10 - Reflections

Summary

This book has not been about strategy, but about the influence navies have exerted upon the strategy-making bodies in different societies. Navies cannot exist without the explicit support of political authorities, and those authorities rely upon their naval experts to help them make decisions to ensure naval power fits into national objectives. It is a symbiotic relationship that is common to almost all experts and their political masters in the modern world. In the twenty-first century the need for political authorities to understand naval power remains as important as ever, but, as the often repeated fears of ‘sea-blindness’ demonstrates, it is a difficult task. What these essays show is that the problems are not new. They have existed at least from the late sixteenth century when institutionalised navies imposed long-term fiscal, economic and political demands on societies’ leaders. The complex demands placed upon those leaders by other actors influenced how they understood their navies and what they demanded of naval power was also highly variable.

Even in strongly maritime societies, navies are just one of many organisations and groupings that influence and inform political and defence policy decision-making. Defence demands have to be satisfied or negotiated among many other pressures facing modern industrialised societies. Today, when navies are an element within a broad ‘defence’ proposition, that is expanding from the other traditional domains of land and air to space and cyber, and the message is clearly that the effectiveness of defence will depend on the joint contribution of all these domains, navies have, as always, to compete to explain and demonstrate their place within this joint endeavour. The new digital media, in some ways, makes it easier, but in others it creates an even bigger wall of competing ‘noise’.

On the other side of the equation, for societies to profit from sea power it requires an understanding and a willingness to accept the technical, social, and financial costs over a long period. Political leaders were not faced with the same defence problem, re-presented continually over space and time. What the problems are and how they are presented, varies according to the social, cultural, economic, and political circumstances.