Navies are obsolete ...

... but naval fans will never admit it

Over the last year, three of the four most powerful navies[1] in the world have suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of opponents with no navy at all.

First, there’s Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Until the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was regularly touted as a decisive factor in any conflict, capable not only of blockading Ukraine but of supporting seaborne assaults on ports like Odesa. The desire to secure unchallenged control of Sevastopol in Crimea was widely seen as one of the crucial motives for the Russian takeover in 2014.

Two years after the invasion, most of what’s left of the Black Sea Fleet has fled Sevastopol to take refuge in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, which is, for now, safely out of the reach of Ukrainian drones and anti-ship missiles. (As I was working on this post, Ukraine hit Sevastopol again, damaging three ships and the ship repair plant there) The Black Sea Fleet has played no significant role in the war, except as a supplier of targets and propaganda opportunities for the Ukrainian side. Its attempted blockade of Ukrainian wheat exports has been a failure.

Moskva, the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, shortly before sinking

But for the large community of naval fans, the failure of the Black Sea Fleet hasn’t been a crucial problem. The ominous assessments of its capabilities made before the invasion have been retconned with a narrative of Russian incompetence, Soviet-era holdovers and so on.

The effective closure of the Suez Canal by the Houthi movement is a much bigger problem. Well before the war in Gaza, the US and its allies had a large naval force in the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean devoted to keeping this allegedly vital sea lane open. That force now includes two USN carrier strike groups, destroyers and frigate from the Royal Navy and other allies, and a long list of other warships.

At least so far, the Houthis don’t have the capacity to strike US warships, unlike the better-armed Ukrainian forces. But, even with relatively unsophisticated weapons, they’ve already come close enough to require a US destroyer to use its last line of defence.

The main focus of Houthi attacks has been commercial shipping, particularly any that can be linked in some way to the US, UK and Israel. And it’s these attacks that the joint naval effort is supposed to stop.

The effort has been singularly unsuccessful in this regard. Houthi attacks have reduced shipping through the canal by around 50 per cent, even before the recent sinking of a UK-owned bulk carrier and the claimed escalation into the Indian Ocean. As shippers reconfigure their operations volumes are likely to fall even further.

However, the Houthi effort has had far less economic effect than would be expected on the basis of claims about “vital shipping lanes”. As I pointed out back in 2016, it’s always possible to travel the long way round. And that’s happened, with ships going around the Cape of Good Hope. It’s slower and more expensive, but the extra cost is trivial in relation to the global economy. As Alan Beattie puts it in the Financial Times “Suez, Schmuez: Blocking cargo ships’ passage through the Red Sea hasn’t noticeably hurt global growth or pushed up inflation.”

In summary, most of the claimed use cases for naval power have been shown to be unworkable. Navies can’t mount a seaborne invasion against a country armed with modern anti-ship weapons. More generally, they can’t operate freely within the range of land-based anti-ship missiles and drones, a range that is extending all the time. They can’t prevent a blockade by nearby land-based forces and they can’t mount an effective blockade themselves if (as in the case of Ukraine) their targets can stick close to friendly shores.

At the core of are two simple facts. First, under modern conditions, it’s impossible for a ship to hide from satellites and aircraft (except for submarines, but that will change soon). By contrast, it’s easy to hide land-based weapons and to move them about quickly. Second, a ship has to carry its own defences and weapons with it, which is a big engineering challenge. Land based systems can be spread out over a large area.

Of course, none of this will have any effect on the belief of naval fans that pouring vast sums of money into warships is essential to projecting power, preserving peace and so on. From long experience, I’ve learned that naval fans are about as open to evidence as creationists and climate science deniers [2]

So, I’ll leave it there and wait for the Gish Gallop to begin.

fn1. China’s PLA Navy has avoided humiliation by confining itself to provocative sabre-rattling. But an attempted invasion of Taiwan, regularly threatened but not undertaken so far, would be an even more catastrophic failure than those discussed here.

fn2. I may have been overly pessimistic here. The National Interest, which ran a piece by arch-naval fan Robert Farley, playing down the significance of the Black Sea Fleet disaster in January, recently published an assessment of the Houthi attacks, summarised by the observat “Counting warships may no longer be the best guide for assessing a country’s ability to halt and control sea lanes. The strategic lesson of the Black and Red Seas campaigns is that counting warships may no longer be the best guide for assessing a country’s ability to halt and control sea lanes. Unsinkable, shore-based missiles and drones, capable of hitting targets hundreds or even thousands of miles out to sea, can now carry as much or more threat as surface warships.”

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