Friedrikshavn,
Denmark. 20 November. At the dawn of
what became the British Empire that great Elizabethan adventurer, naval
commander and occasional pirate Sir Walter Raleigh said, “Whoever commands the
sea commands the trade, whoever commands the trade of the world commands the
riches of the world, and consequently the world itself”. The politically correct West might wish to
put it slightly differently these days but I am sure neither China nor Russia
would demur from Raleigh’s fundamental principles of sea power. Today, I have the honour of addressing officers
of the Royal Danish Navy, latter day Vikings, on Europe’s place on the world
stage and the future of European navies.
The essential question implicit in my speech is this; are Europeans any
longer up to the principles of projectable sea power?
We are entering a big
power age, a hyper-competitive age in which illiberal power is growing and
liberal power declining. It is also a
hybrid age in which co-operation and competition between states takes place simultaneously. It is a world made dangerous by Europe’s
retreat from power and its wilful refusal to invest in power, a retreat that
has doomed its cherished law-based international system to failure. This is something Russia has demonstrated to
effect this year with its skilful conquest of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. In effect Moscow wrapped Europeans up in the
contradictory nonsense of their own ‘laws’ and revealed for all to see that for
Europeans ‘law’ is the new appeasement; a metaphor for weakness and retreat
from power and influence.
Navies in particular
have been hit hard by this nonsense. As
warships the world over are built and launched daily European navies have
atrophied. Britain’s once mighty Royal
Navy (RN) is a European case in point. My
friend Captain Simon Atkinson of the Royal Australian Navy sent me a piece this
week by Nicholas M. Gallagher entitled When
Britain Really Ruled the Waves for which I am grateful. The piece tells the story of the decline and
fall of the world’s premier navy to a point at which today the RN has 38
admirals for 29 ships.
Go back a century. In
May 1916 just off the coast of Jutland where I am sitting the enormous massed Dreadnoughts
and Super-Dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet were swinging one-by-one into battle
line astern, enormous battle white ensigns were blossoming into the wind at the
‘gaff’ of the masts of each battleship as huge guns swung and rose in their
turrets. Before them the German High
Seas Fleet confident of victory was sailing unwittingly into an enormous steel
trap. On one horizon HMS Marlborough
laid her guns for action and at the other end HMS Agincourt. It was the greatest display of naval power in
history as the greatest cannonade ever fired thundered out catching the German Admiral
Scheer completely by surprise.
That was then and this is now, which
is why Gallagher misses the essential point.
His argument is that the US-UK special relationship is built on naval
power and that the weakness of the Royal Navy is putting that relationship at
risk. The RN of today is indeed at low
ebb. Brit-bashing is a popular sport partly
and precisely because of the past power of the Royal Navy. The critics like to point out that there are
not enough ships and that because of that Britain will be unable to exercise
sea control or sea presence, the two essential functions of naval strategy. And they are right; the Navy of today is
neither Corbett nor Mahan.
However, Corbett at
least would have understood the strategy.
Some time ago I told a very senior British officer to keep the faith, look
up and out at strategy and focus on the creation of the future hub force
the Royal Navy is destined to become. Within
a decade the RN will have two super-carriers, new Type-45 destroyers and
Type-26 frigates in addition to its new Astute-class nuclear attack
submarines. Indeed, an enormous part of
Britain’s enormous £160bn defence equipment investment (by contemporary European
standards) is devoted to the new Royal Navy.
Powerful enough to work
with the Americans the future RN will be also capable of commanding coalitions often
alongside the French (not without historical irony) as a pivotal element in the emerging democratic world-wide security web. The web will include Australians, Canadians,
Europeans, Japanese and others and will see the RN front and centre when the Americans are
otherwise engaged as they surely will be.
It might not be Jutland and the Grand Fleet but that was the exception
in British naval history not the norm.
Therefore, when I rise
to address Denmark’s finest I will be addressing partners in a future naval
concept in turn part of an entirely new concept of projectable
maritime-amphibious power. Power that
sits at the core of a new concept of joint force in which land, sea, air,
cyber, space and indeed knowledge are merged into a new concept of influence,
force and effect. The Royal Navy - the greatest navy the world has ever known – will be slap bang at the heart of a
twenty-first concept of projectable military power every bit as impressive as
its nineteenth and twentieth century past.
So, stop whingeing, keep
the faith, and the tell the story Navy!
Julian Lindley-French
