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 love to use albeit with the rationale of a child: ‘changes in warfare’.
In 2026, events rendered this question out of step, if not obsolete. While there has been years in which the argument had advanced or the debate set back, 2026 saw events override it. 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 come less capable of thinking about what the sea means. This is quite natural with hostile environments without an education system in place, so attitudes toward the sea, prove the point.
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 to down a classic naval and seapower matter: the chokepoint.
Hormuz. Bab el-Mandeb. and, for Britain, even 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 sea power 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 amount automatically to 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, Sir Julian Corbett 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 sea power. 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.
Later in the year, for Britain, the problem of the Royal Navy and Seapower depended 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 is 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 reported maintaining an unbroken watch on Russian frigates and associated shipping for almost three 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 who they once where. 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 goal 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, than talk about the near fiscal and material collapse of Britains defences. This should come as little surprise as the military personnel and government civlians have been educated in places like PME and King’s College London to a false narrative to the national strategy because the truth, being maritime is not an option, wouldn’t fit their short-sighted continentalist tactical view of defence. Something that fits in nice neat fiscal and poltical 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 but in reality, it’s the big questions now being exposed which many have ignored for so long.
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 our 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 another embarrassing episode in the familiar story of Royal Navy overstretch.
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 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 destroyed. 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 system 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 military strategy. This is political science gibberish: theory, assumption, 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 US 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, and I still do. Rebuilding a frigate is comparatively straightforward while rebuilding several generations of lost understanding 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 US 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 a US 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 naval higher command, the Pentagon and Congress.
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 US 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 intellectualism, training and education in defence, 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 as is.
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 strength 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 sea power 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 was so organised.
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 sea power 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 public and decision-maker 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?
