What is the 'Art of Admiralty'?
The use and abuse of history and terms can have a fundamental impact on our understanding of not just 'how' something worked and existed, but more importantly, why.
Today, the term ‘Admiralty’ for many has become a metonym. It is a particular irony that as we approach sixty years since the abolition of the Admiralty and the creation of the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1964 that the term can command prestige and inspire historical research but equally suffer abuse in its usage.
Over twelve years of research and a Master of Research and Doctorate qualification studying the relationship between defence organisation, defence culture, national ways of war (and peace), and the interpretation of strategy by high-level decision and policymakers in the United Kingdom and the United States has led my research to conclude how unique the Admiralty was in the British constitution of government and anywhere else in the world. As a result, the story of the Admiralty’s abolition, the creation of the Ministry of Defence and implications for British national strategy was laid out for the first time in my 2021 PhD thesis: ‘Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification.’[1]
The fact that today, ‘Admiralty’ has become a metonym for absolute command of the sea, overwhelmingly naval power or quality of naval force that no other could match reflects the Admiralty’s long-established prestige as not just in command and control of the Royal Navy but at the heart of the national story of Britain that evolved after the 1500s. One where the Royal Navy, which had once enjoyed almost universal public admiration leading to generous funding which reflected widespread acceptance of the seapower state where Government officials understood that Britain had no choice but to place maritime strategy at the heart of the national policy, developing a bespoke and proven British way of war. From that, the prestige of an Admiralty of which the world's most successful fighting force, the Royal Navy, was a natural process of a nation that had little choice but to face its sea dependency and protect its interests from it. Although in the 20th century, the national way of war that reflected strategic realities would be purposefully rejected in favour of doctrine and defence policy alien to an island that neither had the resources nor an iota of any successful historical precedent to justify the change.
That the term ‘Admiralty’ has not been completely erased from the British lexicon only serves to prove that the Admiralty’s prestige and its coupling with the Royal Navy’s past success proves its powerful heritage and centrality to British government. The Admiralty’s institutional experience was greater than that of the British Parliament or the War Office and Air Ministry combined, only second to the Crown, where the Admiralty supported seapower being central to national culture and policy. However, this can also be misinterpreted by believing the term ‘Admiralty’ or that having the ‘the art of Admiralty’ provides absolute answers to questions on domain-specific naval matters.
Therefore, this raises the question, ‘What is the Art of Admiralty?’
It is not a technocratic one or one that relates to the execution of naval warfare or the disposition of military assets. After years of studying this question, I would hazard that hasty conclusions drawn will disregard the facts, which will result in diluting what the ‘Art of Admiralty’ is by associating it as a matter of lower-level doctrinal, planning or domain-specific strategy by those seeing quick solutions to complex and well-established problems. This will be akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy and a potential disaster by distorting understanding of the critical case study in which to understand the British way of war, what it is and once was and, importantly, what it should be.
In short, the ‘Art of Admiralty’ was never one of command or control, naval warfare or even a question of naval strength. Instead, it was the means by which the Royal Navy’s dedicated headquarters effectively communicated the ‘British way of war and peace’, a national strategy based on maritime strategy, to the people, Government, Civil Servants and the City of London. Admiralty civilians: the First Lord, Admiralty Secretary and Admiralty Historian, supported by dedicated service civil servants, executed this task in and beyond Whitehall. This was in close collaboration with external professional historians such as British historian and philosopher of seapower and maritime strategy, Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1921).
This partial distortion is likely because the lens through that many base their understanding of the term ‘Admiralty’ in the twenty-first century has been shaped by events and processes in a defence organisation and national culture that, after the 1960s, purposefully rejected the Admiralty and understanding of its function. The Admiralty’s function unfolds when the ‘art of admiralty’ is understood; its function, before command and control of the Royal Navy, was to safeguard, communicate and educate high-level decision-makers about fundamental national strategic principles, which were based on the analysis of long-term experience rather than short-term tactical responses or objectives.
The fact that this is not understood today demonstrates not only the fundamental shift in national policy away from maritime strategy but also ignorance of the national strategic experience that had served the nation so well in the past. This misinterpretation can be easily demonstrated through the manipulation emerging of terms today in the form of metonyms that have seen either term ‘Admiralty’ or ‘Art of Admiralty’ abused to mean things they are not, such as ‘fighting spirit’, the education of Admirals, naval strategy or sentimental analogies for naval force from a bygone era. This manipulation is dangerous in itself, as it could lead to further alien sea power concepts created by continental military powers with very different agendas, resources, and experience from that of an island-based maritime power further becoming the norm for Britain. Furthermore, it would seek to double down the trend of navalists and naval officers continuing a trend to self-harm by limiting their thinking to be about naval solutions to naval problems rather than maritime solutions to support answering national strategic questions which address contemporary foreign policy objectives that reflect the geopolitics and geostrategic realities of the day.
As previously mentioned, the term ‘Admiralty’ may colloquially point to specific fighting successes of the Royal Navy, but the setup described existed and worked successfully in one form or another since the 1500s. It existed in this form because it had to, for the nature of the task required constant diligence because national security and survival rested on rejecting concepts better suited to an autocratic continental military power than an insular seapower state. The Admiralty system freed naval personnel to focus on being the best fighting sea professionals. They had to be the best because national circumstance and realities of an island required them to be. The Admiralty also compensated for their relative inexperience in the political world, where they were entirely outmatched by their contemporaries in the other military services and civilians in the Treasury and Cabinet.
Contrary to popular belief, a major driving force behind the abolition of the Admiralty in the 1960s was the fact that it had convinced high-level decision-makers to reject defence and foreign policies that were wholly alien to national strategic experience in the form of a continental commitment to Europe, highlighting that there was a better option––revitalising maritime strategy. Moreover, they suggested that being part of NATO and working with partners such as the United States did not require British policy and strategy to be ruled by them or their concepts because their needs were continental in origin and often differed from those of Britain. Ultimately, the warning was that British defence strategy and policy would trend into chaos if national strategic experience were ignored. Arguably, it was fitting that as early as 1945, the Admiralty assessed a future that bears marked resemblance to today's world and Britain’s place in it.
Ultimately the ‘Art of Admiralty’ is not a technical or operational matter but one of culture, and it lies at the heart of past and future debates about national strategy. Current uses of the term to describe concepts, theories, guesswork, assumptions related to operational questions, or a particular use of force in a specific context are misleading. They do not relate to the function the pre-MoD Admiralty served or what the ‘Art of Admiralty’ is. It prevented so-called ‘sea-blindness’ at all levels of society, promoted naval and maritime culture, connecting the past, present and future of a unique ‘British Way of War and Peace’––a bespoke product that maximised national power and influence.
If you found this brief overview interesting, you can read more about the ‘The Art of Admiralty’, its abolition and the creation of the Ministry of Defence in my forthcoming academic press publication.
[1]James WE Smith “Deconstructing the Seapower State: Britain, America and Defence Unification 1945-1964,” PhD thesis., (King’s College London, 2021). https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.849793