The scholar who shaped modern maritime strategy would struggle to find a place in today's universities. That should worry anyone who cares about strategic thought. Arguably some of the great strategic minds would have hated modern academia, or left it.
Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1922) is now counted among the great strategic thinkers. Andrew Lambert has placed him in the company of Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831), and a slowly growing number of scholars, officers and officials have asked themselves if they are Corbettian. It is worth asking an uncomfortable question about that revival. If Corbett were starting out today, would the modern university let him become Corbett at all?
Higher Education has its issues, not least they are disinterested in the field that Corbett would have worked in, if not increasingly hostile. Seemingly the mantra of ‘in service to society’ has been replaced by something far less useful. I’ve seen the issues first hand and my faith often shaken in the things I was taught to cherish as vital to the quality of research and scholarship. So, would they employee or create a Corbett? I doubt it, for the reasons say less about Corbett than about the condition of the institutions we now rely on to produce strategic thought.
First is to remember that Corbett was not an academic. He trained as a barrister, practised briefly, and then turned to writing, including, early on, novels. He had private means, which gave him something almost no young scholar has today: time, and freedom from the need to please anyone in order to keep a job. He spent years in the British public record office building a vast body of evidence on centuries of strategy. He lectured to serving Royal Navy officers on the Naval War Course, worked closely with the Admiralty and served as an official historian to His Majesty’s Government. His influence came precisely from that position, independent of any institution’s incentives yet close enough to government to be heard. He was, in the language of today’s job adverts, impossible to place.
Now imagine him applying for a post in todays so called ‘institutions’: PME, Higher education, or otherwise. His work would cross law, history, strategy, finance and policy, which is to say it would fit no single panel and no single department. His great projects took a decade of archival labour before it yielded a manuscript, which is a long time to go without the outputs by which careers are now purely measured. The value of the true researcher degraded. His central purpose, to improve the strategic judgement of the state, would count as “impact” only if it could be documented, evidenced and scored. While his chosen method, the sophisticated analysis of historical experience, belongs to a field that universities are steadily shrinking. Partly because, frankly, many in academia don’t understand it nor are educated to understand it, or they fear the results of what would be produced. A cadre of students heading in different directions, the military amongst them, willing to use their brain to explore questions, challenge assumptions and study practice.
That last point is not rhetoric. In 2024, a Royal Historical Society survey of 66 UK universities found that 39 history departments reported staff cuts, and that 60 per cent had seen academic staffing fall since 2020. Thirty-six per cent had closed one or more degree programmes. The Society’s president warned that history risked becoming the preserve of elite institutions. The pressures have not eased since. More than 5,000 redundancies were announced across over twenty UK institutions in 2025 and 2026, and the Office for Students reported that 36 per cent of English institutions were in deficit, with more expected to follow. When budgets tighten, subjects that cannot show quick returns are the first to be cut, and history, for all its popularity with students, is rarely judged to pay its way.
Within history, the fields Corbett worked in have fared worst. In 2018 Hal Brands and Francis Gavin set out the American evidence in an essay with a title that still stings: “The Historical Profession Is Committing Slow-Motion Suicide”. Diplomatic historians made up 7 per cent of practising historians in 1975 and 3 per cent by 2015. Four decades earlier, 85 per cent of history departments had employed one. By 2015 it was 44 per cent. In one academic year, just three of 572 history jobs advertised through the American Historical Association were in diplomatic or international history. Military and naval history have followed a similar path. Their argument was that the profession had largely done this to itself, by turning inward, specialising ever more narrowly and withdrawing from questions of war, statecraft and policy. Britain is not identical, but the direction of travel is familiar.
Into the space history vacated came theory. It’s apparently more sexy to come up with a theory without evidence, package it nice for out government and miltoiry and they lap it up: quick solutions for people with no time, and some question the effectiveness and efficiency of our military, no wonder if they are being taught to embrace chaos. Strategy and security are now taught and researched largely within international relations and political science, disciplines that prize models, frameworks and general claims over the patient study of particular experience. They do in some circumstances, bring rigour to concepts, test arguments systematically and ask questions historians sometimes avoid. But something important has been lost in the exchange. Strategy is an art, not a science, and the art depends on judgement formed by experience. A theory can be elegant, internally consistent and widely cited while explaining very little about how real governments made real decisions or actually what the practitioner experienced at sea, in the air, on land or even in space. When the study of strategy is dominated by theory, and history is pushed to the margins, the result is not more rigorous strategic thought. It is thinner strategic thought, more confident but far less grounded. Theory protected from evidence can gain institutional authority while losing explanatory power. Corbett, who insisted that history was the final check on any theory, would have seen the danger at once. However on raising his voice, his email inbox would likely explode or he would have been ostracised with a kind of social culture more befitting the class system of old, with people under their breaths saying: “Oh my, what a disturber of the peace.”
The pressure is felt earliest by those starting out. Doctoral students and early-career researchers (post-docs and research fellows) are routinely advised to choose safe topics, to position their work within an established debate, and to avoid challenging the interpretations of the people who will examine them, review their articles and sit on their appointment panels. So what is the point of a forum or a university then? Research that genuinely tests an accepted account, by going back to the archives and asking whether a familiar story is actually true, carries risk, and young scholars are taught to manage risk. So historical myths survive not because the evidence supports them, but because no one has the security to question them. Institutions add their own caution. Departments and centres measure their performance partly by reputation, and reputations are built on established positions or protecting their network of funders and supporters. A challenge to the perceived view can look less like scholarship and more like disloyalty. Seminars and conferences, which should be the open forums where ideas are tested, too often become places where established positions are restated and the awkward question is left unasked. Corbett spent much of his career overturning the comfortable myths of his own service. It is hard to see where a scholar would be encouraged to do the same today. I know, I tried, but that’s a story for another time.
Then there is the machinery by which academic work is judged. Peer review is meant to guarantee quality, and at its best it does. But it is under visible strain. More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023, a record, many of them from mass clean-ups of fraudulent publications and manipulated peer review. Let alone intellectual warfare is a real thing between nations and actually, we often ignore, the governments with access to the best minds, talents, skills and more is going to have an advantage if shove comes to push in conflict and war. Most of the worst cases lie in the sciences rather than the humanities, but the underlying pressures are common to all fields: the demand to publish constantly, too many submissions for too few willing reviewers, and incentives that reward volume over substance. Even where the system works honestly, it tends to reward work that fits established debates and penalise work that crosses disciplinary boundaries or challenges a field’s assumptions. In small fields the problem is sharper. The handful of senior figures who define a subject also review its articles, assess its grant applications and examine its doctorates. Anonymous review gives them the power of gatekeepers without the accountability, while most use it fairly, in a system in which the people with the most invested in an interpretation decide whether a challenge to it is published is not designed to welcome new thinking. This easily extends to PME, think tanks and more. Corbett’s best ideas would have struggled in front of a reviewer committed to the conventional wisdom he was overturning. Let that sink in.
Research assessment adds its own distortions. The UK’s Research Excellence Framework shapes hiring, promotion and departmental survival. Its latest iteration, REF 2029, has been redesigned yet again, with outputs weighted at 55 per cent of the overall assessment. However well intentioned, such systems teach scholars to think in assessment cycles. A book that takes ten years, a career spent bringing history into policy, or an essay that changes how a government thinks but is not easily scored: none of these sits comfortably in the spreadsheet. Can ideas flourish in a system designed above all to measure them? Some do, through the determination of individuals. But they flourish despite the incentives, not because of them and increasingly young people see their futures in the real world than being consumed by a system designed against them, not for the benefit of ‘society.’
Of note, Corbett’s relationship with the military was never easy, and that is part of the lesson. Many naval officers resented a civilian, and a lawyer at that, lecturing them on their own profession. His emphasis on communications and limited aims, rather than the decisive fleet battle, offended officers raised on the opposite creed. The Admiralty was forced to insert a disclaimer into the third volume of his official history of naval operations, published in 1923 shortly after Corbett’s death, distancing itself from his views on seeking battle. Yet, the friction was productive. He was close enough to be heard and independent enough to be uncomfortable, and the navy was better for having to argue with him.
Today the relationship between universities and the armed forces is often worse, and less productive. Parts of academia regard defence as a subject to be kept at arm’s length, and defence research as faintly disreputable. Parts of the military regard academics as slow, theoretical and unaware of operational reality. Each side has some justification, and the result is a gap where Corbett once stood. Officers rarely have the time to become serious historians (military personnel have other things to do and be good at), and historians rarely have the access, encouragement or career incentive to work with the miltiary. Too often the military turns instead to consultants and in-house analysts, who are quicker but rarely independent, and who are seldom paid to say that a cherished assumption is wrong.
The final obstacle is distance. Corbett’s value lay in the combination of independence and proximity. He could tell politicians and Admirals what they did not want to hear, because he did not depend on them, and he was close enough to them that they listened. Universities today often struggle to offer either, the class system is very much alive in it, morphed in new ways. Much academic research is written for other academics, in journals few policymakers read, while research that does reach government is increasingly shaped by funders, think tanks and institutional reputations to be protected. Plus unlike Corbett who knew how to write accessible, the art of English writing so even a complex idea could be understood by the politician or time pressed officer has died. The space Corbett occupied, the independent scholar trusted inside the room, has vanished.
None of this is entirely an argument against universities, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. They still train a few historians, some uphold standards of evidence, protect a degree of independence that few other institutions can (depending on their mood of the day), and house many people doing serious and valuable work––who eventually leave frustrated with issues of academia that really shouldn’t be their concern. Notably, Corbett’s own revival came from within them. Professor Bryan Ranft (1917-2001) and, above all, Professor Andrew Lambert restored him through decades of scholarship that only an academic career could have sustained. The problem therefore is not people: It is the incentives, structures and pressures under which they now work, which make the kind of scholarship Corbett practised harder to begin, harder to sustain and easier to cut.
What, where, whom would let a modern Corbett work? Secure posts for historians in strategy and security, not only in history departments are under pressure. Civilian historians embedded permanently in professional military education, with time to research and the standing to disagree are being pushed out. Routes that let scholars move between archives and government without sacrificing their careers or their independence: vanished. Funding judged by long-term value rather than short-term outputs no longer exists. Meanwhile doctoral training rewards students for testing accepted accounts rather than steering them away from it. Ways of giving new ideas a hearing that do not depend on a single gatekeeper’s approval: reviewers drawn from more than one discipline, editors willing to publish a challenge alongside a response, and genuinely open forums where officers, officials and scholars can argue in public without career penalty. And a willingness within the study of strategy to treat history not as background colour for theory, but as the evidence against which theory must be tested.
These are not new ideas. They describe, more or less, the informal ecosystem in which Corbett himself flourished: the Admiralty, the War Course, the network of officers, officials and scholars who preserved experience and carried it to the people who had to decide. That ecosystem worked largely by accident, and it was easily lost. American’s understand this too, as do Australians, French, Japanese and others, who all are asking the same question: If we want another Corbett, or more importantly: the system to work, a feedback loop of practice, research and education, it will have to be built on purpose.
To conclude: I should be honest about where I stand. I have spent a considerable amount of my life in and around this system, and I know from experience how hard it makes the kind of work Corbett did. I agree with him on what strategy and education needs, and I recognise every one of the obstacles described here, even experienced them first hand. I could say a great deal more about academia, and perhaps one day I will. For now it is enough to say this:
The tragedy is not that Corbett would have hated the modern university. It is that the modern university would probably never have produced him, and we would never have heard of him. We should all worry about what the future of strategic studies looks like.