2026 has been a horrible year for Britain’s Royal Navy, whose strength has now — depending on how it is calculated — fallen to historic lows.
The issue has caused a serious political flare-up after it emerged that the navy could not send an advanced destroyer for the defense of Cyprus after a UK air base came under drone attack on March 2. HMS Dragon finally sailed on March 10, some days after an 11-ship French fleet headed for the Mediterranean. Commentators declared a national scandal.
Many say the Royal Navy has been found wanting. The new First Sea Lord, Royal Marine General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has staked his reputation on regenerating a capability to meet its NATO commitments in the North Atlantic by 2029, but this has involved cutting back the navy’s capability for global operations, only to be exposed by a crisis in the Mediterranean and Gulf.
Right now, the Royal Navy fleet looks like a construction site. All of the major classes of warships and support ships, without exception, are in various states of retirement, repair, construction, training, or crew regeneration. Some relatively new ships are tied up alongside but uncrewed as they await sufficient trained manpower and funding to be used operationally. It’s thought that of the force of just 13 destroyers and frigates, only around four are at sea. It’s the same story with attack submarines, where only one of the five vessels is known to be operational.
And yet the Ministry of Defence (MoD) employs 50,000 civil servants, far more than at any other time, and while the navy now numbers only around 20,000, once the Royal Marines are discounted.
It’s a grim picture. What has gone wrong to result in this seeming failure to prioritize Britain’s fighting power over its organizational structure at a time when it is needed most?
The strategic problem has a long history. It dates to 1964, when the Admiralty, the historic Navy-run institution which owned Britain’s defense policy and global security strategy from the 17th century (Samuel Pepys was one of the fathers of the Royal Navy), and spawned Britain’s intelligence services, was rolled into a new civilian-run MoD, along with the War Office and Air Ministry.
The Royal Navy joined the new structure in good shape. Its sterling qualities were an article of faith for most loyal Britons – symbolic of national pride and as the practical guarantor of the country’s security, freedoms, and independence.
The creation of the MoD mirrored the formation of the Department of Defense in the United States, and reflected the multilateral post-war security settlement, where both British and American defense strategy was to be pooled in the American-led NATO alliance and inter-state disputes resolved by the United Nations Security Council, on which both Britain and the United States (along with the other victors of World War II, France, China and the Soviet Union) had a permanent seat and veto. These arrangements were anchored by a nuclear umbrella underpinned by the 1958 Anglo-American Mutual Defense Agreement (MDA).
For 40 years this worked exceptionally well, British and American security policy and institutions became deeply entwined via the MDA, NATO command structures and the Five Eyes intelligence sharing agreement, arrangements which delivered tangible results in the Cold War and 1990s, leading to an unprecedented era of global security, the collapse of the Soviet Union, proliferation of democratic and free market economic norms and a measurable decline in the use of armed conflict to resolve international disputes.
The requirement to serve NATO policy kept British defense policy and strategy serene from the vagaries of party politics for much of the Cold War. Defense spending stabilized at somewhere between 4% and 5% of GDP. Where it was driven by domestic politics was in relation to Britain’s global posture due to decolonization and entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.
This resulted in a rapid withdrawal of forces “East of Suez” beginning in 1967. The bulk of these were maritime, leading to British defense posture gradually ceding its global maritime responsibilities to the US, and becoming more oriented towards supporting its nuclear deterrent and enabling anti-submarine warfare in the North Atlantic. Only in the volatile Persian Gulf were naval forces retained to clear sea mines and help keep global oil supplies flowing.
This strategy lasted until the end of the Cold War. Thereafter, most politicians assumed (and were rewarded by voters for assuming) that the era of permanent peace would continue. Initially, the navy’s purpose appeared to be expanding the writ of Western humanitarian and democratic norms into the developing world after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union.
The Gulf War and interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Kosovo kept the Royal Navy busy in the 1990s. While defense budgets plummeted, the need for maritime power projection seemed no less important.
Yet these tasks did not seem to require the same capabilities. The fighting ships needed during the Cold War to confront the Soviet Navy and keep open the seaways — nuclear attack submarines, anti-submarine frigates, air defense destroyers, and sophisticated minehunters — seemed less important now. Now the need was for more logistics ships, platforms for special forces, helicopters and humanitarian aid, and patrol ships to police the small wars of the era and support interventions on land.
More money was also needed to invest in soft power to underpin the transition to democracy and free market economics in former communist or communist leaning nations in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The outcome was a dramatic cutback on shipbuilding and support infrastructure for the navy’s conventional high-end fighting power. While ships were built, they were mostly for non-combat roles, and the research and development and specialist institutions, workforces, infrastructure, and training needed to confront a peer adversary began to wither on the vine.
This retrenchment, both in budgets and priorities for maritime capability, saw the British marine defense industry also reorient towards overseas markets, which retained an interest in high-end warfighting, notably to investment in the United States and Australia, eroding the industrial base needed to regenerate naval fighting power, should that be needed.
By now, British defense policy had become largely disconnected from the serene absolutes of previous eras embodied by the Admiralty and later Britain’s Cold War role in NATO.
This disconnect was cemented by the introduction of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) process in 1998. These reviews have been used by successive governments to question the whole premise of defense in each new Parliament and attempt to direct Britain’s defense capability and posture in response to the short-term exigencies of international relations rather than the long-term interests of national security.
Whereas the Admiralty was primarily concerned with maintaining the balance of naval power to ensure stability and maintain British influence and trade, and NATO was primarily concerned with the balance of forces to deter the Soviet Union, successive British defense reviews have largely considered American military power and the NATO alliance as guarantors of national security, to which Britain need contribute little beyond its nuclear deterrent.
Politicians, meanwhile, attempted to reshape maritime capabilities to deliver short-term political priorities to counter terrorism, support humanitarian intervention, and promote concepts like “Global Britain” in the early 2020s. During the 21st century, this questioning has deepened as non-state Islamic terrorism emerged as the primary threat, and “defense” was recast as “security” (and the defense reviews became defense and security reviews), removing the last vestigial sense that, beyond the nuclear deterrent, the balance of hard power was of any importance whatsoever in securing the nation.
The results have been catastrophic for the Royal Navy’s ability to generate meaningful conventional power. The navy has been pared back to the ability to generate just enough fighting ships to deliver and protect the nuclear deterrent and generate an occasional (every three to four years) carrier strike group to support US foreign policy objectives. Beyond that, the Royal Navy and Royal Marines only have the capability to support small-scale policing or counter-terrorism operations and patrol the UK and overseas territory coastal waters.
In the MoD, money has flowed everywhere except into hard naval power. Into capabilities to support counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, support humanitarian intervention, and train and mentor allies, and develop the policies and strategies to support these initiatives, but not into building and operating the fleets of fighting ships needed to ensure the strategic balance of power operates in Britain’s favor along the trade routes it needs to secure its economic and political future.
Belatedly, since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the foolishness of this posture has begun to be exposed. Yet it’s hard to overestimate the inertia built up within Britain’s political leadership, within MoD, and among the current generation of naval commanders, all nurtured during the era where defense was not grounded in an appreciation of the importance of a balance of conventional fighting power, but in its utility in delivering short-term political policy goals.
It’s also hard to overestimate how closely the Treasury is wedded to defense on the cheap. Money doesn’t solve everything, but the UK’s defenses can do nothing serious without more money. Spending 2.3% of GDP on defense is grossly inadequate.
The dismal failure of the Royal Navy to either anticipate the requirement for or deliver a single fighting ship in response to a direct attack on British territory in Cyprus should signal the end of this complacent era.
The question now is whether either British politicians or, more importantly, the British naval establishment has the leadership or organizational capacity to reverse a rot so deep that it has turned a once-proud service into a national embarrassment?
James Fennell MBE, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, is an international peace and security expert and was Director of the UK FCDO’s flagship stabilisation program in Ukraine from 2022-24. Since leaving the Royal Navy he has spent 30 years as a senior executive and government adviser on conflict and security policy in Africa, Asia and the Middle East for FCDO and international organizations. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary research fellowship by the University of Birmingham in peace and security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Ukraine 2036
How Today’s Investments Will Shape Tomorrow’s Security
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
