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 (2012) 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.