Introduction
As the influential writer on strategy, Colin S. Gray wrote, “Bad times always return”.1 Russian naval regeneration2, American reticence toward European security3, and even China’s burgeoning assertiveness at sea4 have been brought into relief in recent pronouncements and events including the UK’s Strategic Defence Review5 and Pete Hegseth’s address to NATO in the summer6, and December’s US National Security Strategy7 and the cruise of the Russian intelligence ship Yantar.
To meet the return of the bad times, the Royal Navy must think seriously about threats and generate good ideas about how and by what means to contend with them. Such ideas emanate from the Naval Staff, whose duty it is to balance internal and external demands and resource constraints, whilst generating and executing ideas about how to handle such problems. A wave of continuing reforms generally packaged as ‘Warfighting Ready Plan 2029’8 is the Navy’s current idea, spearheaded by the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. It covers new concepts like ‘Atlantic Bastion’, ‘Atlantic Shield’ and ‘Atlantic Strike’. These things may well bolster the Navy’s overall fighting power, but, in the view of this observer, an important element of the Navy’s ‘fighting power’ may be being impaired.
The Navy, like the Army and Air Force, thinks about ‘fighting power’ as comprising three components: ‘physical’ (weapons, equipment, manpower &c.), ‘moral’ (motivation, culture, ethics, &c.), and ‘conceptual’ (doctrine, learning, strategic analysis).9 This conceptual shorthand helps the Royal Navy consider the many complex dimensions of war and aspects of sea power and maritime security. The ‘Warfighting Ready Plan 2029’ is strong on the physical component, pursuing industry partnerships and procuring new weapons and equipment such as uncrewed systems; the Royal Navy seeks to create a ‘more lethal, integrated’ ‘Hybrid Navy’10. General Jenkins has also personally addressed moral aspects concerning promotion, ‘toxic leadership’ and morale at his Fist Sea Lord’s Conference with senior officers.11
But among this wave of reform, it is important to not lose sight of the conceptual element of fighting power, lest the Navy equip itself with platforms ahead of the evolution of doctrine. Leadership reform must, along with behaviours and actions, also ensure that the conceptual-intellectual aspects of fighting power are robustly protected.12 The loss of the Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre (RNSSC), in this regard, seems like a misstep for the service which needs to advance the ‘conceptual component’ now more than at any time in the last 35 years.
The Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre (RNSSC)
Established in December 2019 by then Admiral Tony Radakin, the RNSSC functioned as the Naval Staff’s in-house ‘think tank’, its express purpose being to develop the conceptual component of fighting power, whose mission was to ‘inform the Royal Navy’s policy and strategy decisions’13 and so keep ‘ahead of our adversaries in terms of conceptual thought as well as delivery on operations’.14 To this end it provided the Navy with a dedicated forum for serious, rank-agnostic, open inquiry and strategic debate among officers. It also provided an institutional bridge for external engagement in national debates about sea power and maritime security and intellectual connections with organisations like the Army’s Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research (CHACR)15 and RAF’s Freeman Air and Space Institute (FASI)16, allied forces’ counterparts, civilian academia and think tanks like the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and Council on Geostrategy – with whom its researchers published.
The RNSSC’s small team of five permanent staff delivered ‘bang for buck’, with a small operating budget compared to the Navy’s capital expenditure of billions. Its intellectual pursuits and ‘outputs’ were many and varied, with researchers publishing public articles in fora like The Wavell Room, The Broadside, and CIMSEC17; it undertook a joint Podcast series with Mariner’s Mirror,18 visiting fellowship programmes with Five Eyes allies, and worked alongside its Army and Air Force counterparts19 to promote multi-domain thinking. The RNSSC also sponsored workshops at a range of institutions, and represented Royal Navy thinking at conferences across Europe, the Americas and Australasia. Its staff hosted monthly lectures for an internal audience and liaised with think tanks for external policy research. In 2024, it published an edited volume — Maritime Britain in the 21st Century20 — launched at a private breakfast in the Houses of Parliament; a clear strategic communications campaign speaking direct to policy makers at the heart of government and much else besides.21
This diverse intellectual activity fostered serious study of strategic challenges of sea power and strategy — technical, historical and theoretical, with academic rigour and integrity; it did this not just within the Naval Staff, but across the service’s intellectual environment. Its independent team could also take a longer, more considered look at maritime strategic problems in an era where thought is increasingly constrained by operational tempo and the pace of demand for tactical, naval ‘outputs’. Providing knowledge about the Navy, to the Navy, on things the Navy should be interested in was, then, its key role, but importantly it did so from an internal, expert, and institutionally benign position within the Navy, rather than as an external organisation with separate, potentially rival, interests — whilst still serving as a bridge beyond the Navy. This allowed it to raise difficult but essential questions to the Navy’s leadership and disagree from a position of trust — and with security clearance unavailable to external partners and commentators. The centre thus helped to institutionalise the Navy’s self-awareness, self-reflection and self-critique — key elements for learning and adapting among military forces.22
What is Lost
Nevertheless, those following the RNSSC online may be concerned to note the disappearance of its webpage from the Navy’s home site. On LinkedIn, it was first replaced with the ‘Naval Staff Research Team’ and then disappeared from that platform, with a hint to look for its activities at the general Royal Navy page instead. In short it has been disestablished. Were this retreat from social media only cosmetic we might suspect the new ‘Research Team’ as only a downgrade, from in-house engine for genuine reflection and thought, to research support. But the deletion of the RNSSC in total and subsummation under the principal Royal Navy banner suggests its services are ‘no longer required’ and the telos of the RNSSC, in this mode of think-tank-bridge, is to be lost or diffused, blunting the conceptual component of the Navy’s fighting power.
Without an obvious replacement this appears an unwise loss to the Navy’s capacity for self-reflection, open discussion and inquiry and intellectual engagement with other institutions and the public, particularly at a time when institutional thinking about strategy needs to be built up to meet the return of bad times — rather than be run down or retired. A dedicated pool of thinkers is obviously valuable for thinking about war, and for reference neither the Army’s nor the RAF’s centres for strategic thinking seem to be going anywhere. Indeed, the co-director of the RAF’s FASI (and RNSSC Visiting Fellow), Dr Sophy Antrobus, has recently been ennobled.23 Important external sources of critique do exist (in think tanks, academia, and the wider realm of the MoD) and the Naval Staff retains other organisations within itself for reflection, but the loss of the RNSSC reduces the service’s capacity for wider engagement and thus fewer bulwarks against confirmation-bias, group-think, and other organisational maladies that hinder strategic thought. Moreover, does the loss of this secure but academically open and public-facing forum for disagreement impair, contra, contra the First Sea Lord’s noble intent — impair service culture?
We can hope that the RNSSC’s farewell post on LinkedIn suggests its work will continue elsewhere within the Naval Staff’s Strategic Plans department, and the Operational Advantage Centre, for example — but likely in a more diffused way and with less of the bridging function with wider academia, and particular focus provided by the RNSSC. Such work depends, as always, on an organisational culture of open critical inquiry in strategy and history, time to study and think, and willing individuals to undertake and support such endeavours.24 British commentators have pointed out the necessity of developing such organisational cultures25 but that our services retain serious hang-ups towards scholarship that the RNSSC’s activities played a role in mitigating.26 Here the Navy’s obsession with tempo, the ‘pace of threat, the pace of technological change’,27 efficiently packing officers’ time and producing ‘outputs’ at speed exacerbates the lack of time available for reflection, discussion and learning — a common enough complaint among civilian academics involved in military education. But the undeniable need for efficiency and meeting the challenges of war’s accelerations can be appreciated without jettisoning diligent study. Quickly producing bad ideas is worse than useless and the RNSSC provided a temporal advantage in this regard by enjoying the time and space to indulge in purposeful curiosity, questioning assumptions and challenging orthodoxies against the need for speed in time-sensitive staff-work.
Conclusions
This has not been an argument for the intellectualisation of the practical business of sailing and fighting. Only that with the apparent loss of the RNSSC we should be concerned that the Royal Navy is further losing its grip on the conceptual component of its fighting power. More must be done to foster an environment that, over the course of a career, sees more engagement with the theoretical and historical, not just in preparation for staff college, and building a Navy-wide learning organisation. An obvious part of the solution seemed to be a dedicated organisation for maintaining open intellectual inquiry, bridging to wider academia and public debates. Without it, who is guarding that conceptual bridge for the Royal Navy’s fighting power?
1. Colin S. Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace and Strategy, Bloomsbury, 2007, page 121.
3. https://behorizon.org/the-end-of-an-era-what-the-us-retreat-from-european-security-means-for-the-world/#:~:text=Key%20Takeaways.%20The%20US%20is%20stepping%20back,NATO%20and%20altering%20the%20continent’s%20security%20dynamics.
4. https://www.eurasiareview.com/24112025-chinas-strategic-ambitions-assertiveness-and-escalation-in-the-south-china-sea-analysis/
5. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-strategic-defence-review-2025-making-britain-safer-secure-at-home-strong-abroad/the-strategic-defence-review-2025-making-britain-safer-secure-at-home-strong-abroad
7. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf
8. https://www.dsei.co.uk/news/royal-navy-chief-lays-out-warfighting-readiness-plan; Defence Minister Luke Pollard quoted in https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-details-how-warfighting-ready-plan-2029-will-be-delivered/
9. For example, Joint Doctrine Publication 0-10, UK Maritime Power, (5th Edition, 2017) pages 29-39 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82af8840f0b6230269c2b6/doctrine_uk_maritime_power_jdp_0_10.pdf ; Joint Doctrine Publication 0-01,(6th Edition, 2022) PP. 24 – 33 – https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/63776f4de90e0728553b568b/UK_Defence_Doctrine_Ed6.pdf
10. SDSR 2025, page 4
11. https://www.forcesnews.com/services/navy/changing-culture-royal-navy-vulnerable-promoting-toxic-leaders-says-first-sea-lord
12. Young, M., & Dulewicz, V. (2024). General intelligence, personality traits, and motivation as predictors of performance, potential, and rate of advancement of Royal Navy senior officers. Military Psychology, 36(6), PP. 617–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/08995605.2023.2244818
14. https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news/2019/december/18/191218-strategic-studies-centre-launched
15. https://chacr.org.uk/
16. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/freeman-air-and-space-institute
17. Center for International Maritime Security, https://cimsec.org/
18. https://snr.org.uk/podcast-categories/seapower/
19. Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research (CHACR)[iii] and the Freeman Air and Space Institute (FASI).
20. Maritime Britain in the 21st Century , Ed. Kate Jamieson, Kevin Rowlands and Andrew Young, Britannia Publishing, 2024.
21. https://cd.royalnavy.mod.uk/-/media/rnweb/locations-and-operations/bases-and-stations/rnssc/ssc_annual_report_2024-2025.pdf
22. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With A Knife; see also ‘Learning organisations defeat insurgencies; hierarchical bureaucracies do not’, The US Army & Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007),p.liii.
23. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/prime-minister-appoints-kings-senior-research-fellow-to-the-house-of-lords-as-labour-peer
25. https://wavellroom.com/2020/04/02/organisational-learning-culture-a-changing-paradigm/
26. https://wavellroom.com/2020/11/05/intellectual-discipline-the-missing-core-value/
27. Jenkins, Gen. Sir Gwyn, ‘First Sea Lord’s speech to the International Sea Power Conference, 8th of December, 2025 https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/first-sea-lords-speech-to-the-international-sea-power-conference
