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THE FINALHMS Your browser does not support the element. signal sent by Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 is etched in the minds of officers in the Royal Navy: “Engage the enemy more closely”. But has the Nelsonian spirit of aggression faded in recent years? A recent paper by Andrew Livsey, who spent 25 years as a naval-warfare officer and now works for the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre, a think-tank, looks at how the culture of the service has changed.It appears to have become more risk-averse. Mr Livsey cites an interview with Vice Admiral Jerry Kyd, the fleet commander in 2019–21. When Admiral Kyd commanded , an aircraft-carrier, he recalls a subordinate cancelling night flying merely because lightning had been spotted nearby. The surface fleet and the fleet air arm, Mr Kyd thinks, have lost their aggressive edge. Many naval officers consulted by share this diagnosis.John Foreman, a retired navy captain, notes that when in 1990 he operated in the Barents Sea, near Russia’s Northern Fleet, his ships would venture to 12 nautical miles off the coast, the edge of Russian territorial waters. In 2021, he says, the navy had to remain more than four times farther away. Some see a wider cultural shift. A person recently involved in leading war games for senior officials says that he found that his students evinced a surprising reluctance to use or threaten force.Not all of this “excessive timidity”, as Mr Foreman puts it, is the navy’s fault. Mr Livsey recounts an episode when the navy’s maritime-warfare centre attempted to test the use of 40mm grenade-launchers, which have been used on land for many years, at sea. It took over a year to get approval from no fewer than seven bodies. Health-and-safety measures have accumulated over the years to occasionally crippling levels, complains one insider.In practice, sailors are still entrusted with considerable responsibility. A Chinese naval officer on board a ship in which Mr Livsey was second in command was “amazed” by the scope of decisions that could be taken by deputies. A junior lieutenant-commander, fifth in the chain of command, he says, can make decisions which would fall personally to an American commanding officer. Parts of the navy—the Royal Marines and submarine service—also have a higher tolerance for risk than the rest.Tom Sharpe, who commanded four warships in his 27 years in the Royal Navy, is sceptical that the service has lost its edge. British destroyers in the Red Sea have faced intense risks from Houthi drones and missiles. And what looks like risk-aversion is often civilian skittishness. The navy was keen on sending a carrier to the Red Sea, says Mr Sharpe, but was overruled by the Foreign Office.He argues that many of the old ways were pointlessly dicey. “You still have to know how to drive a ship aggressively, sometimes, but that doesn’t mean doing it all the time.” Frigate captains were once expected to berth at high speeds without tugs. An admiral in Malta in the 1970s would send back out to sea ships that did so without enough “panache”, recalls Mr Sharpe. “You can’t do that now. We don’t have the assets to ride out the inevitable dinks and scratches.”
