appear in my forthcoming book based on my PhD.

Dr Smith and Dr Klein started an annual tradition of a space lecture once a year covering space warfare, space strategy and matters related to space. This online lecture explored a range of topics ranging from the current state of the intellectual thought of space strategy, warfare, doctrine and technologies through to the geopolitical and related matters which space is involved in along with it being a more contents domain in itself.

This lecture will be of interest to students, military personnel and government officials who are interested in space warfare, space power, defence, strategic studies, and international relations. After Dr Smith’s and Dr Klein’s presentations and discussions there will be an open Q&A session.

About the speakers

Dr James WE Smith is a British Academy Research sponsored scholar and Laughton-Corbett Research Fellow at King’s College London, Department of War Studies. As the Laughton-Corbett Research Fellow, James focuses on matters such as strategic studies, maritime strategy and space. He has a forthcoming book titles on of which is on Space Strategy. James has recently been working with partners such NASA, the US Navy and others on the future of strategy, seekingcloser integration of domains though a ‘seabed to space’ approach.

Dr John Klein, callsign “Patsy,” is a Senior Fellow and Strategist at Falcon Research, Inc., and also instructs space policy and strategy courses at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, Georgetown University’s Strategic Studies Program, and Institute of World Politics at the undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate levels respectively. He routinely writes on space strategy, deterrence, and the Law of Armed Conflict. He is the author of the books Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy(2006), Understanding Space Strategy: The Art of War in Space (2019), and the recently released Fight for the Final Frontier: Irregular Warfare in Space (2023), along with Space Warfare 2nd Edition(2024).

Patsy is also a retired Commander of the United States Navy, receiving his commission through the NROTC program at Georgia Tech. He served for 22 years as a Naval Flight Officer, primarily flying in the S-3B Viking carrier-based aircraft. Patsy supported combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. His tours included the Executive Officer of Sea Control Squadron Twenty-Four and the final Commanding Officer of Sea Control Weapons School.Patsy holds a master’s in Aeronautical Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, a master’s in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College, and a PhD in Strategic Studies from the University of Reading, England. Patsy is a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He has over 2,700 flight hours in 27 different types of aircraft and over 600 carrier-arrested landings.

In the January 2026 edition of Warships International Fleet Review, (on sale in e-version and print in the UK & abroad after 19 Dec 2025), I point out restoring Britain to its proven national strategy, alongside fundamental defence organisational change is the key to defending Britain and it’s interests while addressing a litany of issues plaguing British defence. Island nations should not be warmongering, but thinking more intelligently about their approach to contemporary defence threats.

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 NEEDS ADMIRALTY NOT A MINISTRY OF WAR

INTRO:

The US Department of Defense was recently rebranded the Department of War, representing a high-level mindset change for the American military. In this commentary James W.E. Smith suggests Britain needs to carry out a similar evolution.

ARTICLE:

We are approaching 500 years since King Henry VIII, under the guidance of his once-special advisor, Sir Thomas Cromwell, established a ‘Council of Marine’, a forerunner to the Admiralty.

Although this could arguably be the foundational start of the Royal Navy, professionalism and organisation must go hand in hand; there was far more to it than creating a military force at sea. It was the process of acknowledging the harsh realities of what it meant to be an island, a topic I have touched on before in this magazine, but which it is worth reiterating.

Over the centuries, this has been analysed in different ways, but the reality is that Britain is easily defeated on land, cannot always sustain an army, is resource-strapped, and is often balancing its national finances.

This was obvious to King Henry VIII and Cromwell, who saw ports, sea trade, and merchants as the foundations of a national economy, and therefore something that had to be protected.

To go a step further, a professional military force at sea could not only protect trade but defend the nation from the endless threats of invasion. It could equally signal that Britain would commit national power - with pinpoint precision - to undermine the economy and military endurance of a competitor nation while calling in other Continental nations to ‘gang up’ on a threat to England. This simplified take on British defence strategy need not be expanded. History shows that politicians, when educated, understood the strategy that enabled the collaboration of a powerful, capable global navy with a flexible, professional expeditionary army. It delivered national security over the centuries, the ultimate proving case being the downfall of the French tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte, if not WW2.

Either way, King Henry’s and Cromwell’s argument for the organisation of defence offers some fascinating insight into where we are today: defence of the realm has no other options for national strategy but facing seaward.

And for Britain, national defence historically required that no one person, not even a King, could have total responsibility. It required a government and council of civilians and military that broadly covered the interests of business, as well as professional managers of the Navy. They worked together to ensure that the Government did not adopt foolish ideas, such as turning Britain into a fraudulent land power.

As resources are always limited, experience has proved that it is best not to overcomplicate matters. There was little need for complex organisation, nor did Defence need a powerful army-centric ‘Ministry of War.’ In fact, when Prime Ministers tried, usually to cover up the poor performance of British Army leadership, it was promptly shut down.

The lesson was made when Army leadership got too loud in the run-up to WW1: Britain’s national strategy was put into jeopardy. The outcome was clear: the coffins of our brave soldiers came home in quantities and WW1 became a bloody stalemate. The intelligent way of defeating an enemy power, maritime in foundation, was during WW1 easily disregarded due to a bloated defence organisation, which enabled too many voices who had failed to educate themselves in British strategic history. Defence organisation was further complicated with the creation of the Royal Air Force (RAF). In the end, the insight provided is that when you over complicate defence organisation, the line between defeat and victory becomes more blurred. Things take too long to get done: endless committees debate, money gets wasted, accountability and transparency evaporate. Organisational myopia and stagnation set in. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

A lean defence organisation, with tight budgetary controls, should be enforced in nations with a fixed strategy. Even after the creation of a third military service Britain’s the management of the armed forces remained lean and agile. Defence reviews were published –for right or wrong – consisting of a few pages, costed, equipment explained, with the plan detailed. You can find them in Parliamentary records. They put the 2025 strategic defence review document to shame. It is nothing more than a glossy brochure of wishful thinking rather than a plan of long overdue action. Equally, for all the promises of defence reform being better than what has gone before and solving problems, little has (at the time of writing) been delivered.

Britain once had a clear national strategy, and if was still followed - and the organisation built around it - then UK defence today would look very different. National strategy should decide defence organisation.

For navies, this is important, as they have been influential in shaping how defence organisations work, for better or worse, around the world. The wisest naval minds and maritime strategists have understood that being able to educate and communicate about the Navy, considering its business is far over the horizon, is critical to protect and maintain.

It is why they have pushed back on the concept of land-think dominating defence, not out of rivalry, but because there are more moving parts in defence than soldiering.

In the United States the Department of Defense (DoD) has been rebranded into a Department of War in which the naval voice is arguably much diminished. After 250 years of American ambition to be a power at sea, it now appears to be on shaky grounds if navalists cannot assert the truth of military history, which has seen America’s sea power vital to the success of its land forces over the centuries.

It serves as a warning for the British to reject any such notion that might gain traction in the UK. Firstly, any talk of fixed continental commitments should be dismissed and acknowledged as being out of step with the present and future of warfare. We are confronted with a future that spans from seabed to space, with warfare likely bloodier than ever. It will be integrated, complex and paced at a speed faster than the human brain can comprehend.

Secondly, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) must be scaled back to a size that it was in the 1950s - hundreds of staff, not thousands, centrally. Thirdly, re-empower British services to run themselves and our Service chiefs to coordinate our strategy and operations closer than ever.

Ultimately, the best medicine for British defence is a good dose of objective reality. Britain must relearn its national strategy, focusing on being the best at the things it can, and disregarding the rest. This may be uncomfortable for many, including the UK Government, which needs to learn the limits of British power; for actually, it has always been the same – for an island nation naval forces and a matching strategy paramount. We know what to call this approach. It is ‘Admiralty’.

‘Endgame for Seablindness: defence organisation and the future of the Royal Navy and the United States Navy.’

I argue, the future of navies, let alone strategy, and warfare may very well depend on the future steps taken with the next iteration of defence organisation––for one is now long overdue––whatever form that needs to be, it must be of one united from seabed to space.

It is an overlooked fundamental fact that the analysis of history proves, since the founding of professional navies, beginning with the Royal Navy in 1546, that if you cannot communicate what this military power is for, or what both ‘maritime’ and ‘sea’ mean to a nation, then nothing else matters. 1Most issues, debates, discord, discussions, and disagreements flow from the failure to consider this the number one priority. This uncomfortable fact has been forgotten, because too often naval minds are tourists in nostalgia - something antithetical to the fact that the very best maritime thinkers and naval personnel were rebellious to status quos, and adverse to the comfort of armchairs of the wardroom - and yet this is understandable to some degree. This is because few have accepted that the centrality of American naval power and British seapower to their respective nations ended after 1945. Although there are many factors at play, critically, the organisational setup of unified defence broke down the systems for communicating about the Navy and seas’ influence on each nation.2 Past systems to communicate were taken for granted, today misunderstood, let alone never rejuvenated. This is partially the root of why many in leadership roles have struggled to communicate about the Navy in an effort to encourage those with the authority to take that message and act upon it, particularly after the 1980s defence reforms and the end of the first Cold War.

After 1947, there has been a ‘beat the retreat’ within navies. The shock that navies were no longer as important as they once were left vast scars that too many took to heart, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to think innovatively about the future. Instead, there has been comfort in retiring to the sea and accepting, through a distorted lens of navalism, that navies are a minor matter, simplified and to be concerned only with naval warfare and less influential in the world around us. Although there is a sound argument for a period that this was true, that time has passed, but in doing a retreat to grounds of naval matters for a naval audience and where naval warfare is all that naval policy, strategy, and doctrine is, let alone maritime strategy and policy, has provided ammunition for far broader and more profound problems down the road. This is now coming home to roost, ‘cause and effect’.

Those wise enough know that a limited view of navies is not accurate and has undermined the process of thinking about the future of the Naval Service and wider national defence strategy for some time. To place the Service in a neat little doctrinal box, contained to the sea, was always the objective of those who had interservice agendas and were hostile to other Services, and who cared little for anything beyond narrow domain-centric views of warfare, and, at times, have been helped to fulfil that objective by those within navies themselves. Over the decades, some have been aghast at the sense of nihilism and drift that have been evident in many Western navies, characterised by a loss of confidence, risk aversion, and lack of boldness. A marked departure from the outstanding achievements of the past, although this is not a reflection on many of our hard-working sailors and marines, there is some blame to be shared between civilian leadership and the military. For we must remember that defence is not about being ‘comfortable’; otherwise, for example, many of our great naval battles would not have ended in victory if such a disposition had been taken. Elsewhere, for academia and supporters of our navies, and all their parts of the original ‘Joint Service’, many educated minds and scholarly works have been created. However, to say that ‘things have got better’ for some of these efforts’ smack of the ‘ivory tower syndrome’. Would anyone claim with certainty that the government’s understanding of the Navy and maritime affairs has improved and is reflected in some form? You can explore this yourself: the author challenges every reader to ask around ‘what is the Navy is for’, and the answer will be clear: from politics to the public, to inside the Navy itself, and with the other military services, you won’t get a clear, concise, or coherent answer. Turn the page back in history, and the ‘story’ would be different. In the past, there were mechanisms in place where institutional knowledge and corporate memory were fiercely guarded, along with the fact that there were fewer overbearing legal and political restrictions on those who wanted to report the truth, express evidenced analysis, as their duty would allow them to do, to the highest offices.

Another part of this is that it may be a moment for both professional military education (PME), and academia, to reflect on returning to proven methods of analysis rather than overdependency on guesswork, assumptions, and wishful thinking, as these are no grounds for good education, competent communication, or sound policy, let alone ensuring those who need to get the job done can actually do so. Either way, if a mindset of ‘ease’ over decades has been due to avoidance of conflict with the other Armed Services, or adverse to political investigation, that is entirely out of step with the history of civilian and military individuals who built the navies we have inherited. This approach has run its course; the result of the collapse in education of our nations to ‘maritime’ has allowed the explosion in the encapsulating term ‘seablindness’. 3While other factors have been at play - budgets, foreign policy, social and domestic matters, and technology - there was always going to be a reckoning moment, where a pause and taking stock would be necessary to change course or continue repeating the same old ways, expecting some miraculous new result to arrive. We have now reached that moment.

The hypocrisy of the matter is the same old question comes up: ‘What of the Navy’s future?’ Reflecting often on this question is helpful if it enables some positive action, but the fact that the frequency of this question appears and has become more entrenched should have flagged that something deeper is amiss. Some scholars have used the entirely unhelpful debates under a mantra of ‘fall and decline’, in short, to accept one’s fate. Elsewhere, others have delved into familiar grounds of navalism, trading blows over budgets, technologies, and whose weapon system is superior to the others. Often, when surveying debates over the past four to five decades, it has been a tale of reaction rather than pre-emption, when thinking more carefully and wisely about the security and defence picture influences what happens at sea and, equally, what happens back from it to other domains. However, often overlooked is the failure to educate the public and decisionmakers - in offices high and low.

What is the price of this?

The West was in a position of strength after the Second World War. Our enemies were defeated. The seas were ours; our sailors and marines had delivered their most significant victory. But it was short-lived. In Washington, D.C., the politics of defence, with deep roots, made it appear that, by 1946, the US Navy had done very little in wartime. The story was little different for Britain’s Royal Navy, which had slogged it out globally alongside merchant mariners to save a nation and buy critical time to form a war-winning Alliance. As the 1950s progressed, however, weaknesses in naval policy contributed to the rise of Soviet naval power. The Cold War distorted many minds to believe that navies were ‘safe’ and only so because of the existence of a competitor; but what would happen when there was no prominent or primary adversary, and the seas shifted from a two-power super struggle or something ‘multipolar’ today, more historically accurate, but more complexly contested?

Turning to recent decades: merchant ships openly attacked in the Red Sea and off the coast of Africa, the lifelines of civilisation on the seabed contested, our lines of communication probed - from seabed to space - and the rise of an increasingly powerful and capable Navy of China that takes more bold steps, technologically or otherwise, every year. Seemingly, the teachings of great minds like British historian and strategist Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922), who emphasised that our navies must never relinquish a position of strategic advantage,4 have been largely ignored. Ultimately, sea control was a theoretical aberration and was always going to slip through NATO, American, and wider Allied hands because, in ‘peacetime’, nations have different priorities, but this should not have been an excuse to stand still or fail to effectively communicate the fact that holding an advantage was the best approach to avoid bigger problems and greater expense down the line. The message was simple: maintaining a strategic advantage at sea, across the globe, and across chokepoints, while keeping merchant fleets’ security tight from terror or piracy, was the most effective way to manage uncertainty. But what then has gone wrong and why? Failures in policy? Our sailors and marines made mistakes? Was the doctrine dodgy? Is PME not working? No, not exclusively. It’s because, in simple terms, the priority to communicate what this very complex and expensive organisation we pay taxes for, ‘Navy’, was not expressed. This is an enduring task that is relentless, more than ‘public relations’, and everyone needs to take it with the utmost seriousness.

In the past, it has been a combination of factors, beyond national prestige, foreign policy, and defence threats, including public and private interests such as business and financial markets, that have driven the forum of debate on investment in the Navy. After 1945 this shifted away, often purposefully, from the accountability of public influence and became more dependent on the symbiosis between Government, Treasury, and the organisation of defence. This questionable relationship, if that is what it must be called, should not be confused with civil-military relations, although it is interconnected.

To think about the future requires some context, and because humans are ‘near-sighted’ and ‘memories short’, fortunately, we can turn to the past, for the past is all we have to seek guidance from. In the 1950s, the United States Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Arleigh Burke (1901-1996) took a stand against President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) in the US Congress. He did so on two fundamental points:

The first is that a defence organisation must truly and equally allow each military Service equal representation and a voice to carry out their responsibilities and report honestly, non-politically, and in a timely manner to the people’s representatives. The reform package that the President was attempting to impose on the barely decade-old Department of Defense (DoD) sought to limit that, asserting military control akin to a German Army system and reducing civilian control. The second was that, while politicians were tinkering with defence organisation, world events were overtaking proceedings, adversaries were becoming emboldened, and America’s top military and civilian decisionmakers were focusing on matters of bureaucracy rather than the task at hand. Burke was proven right, the Soviet Union demonstrated its space power with the launch of the satellite Sputnik, and growing Soviet confidence at sea was proven, right in the middle of defence organisational debates. In short, Burke’s view prevailed with Congress: it was time to return to the business of being professional sailors, marines, soldiers, and airmen, in an effort to deter war, maintain peace, and be prepared to fight. But what was he demonstrating, and what were our forebears trying to tell us? If you cannot communicate about the sea, our maritime world, what the Navy is for, then the conclusion is clear: it’s endgame for the Naval Service. Burke’s interest in defence organisation was rooted in a concern that if the Navy lost its voice, or a pathway to communicate roles, missions, capabilities, and more, it would struggle in the future. Seemingly, the last Admiralty Secretary, Sir John Lang (1896-1984), and Admiralty-era First Sea Lord Sir Caspar John (1903-1984), warned the same, but Lord Mountbatten (1900-1979) had them ostracised. It’s clear today who was right: Lang and John, who were also notably students of Corbett’s scholarship, unlike Mountbatten who held on too rigidly to sentimental claptrap and his own agenda over the Naval Service rather then facing objective reality.

In all, Burke, Lang and John, amongst others, had the same primary concern - that there was ever a temptation for organisational reform of the unified defence system that would see its structure reflect a particular Service’s ‘way of thinking’, neutralising the forum, discussion and debate over strategy, doctrine, and inviting permeant stagnation and status quos, leading to a quick way to defeat. That defeat would be set in peacetime, executed in conflict or war. Letting this happen would be a short drop and a sudden stop for centuries of developing sea power, making the so-called ‘decline’ unavoidable. Burke had learnt from CNOs Ernest J King (1878-1956)5 and Louis E Denfeld (1891-1972) - one of America’s finest military officers - and the First US Secretary of Defense James Forrestal (1892-1949).6 Their contributions to creating what eventually became the Department of Defense rejected an Army takeover that had the intent of creating an all-powerful ‘Department of War’. These luminaries offer something fundamental to understanding navies in the future, and how seablindness could ultimately reach its final destination.

We only have to look at a case study to understand their arguments: the abolition of the British Admiralty resulted in the Royal Navy never recovering its voice. The Royal Navy, although not equipped to understand what it faced, did not challenge that the UK Government had failed to transfer vital institutional knowledge and ‘corporate memory’ into the UK Ministry of Defence. Notably, the other military Services were more astute on this front once they saw the opportunity to shape a new defence agenda around them and break the naval dominance on national strategy that had existed long before either the British Army or the Royal Air Force (RAF) existed. In short, navies have had to start again. Still, by then, a new national ‘way of warfare’ had taken hold in the minds of politicians and military officers, rejecting centuries of national strategic experience, one that was totally alien to an island nation. America’s Navy fared better, yet defence reforms, such as those in 1986,7 did not help matters. Both Navies suffered from weakened structures, which hindered their ability to operate and communicate effectively, thereby limiting their support for building a national defence strategy due to problems in educating about the critical contribution of naval forces to it.8

Returning to today, the concerns of those luminaries are not just relevant because of the aforementioned case study or many of the debates being discussed across the pages of defence discussions about the current and future of navies, but the topic of defence organisation has reared its head in political circles, for better or worse.9 The 2025 US Presidential Executive Order ‘rebrand’ of the Department of Defense to ‘Department of War’10 should set ‘alarm bells’ ringing in anyone mindful of the ‘health’ of the forum of high-level defence debate, where unity of effort is central. Yet, for those who argue that it is just a name change, they are short-sighted: words are powerful, both domestically and abroad. Names carry culture, connotations, and weight of the past, and those can drive intent - misguided or purposeful—even if it’s subconsciously executed. One example is that since this order, there has been a lot of talking of ‘soldiering, warrior ethos, Rome, Greece, and quaint ideas of militia and regiments’ by politicians. This is set in a backdrop of the ‘250th’ anniversary of America starting to reach out to sea through naval power. Notably, most of those 250 years took place under Constitutionally mandated equal War and Navy Departments.11 A pertinent reminder that, for nearly a century of understanding how to, in the simplest words, understand all the moving parts of war and defence, we’ve ended up talking about organisation through the lens of Prussian-style land warfare and ‘soldiering’.12 To use some English sarcasm: let’s hope the Napoleonic Wars ‘era’ or American Revolutionary War can guide us on seabed protection, Artificial Intelligence, space warfare, cyber war at the speed of light, the evolving air warfare picture and lethality in overall war and conflict that would make the Battle of Somme in the First World War look like a storm in a teacup. But the point is serious: if only the forebears could have warned us of the habit for defence culture to resort to comfortable old grounds, which history shows us time and again can happen, resulting in the coffins coming home at extraordinary rates when focus realigns to dwell on nostalgia, myths, and old ways—for the sake of it—rather than using the past wisely. It’s almost as if our politicians have not done their homework, or worse, those who advise them could not do research into their own organisations’ history. That’s new?

Returning to 1949, in the US there was agreement between the Army, Navy, and Air Force that the Department of Defense be named that way because it was about ‘defending America and its interests’.13 It was an intelligent move, with intent, providing manoeuvring space to adapt as the future required and to encourage the defence organisation not to stand still - a message lost in the latter 20th century and into the 21st. It’s pertinent to remember that US naval leadership effectively and efficiently argued between 1941 and 1947 to avoid a Department of War. Even with the overbearing lobbyists seeking an independent US Air Force, they won over the minds of Congress. Congress wanted to prevent squabbling military Services and equally hold the power over defence expenditure and many facets of it, including appointments, titles, and scrutiny of the DoD, as the US Constitution demanded of them.14 This charge remains in place today irrelevant of Executive Orders.15

It wasn’t a matter of interservice rivalry. Still, the Army and Navy had to work together, they had just experienced total war, and war was fresh in their minds when they knew defence organisation had to take steps away from a land-centric Prussian style soldiering and brutish ‘warrior ethos’ to something more intelligent, wise and bold - seabed to air to space - and to understand new capabilities and terrifying weapons to match. Time and again over the 1940s and 1950s, creating any system that reflected the structure of the Army was rejected, because it did not emphasise the requirement of unity of effort or cohesion to get the job done. Clearly, now that we are far removed from the Second World War, that insight is at risk of being lost. Equally, the experience of Imperial Japan during the Second World War, with its Navy overcontrolled by the Army, might be a valuable framework for Americans to consider, particularly in light of future defence geographical challenges that may lie ahead. Yet, answers for the US Navy are not the same for the Royal Navy, JMSDF, or Royal Australian Navy. Islands will always use sea power differently than that of great continental powers, even one like the US, which is flanked by two oceans; that mass of land can still undermine the best arguments of American naval power, rendering them subservient to concepts that erode the efficacy of sea power and maritime strategy.

To dismiss the wartime generation is not the correct path, for what has happened with defence organisations in the latter 20th century in the UK and the US clearly sets the stage for questions pointed at others. That is another topic, but younger generations could vent some frustration in helpful directions justifiably. What is more critical for navies and the maritime-minded is an objective understanding that seablindness has reached an endpoint if defence organisation is both hostile to navies and maritime strategy, because it faces a takeover by a view that sees the world as purely a land-warfare domain. Resultingly, on US Constitutional grounds, calls for an independent Navy Department may become louder; yet, it’s islands and smaller countries that could watch developments in the US and seek to streamline their defence organisations fundamentally. In the UK, revisiting plans for an alternative to the UK MoD, with an all-encompassing Admiralty as considered in the early 1960s, would provide a good foundation for the UK to recover from decades of failing defence reviews, along with schizophrenic direction and mismanagement of defence budgets.16 There is some wisdom that constant change is tantamount to chaos and, eventually, if an institution is repeatedly exposed to be riddled with mistakes and flaws, if not entirely broken, then shutting it down and starting again might be the best course of action [See UK Naval Review 112/4, p. 576].

As we live on the land, it’s understandable that land warfare rises to prominence. Yet, this view lacks nuance in the modern defence world. American General George Washington (1732-1799) recognised, along with the emerging nation, the importance of sea power and that military success was impossible without it, ultimately leading to the twin US Departments of War and Navy, for no land force can act decisively unless it is accompanied by maritime superiority. 17Critically, this statement tells us that intelligent civilian and military defence leadership refuses to be limited by narrow lenses when thinking about and executing defence policy and strategy. Yet, suppose the silence of navies worsens to the point where they are wholly invisible to politicians and the public, let alone because defence organisations strangle it, leaving their hands tied from offering the best options for national defence. In that case, seablindness is nearing its final position just as warned about earlier in the 20th century when the Admiralty and independent US Navy Department still stood.

Naval officers are not trained, nor are they equipped due to civil-military relations, to tackle this problem entirely, but they do need to understand it. Nations expect sailors and marines to get on with the task at hand, while, on the other hand, civilians have little excuse: naval personnel have a partnering role in the effort to communicate about the Navy, not just through public relations, but also in terms of how they express themselves and convey the message. If most senior naval and marine officers cannot do that effectively, then expecting other personnel to repeat the same clear message is a non-starter. Equally, it should be understood that most of the government, not least civilians across it, do not understand the sea nor have any interest in it, which makes the task the more complicated. A good case study is today’s Royal Navy, even its most senior ranks, fail to communicate confidently about what the Service does and why. The 2025 UK Defence Review, and subsequent outputs from the Service, continue to use weak, mild, and uncertain words rather than confident ones.18 This provides a pathway for alternative, narrow, and seablind views to seize the initiative and claim key arguments, which should be fertile grounds for the Navy to argue for its funding and future. It’s rare for the public to see or hear about His Majesty’s sailors and marines, and much of recent military history has been rewritten by the other military Services and their vested allies, so that the public effectively knows little of events at sea, past or present. Elsewhere, events to mark the ‘US Navy 250’ had shades of the British Spithead Naval Review of 1897, when lines of tired irrelevant warships were exposed for what they are by a display of new technology such as Turbinia,19 the world’s first steam turbine ship whose speed made other ships of the era look like a horse and cart compared to that of the NASA’s Space Shuttle heading to orbit. More importantly, how many Americans actually saw the display of naval power on the eastern US seaboard?20 Few. An impressive show to the US Commander-in-Chief, but the future of US sea power lies in Congress’ hands, not his.

A Service distant and remote to most humans means that bringing the Navy to the people and decisionmakers in a modernised fashion isn’t optional; it’s a must.

This isn’t theory: beyond those already mentioned, it was playing on the minds of previous British and American naval and marine officers in the 20th century. Great historians, commentators, thinkers, and strategists, such as Corbett and USN Captain Alfred T Mahan (1840-1914), were among them. Call them wrong if you believe that, but it’s clear that the approaches of recent decades to educate and communicate are not working. However, few could see the toxic combined effect of so many factors, more than those mentioned here, that occurred after 1945. Wiser generations analysed history to seek to understand how best to educate decisionmakers’ minds on a form of military power - naval - that was usually disconnected from the public, technically complex to teach about, and whose business, let alone achievements, is far over the horizon. A notable difference to the Army and Air Force, which have mastered their interaction with the public and have both the presence and therefore weight to reshape the image of themselves, define military history to support their own agendas, and insert themselves more into the viewfinder of the wider nation in many different ways.

But seablindness is not a mere matter of ‘literacy’21—behind seablindness is something more important: our understanding of our world and the space around it, and ultimately how our civilization works. The majority of humans do not think in these terms and are far less sensitive to the fragility of the nation, life, and dependency on logistics on Planet Ocean than previous generations. This reminds us that rampant navalism won’t singularly solve the issue, as the public’s views on what the Navy is and what it is for vary more widely than those of any other military Service. Arguably, you can’t ever beat the scale of the seablindness problem, just contain it the best you can. A helpful analogy is that astronauts will never be able to truly explain their experience in space because the majority of the human populace has no way of connecting with what they are talking about.

To reverse course from seablindness completing its journey, a journey complete when enough factors have aligned as they now appear to be, will rest on two future actions. The first is that navies must be willing to start discussing the future of defence organisation and Unified Forces, taking the lead, before world events overtake proceedings. We must all be mindful of the political rhetoric of the moment—for it comes and goes—while the Navy’s mission never ends and endures governments, but keeping in mind that being ready for war means fighting with what is available at the time. Tinkering with minor things and issues of the day, many of which are outside the control of the military, is not addressing the big defence questions of the present. The best solution to be ready for what the future holds is to ensure the forum for debate, where all Services—no silent Services permitted—can thrash out future strategy, and report honestly and sincerely to our elected officials about options ahead to address future challenges. This is the conversation that needs to take place continuously. Our defence organisation has to allow that and navies have traditionally been champions of using their voice, not being silent as has now become common place. Second, navies need to change how they communicate and start thinking wisely and boldly about the future. A clear, concise, positive, and coherent message, coupled with a realistic plan for new models of a Navy that deeply interconnects with the nation’s economy, culture, and its defence strategy, with timely responses to defence needs, will always best endless chop and change as demonstrated through mindless documents, plans, terminology, and concepts of late.

In conclusion, waking up and using voices is paramount. Embracing some proven traditions for communication is now needed, coupled with loudly rejecting any takeover of defence, which skews experience and military history to be of one Service against the others. An alternative positive plan for a high-level defence organisation—for the Navy’s ability to communicate and educate is intertwined with it—must always be at hand, rather than constant cynicism and negativity of the Naval Service and broader defence. The future of navies, let alone strategy, and warfare may very well depend on the future steps taken with the next iteration of defence organisation—for one is now long overdue—whatever form that needs to be, it must be of one united from seabed to space.

UK Naval Review Link.

US Naval Institute Link.

If Lord Nelson were here today he would be much encouraged by the inquisitive and educated minds of the modern military. Equally, for matters concerning seapower and the Royal Navy, he would have some concerns. Nelson would have encouraged others to think and question, for he too questioned values of the past and subsequently made up his own mind. His victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, saw him abandon proven battle tactics, breaking with tradition to do something evolutionary and new, yet guided by experience. He believed there was always ways for the military to improve, that although questioning accepted values, he sought better and fairer solutions, particularly for his sailors and marines. In short, people matter, and so that if any man––or women–– wants to ‘stand tall on the quarter deck’ in pursuit of the same cause, then he would see them looked after, and equally protected from whims of the public and the variances of the political body. All of his life, he sought to improve his men and their conditions.

But Nelson was no fool, he was able to distinguish between the good and bad, right and wrong, justice and injustice. While he clung to some traditions like honour, patriotism, courage, and duty, he did so by instilling the same into his men so that when they went to battle they did so with pride and reserved stoic confidence, not arrogance. He taught his men, his friends, his colleagues that one could defend their country, but not surrender their ideals. That one can add to a vision of peace and have no better satisfaction in doing something about it, with honour, through the profession of arms. It was Nelson’s character, evidenced and proven over time, that resulted in those around him holding him in the highest esteem.

Today, yes, much has changed and also some other things have not. The lifeblood of civilization flows still along the sealanes and trade sets the commons for wider interactions between peoples. As Nelson reminds, and something that sets navies aside from the other services, the enemy is the asset-–the ship, submarine, aircraft etc––and the sea: once victory objectives are achieved, the humanity of sailors and marines to help save souls from the seas becomes paramount, rather then pursuing things in a bloodthirsty, pure ‘war fighting’ manner. Nelson gave his life, so that his country might be safe and the seas remain free because he believed there can be no higher service or calling than to watch over those who go about their business in peace and even more so on the great waters that make planet ocean.

There was lesson in this, it offered insight to militaries far beyond Britain, including some civilian leadership and politicians who chose to learn more about Nelson and what happens on the oceans. For in most nations, it is a choice to go to the sea and learn about it for geography remains central to the shape of politics, culture and relationships between nations One such individual was America’s First Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who had a long standing affection for Nelson. As a former US Secretary of the Navy during the final years of World War Two, his task postwar was to enable unity of effort between the military services, hashing out questions like roles, functions, missions and how they can work better together. This was a task that no politician, no leader had faced in the United States. In the end, it claimed Forrestal’s life. But Forrestal took inspiration from the best great British and American naval individuals. he did so because he understood that the role of Defense Secretary was to throw away previous biases and instead to be an arbiter, a decision maker and the guardian of the forum to enable the advancement of the military and protect those who are engaged in the profession of arms. In his personal, now declassified correspondence, he pointed out, and in not so many words to the US Congress and the US President, that a Defense Secretary must never become involved in the minutia of the military, they respect them to pursue their daily business and ultimately never over centralize power. The temptation, a word of warning to future defence leaders from Forrestal, was that a Defense Secretary or Defence Minister must never become a tyrannical leader, brutish in method, ‘gung ho’ or a ‘King maker’. If this happened, then the ability to maintain a workable military in a democracy or republic was quickly placed in jeopardy, for the culture of organization can be the dividing line between victory and defeat. Forrestal took from the fact that Lord Nelson respected their Lordship’s in the Admiralty, whose primary task was to educate and advise the government to national strategy and the role of seapower, while letting naval personnel get on with their jobs at sea. Forrestal’s view was Defense Secretaries have other tasks to be getting on with than backseat driving professional personnel of arms, whether they be sailor, marine, solider or other wise. But Forrestal was a generation who knew the suffering of total war, while faced with new weapons of mass destruction they sought to maintain the peace best they could, navigating defence policy and strategy through choppy waters the best they could.

Today, there is a lot of talk of soldiering and ‘warfighers’ [not a word in the Oxford dictionary], while military history is often twisted, as its always been, to suit the individual who is spinning a tale. But today’s language is all ‘land talk’, reflective of a world that sees the military purely through the eyes of platoons, regiments and land battles. We know this is not the case today, from seabed to space, to cyber, warfare has changed, as it has always been doing so. An ‘this way or the high way’ or arrogance of ‘shut up and get out we know better today’ approach is misguided when history offers us insight from all domains. This should not be so easily discarded just to suit matters of the moment. Nelson would have relished this defence environment today for provided more choice, more ability, more capability to think about how to defeat his enemy because ultimately defence is about thinking wisely and acting boldly. Equally, although I will not explore here, in the final frontier, to hostile environments like the seabed, there is something to take from Nelson and the age of sail, for the ideal of thinking more wisely about strategy, tactics and the warfare echo into our contemporary debates.

Some claim true or total war is dead, others claim war is inevitable, let us hope the former is still what many aspire for in an era where the pain of the generation fighting in Nelson’s time or over the 20th century has become disconnected from the mindset of today’s leaders and young people. To use an analogy, we must be all mindful of the those who think they are going to get into fight, so walk into the bar, and start that fight: a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if we can take anything from Nelson’s navy, it is to push back against warmongering. Instead approach it from the ethos that the task of our navies today is to keep war dead. They must do so from a position of strategic strength and advantage but only if necessary, ready and able defend their nation and global lifelines against aggression, for that is human nature in all generations.

It is generally accepted that the founding of England’s Royal Navy marked the starting point of military power at sea. Although England had a form of naval or maritime power and forces prior to King Henry VIII creating the ‘Council of Marine’ in 1546, which is commonly referred to later as the Admiralty, what is essential is that it made the future pathway for establishing standards and professionalism. In short, we combine professionalism with organisation as the founding principle of a military service.

Following this accepted fact that has been in place for centuries, the US Department of the Navy, established on April 30, 1798, would continue to function in the same role in the story of American naval power, marking 227 years of service of the US Navy that we understand in its base form today. Although there is some wiggle room in this, as the US Navy was established on March 27, 1794, it is older; yet, the Department of Navy was not created by Congress until a few years later. Historians would counter that there is little difference between the revolutionary naval forces and the Continental Navy, and the US Navy of today. The fact that America did not sustain its naval force (1775-1785), and it had to be renewed in the period in which the creation of a Navy Department in the 1790s, instead makes the point that the US Navy of today and its forebear is no different from English maritime forces being distinct from the Royal Navy under King Henry VIII.

Either way, this nuance is important for many of today’s naval and sea powers, great and small, who have evolved with the times serving based on the geographical realities of which nation owns them. America is no different. For example, islands will always use seapower differently than that of great continental powers, even one like the US, which is flanked by two oceans; that mass of land can still undermine the best arguments of American naval power, rendering them subservient to concepts that erode the efficacy of sea power and maritime strategy.

American naval power, reaching its zenith during the Second World War, was a notable anomaly in reality, and demand forced America into action rather than an active choice. It stands distinctly alone compared to other periods in the history of the US Navy, a path that other navies––which are not islands––, such as European navies, have taken. By the end of 1945, America’s navy was viewed as coming of age. Its success in the Pacific theatre of World War Two was immortalised. In my 2021 PhD thesis and forthcoming title, I argued that this was ‘America’s Campaign of Trafalgar.’ It began with the Battle of Midway in 1942 and continued through to the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944. These victories, including that of the US Marine Corps, became central to the US Navy’s self-confidence and its place in the broader national identity as the navy looked to establish a prominent role in postwar national defence.

Nevertheless, it was short-lived, as debates over the US Navy and defense organization took place post-war. In Washington, D.C., the politics of defence, with deep roots, made it appear that by 1946, the US Navy had done very little in wartime. In reality, the aspiration of many Americans and US naval personnel to surpass the Royal Navy had ended in disaster as they turned their backs on what they should never have lost sight of, which was the vulnerability of a naval power answering to a continental country where the minds of land-thinkers dominate. This struggle has not changed since, and in 2025 only deepened.

Either way, at 250 years of America’s military power at sea, it is a choice to go to sea, something that many Americans and those who support US naval power often forget. A choice can also turn into a choice not to. That should be the message at this juncture.