Royal American Navy

The Royal American Navy is the maritime service of the Royal American Armed Forces and the second of the Realm’s six services. It numbers approximately 330,000 regulars, operates four fleet carriers and five ballistic-missile submarines, and carries the entirety of the Realm’s nuclear armament.

It was created by the Charter of Union itself, in a clause of fewer than forty words, which makes it the first institution the United Kingdom of America ever made. The Army is older than the country and remembers it constantly. The Navy is exactly as old as the country and has never been able to decide whether that is a boast or an admission.

The relationship with Great Britain’s Royal Navy is the closest between any two institutions of the personal union, and the most carefully unexamined. The two fleets share a sovereign, a rank structure, a signal book, a body of doctrine, a continuous exchange of officers, and, most awkwardly, a ship prefix. They are near enough the same size that neither government has published a comparison in sixty years, which is not an accident.

The Navy holds the deterrent and nothing else does. There are no land-based missiles, no tactical or battlefield weapons, and no American warhead stationed in any other realm. The whole of it goes to sea in five submarines, one of which is always on patrol, and the order that would use it requires two signatures that the Navy defends more fiercely than the politicians who hold them.

It is governed by a Board of Admiralty that has not genuinely governed anything since the middle of the last century. The First Naval Lord decides, the Board meets and signs, and every officer above a certain rank could tell you so. The 2028 defence review proposed abolishing it, and the Navy defended a form it did not believe in with arguments it did not expect anyone to accept. On 29 October 2028 the government rejected abolition and announced instead that the Board would be made to govern: new letters patent will have it decide flag appointments, shipbuilding and the estimates by majority vote, with its civil members voting and their dissents recorded.

Origins

The clause

The Navy exists because of thirty-eight words in the Charter of 1783, which authorised the Congress of the new Realm to raise and maintain a naval force and to build the yards to sustain it.

The clause was not controversial and was not much debated. The colonies that had just secured their settlement with the Crown were maritime colonies, their wealth moved on water, and nobody at the Charter proposed that the Realm should be without ships. What the drafters did not anticipate was the constitutional weight the clause would later carry, which is that the Navy is the only armed service of the Realm whose existence rests directly on the founding instrument rather than on an Act of Parliament that could be repealed by a majority.

The Navy has never allowed anyone to forget this. Its standing objection to any reorganisation it dislikes is that the Board holds its authority from the Charter and not from the ministry of the day, an argument that is technically sound, has never been tested, and irritates every minister who encounters it.

The service with no ancestors

The Army traces regiments to provincial corps of the 1740s and carries honours it won fighting against the Crown it now serves. The Navy has nothing of the kind and the difference is the making of both services.

There was no colonial navy to inherit. The Realm’s first warships were built, bought or transferred after 1783, crewed by men who had served in the Royal Navy or in privateers or in merchantmen, and organised on a British model because there was no other model available and no time to invent one. The Navy therefore began as a deliberate construction rather than an accumulation, and it has been a deliberate construction ever since: reorganised by design where the Army was reorganised by accretion, uniform where the Army is various, and free of the territorial loyalties that the Army spent two centuries managing.

What it lost by this is a past. A soldier joins a regiment with a history older than the Realm and a memorial wall with names on it from wars the Realm was not party to. A sailor joins a service that began with the country and a ship that will be broken up within her lifetime. The Navy’s answer to this is that it has the country’s history instead of its own, which is true and is also the sort of thing an institution says when it is short of something.

The Continental Navy, and whether it counts

Whether the Navy descends from the Continental force of 1775 has been argued for two centuries and has never been decided, and the Board has declined to decide it on at least four recorded occasions.

The case for descent is that vessels, officers and practices of the Continental service passed into the Realm’s fleet after the Charter, that several of the first commissions went to men who had held Continental ones, and that the Army’s claim on its own rebel ancestry rests on no better evidence. The case against is that the Continental Navy was dissolved, that its ships were sold, that the Charter’s clause speaks of raising a force rather than continuing one, and that a service which prides itself on constitutional exactness should not claim a lineage it cannot document.

The practical effect of the non-decision is visible in the fleet list. A small number of ships carry honours dated before 1783 and the rest do not, the distinction follows no principle anyone has been able to state, and the Board’s position since 1911 has been that the question is of historical rather than administrative interest. Historians regard this as an evasion. The Board regards the historians’ certainty as the greater evasion, since the records that would settle it were lost in the 1814 fire, and both positions have hardened comfortably over a century in which nothing whatever depended on the answer.

Commissioning Day

The Navy’s anniversary is the day the first ship was commissioned under the Charter, and it is the only service anniversary in the Realm that nobody disputes.

The Army has two birthdays, one colonial and one from the raising of the Continental force, and marks both because it could never agree to drop either. The Air Force dates itself from an Act. The Navy has a ship, a date, and a signed commission in the archive at New Westminster, and it produces all three at intervals with a satisfaction that the other services find difficult to bear.

The two navies

One King, two fleets

The Royal American Navy and the Royal Navy are separate services of separate realms under one sovereign, and they are more deeply interwoven than any other pair of institutions in the personal union.

They share a rank structure, identical in title and nearly identical in function. They share a signal book, maintained jointly and revised in alternate years by each. They share a body of tactical doctrine that neither could now unpick from the other. Officers cross between them on exchange postings as a routine part of a career, and an American captain who has never served a commission in a British ship is unusual enough to be remarked on.

None of this is a merger and the distinction is maintained with some care. No officer holds a commission in both services. No American ship is subject to British ministers or the reverse. The standing agreement that governs the relationship is older than the Atlantic Treaty Organization and was deliberately not folded into it, because the two realms concluded that an arrangement between two fleets of one Crown was a different kind of thing from a treaty between allies, and that calling it an alliance would concede a point neither wished to concede.

The prefix

Both navies use HMS, and this is the single most inconvenient consequence of the personal union.

His Majesty’s Ship is a description rather than a nationality, and the ships of both realms are literally his. Neither service has ever been willing to give the prefix up: the Royal Navy because it has used it since the seventeenth century, the Royal American Navy because surrendering it would concede that the American Crown is a lesser capacity of the same monarch, which is precisely the proposition the Realm’s whole constitutional architecture exists to deny.

The two services therefore maintain a joint register of names, revised annually, under which no name is borne by a ship of both fleets at the same time. Official lists disambiguate by port of registry, so that a document will speak of HMS Chesapeake (Norfolk) where confusion is possible. In practice confusion is usually not possible, because the fleets operate in different waters and each service knows its own.

The register has failed twice. In 1889 both realms commissioned a ship of the same name within five weeks, the American by administrative error and the British by a decision taken before the error was known and not reversed afterwards. In 1943 the same thing happened under wartime conditions and was allowed to stand for two years because nobody could be spared to care. Signal traffic from both episodes is studied at both staff colleges, as an example of what an agreement without an enforcement mechanism is worth.

The parity nobody states

The two fleets are close enough in size that neither realm has published a comparison since 1968, and the closeness is not a coincidence.

Both governments understand, without either having said so in a document that has been released, that a sovereign whose two principal realms maintain enormously unequal fleets has a problem that would eventually have to be named. If the American fleet were plainly and permanently the greater, the Royal Navy becomes the junior fleet of a junior realm, which Britain will not accept and America has no interest in imposing. If the reverse, the American Crown looks like a dependency in the one domain where dependency would actually matter.

So the building programmes of two sovereign states have been run, for the better part of a century, with one eye on a number neither publishes. Defence ministers in both realms deny that this is so. Naval attaches in both realms would find the denial funny. It is the clearest case in the whole personal union of the two Crowns managing a problem by declining to describe it, and it works, which is the uncomfortable part.

What the Realm does claim is that its Navy is one of the two greatest afloat. It does not claim to be the first, the comparison is not made in official publications, and officers asked directly will say that the question is not a useful one. This is a change from the language of the 1950s, when the claim was made freely, and the change was a decision rather than a drift.

Command

The Board of Admiralty

The Navy is commanded by a Board, which makes it the last collegial command structure in the government of the Realm, and the Board is a fiction.

In form, the Board of Admiralty is a body of naval and civil members who take decisions jointly, sign jointly, and are jointly answerable. Commissions are issued in its name. Ships are ordered, officers appointed and courts convened by its authority. The First Naval Lord is its senior member and, in the constitutional theory of the thing, its chairman rather than its master.

In fact the First Naval Lord decides and the Board ratifies. This has been true since at least the 1950s, is true of every Board member’s own account of their service, and is not seriously contested by anybody inside the institution. Board meetings are held, minutes are kept, and the minutes record agreement because agreement is what happens when the professional head of a disciplined service states a view to subordinates who will need his favour for their next appointment.

What the form is for

The Navy’s defence of the Board is that collegiality restrains the service, and the Navy does not expect anyone to believe it.

The argument runs that a Board cannot be captured as easily as a single officer, that the requirement to carry colleagues slows a bad decision, and that the civil members supply a check that a purely military chief would lack. Each proposition is defensible in the abstract. None of them describes a body whose decisions are taken elsewhere and brought to it.

The better argument, which the Navy makes less often because it is less flattering, is that the form is worth keeping because it is old. An institution that has signed its instruments the same way since 1783 acquires a kind of stability that a reorganised one does not, and the Navy has watched the Air Force reorganise its command three times in fifty years and reach no better decisions for it.

The 2028 review

The 2028 defence review proposed to abolish the Board and replace it with a single Chief of the Naval Staff. The government rejected the proposal on 29 October 2028, and chose to make the Board govern instead.

The ministerial case is straightforward and has been made before. The other services have single professional heads. Joint operations require a single naval voice. A Board that does not decide is a layer of process that obscures accountability, and when something goes wrong the Realm is entitled to know whose decision it was. The review’s supporting paper observes, accurately, that no Board member has recorded a dissent in the minutes in nineteen years.

The Navy’s response has been to defend the Board in public and to lobby against abolition in private, which is what it did in 1974 and 1991 and 2009, on each of which occasions the proposal was withdrawn. The service’s institutional memory holds that ministers lose interest before admirals do.

What is different this time is that the review has said what it would put in the Board’s place, which the earlier ones did not, and that the First Naval Lord has declined three invitations to state that the Board is a functioning body. Those two facts were read, inside the service, as the review being more serious than its predecessors and the Navy’s position being weaker. The review reported in the spring.

The answer came on 29 October 2028, and it was neither side’s. The Minister of Defence told the House of Commons that the government would not abolish the Board but would give it powers of its own. The Board will decide the Navy’s appointments to flag rank, its shipbuilding programme and its estimates by majority, its civil members voting and their dissents recorded in the minutes, and the First Naval Lord remains its senior member. The change is to be made by new letters patent, which need no Act of Parliament; the government’s written heads of agreement with its partners confine its legislation to Loreto and supply, and an Act was not available to it. The Navy keeps its Board and loses the arrangement under which the Board did not decide anything. The review’s other proposals are still open.

The fleet

Shape

The Navy is built around four fleet carriers, five deterrent submarines, a force of attack submarines, and a surface fleet whose job is mostly to make the first two possible.

Two carriers are assigned to each ocean and one of each pair is in refit, working up or standing down at any given moment, so the practical availability is one carrier per ocean with a second obtainable at notice. This is understood by everybody in the service and is stated in no public document, because the arithmetic invites a question about whether four is enough that no First Naval Lord wishes to answer in front of a committee.

The attack submarines are the service’s real workhorse and the part of it the public knows least. They escort the deterrent, trail other people’s submarines, gather what is gathered, and spend their lives in an environment where nothing they do can be photographed. The surface fleet, in the low hundreds of hulls, ranges from air-defence escorts down to the patrol vessels that do the unglamorous work in the Caribbean and the Gulf.

Names

Fleet carriers take the Realm’s battle honours. The deterrent submarines take its rivers.

The carriers are named for engagements: the practice began in the 1920s, when the first purpose-built ships were ordered and the Board decided that an aircraft carrier was too conspicuous a thing to name for a living person and too expensive to name for a small one. The result is that the Realm’s largest warships carry the names of its fights, which is conventional, martial, and exactly what a navy would be expected to do.

The submarines that carry the weapons are named for rivers, and the contrast is deliberate. The Board that chose the scheme in the 1950s considered and rejected virtues, which it thought pompous, and battles, which it thought inappropriate to a weapon nobody intended to use. Rivers were chosen because they are domestic, because every one of them runs through somewhere people live, and because a boat named for the water at the bottom of somebody’s town is a harder thing to think about casually. Whether that was the intended effect or a retrospective justification is argued about. The minutes say nothing.

The rest of the fleet follows older conventions: escorts for towns, patrol vessels for birds, auxiliaries for what they do.

The gap

The Navy cannot crew what it owns, and this is the most serious thing wrong with it.

Recruitment has missed target for a decade. The shortfall is not uniform: general service intake is adequate and occasionally good, while the technical trades, the nuclear watchkeepers, the sonar and weapons-engineering specialists, are short by margins that the service reports internally in percentages it does not publish. Hulls sit alongside for want of people. Ships sail with gapped billets and the gaps are covered by working the people who are there harder, which is a solution that produces its own attrition.

The reasons are not mysterious and are not mainly about money. A nuclear watchkeeper can earn more ashore, work predictable hours, and sleep in the same place two nights running. The Navy’s answer has been bonuses, shortened initial engagements and a recruiting campaign built around technical training, and the effect has been to slow the decline rather than reverse it.

The uncomfortable part is what it does to the self-image. The Navy’s account of itself is that it is the technical service, the one that recruits on aptitude and trains people to a standard the civilian economy respects. That account is true, and it is also the reason the civilian economy keeps taking them.

The deterrent

What the Navy holds

The whole of the Realm’s nuclear armament goes to sea in five submarines and there is nothing else.

There are no land-based missiles. There are no tactical or battlefield weapons of any kind. No American warhead is stationed in any other realm of the Crown or on the territory of any ally, and that restriction is the reason a nuclear-free Scandinavian Union can sit inside the same alliance without an argument, and the reason a Crown realm can declare itself nuclear-free without an argument with New Westminster.

The doctrine is retaliatory and the Realm has declared no first use. The arsenal is small relative to what the economy could sustain, which is a policy rather than a constraint, and the Realm participates in the League’s reduction and verification machinery rather than obstructing it.

Continuous at sea

One boat has been on deterrent patrol without interruption since the 1960s, and the Navy is organised around the fact that the run has never broken.

Five hulls sustain it comfortably. Four would sustain it tightly, and the Board fought for the fifth on precisely that ground: that a cycle with no margin is a cycle that will eventually fail on an engineering defect nobody predicted, and that the first failure would be the only one anybody remembered. The fifth boat is the difference between a programme that works and a programme that works until it does not.

The crews do not know their targets. They know the release procedure, they know the authentication sequence, and they know what a valid order looks like. What the boat would be firing at is held in the equipment rather than in anybody’s head, and the deliberate purpose of this is that no member of a crew should carry through their life the knowledge of which city they were assigned.

Each boat carries a letter of last resort, written in the Prime Minister’s own hand on taking office, sealed, and destroyed unopened when that Prime Minister leaves. It instructs the commanding officer what to do in the event that the Realm’s government has ceased to exist. No letter has ever been opened. Every Prime Minister since the practice began has written one, and no former Prime Minister has said what they wrote.

The two keys

Release requires the Prime Minister and the Governor-General together, and the Navy defends that arrangement more fiercely than the politicians do.

The rule exists because a Realm that had used the weapon once on a single ministry’s decision concluded that it should never again rest with one officer holding a parliamentary majority. It is the most consequential surviving function of the vice-regal office and was designed to be.

Critics call it a fiction that would collapse in the minutes such a decision allows. The defenders answer that an untested fiction still shapes what ministers plan for, and that the alternative was one hand on the whole of it.

The Navy is with the defenders and is louder than them, which surprises people who expect an operational service to want fewer obstacles between an order and its execution. The service’s reasoning is not constitutional sentiment. It is that the people who would have to carry the order out are the people with the strongest possible interest in knowing that two authorities examined it, and that a submarine commanding officer at the end of a chain of authentication is entitled to the assurance that the chain had two beginnings. The Board has said as much, in terms, to three separate parliamentary committees.

The squadron apart

The deterrent squadron is socially and professionally separate from the rest of the Navy to a degree that the rest of the Navy resents.

It has its own base, its own career path, its own security regime and its own culture, and an officer who enters it is unlikely to leave it. Selection is rigorous and the standards are not the fleet’s standards. Promotion within the squadron does not translate outward as readily as it should, and the surface fleet’s standing complaint is that a disproportionate share of the Navy’s money, and the best of its engineering talent, disappears into a force of five hulls that will never fire.

The squadron’s answer is that it is the only part of the Navy whose failure would be national rather than operational, which is true, and which does not make the resentment less real.

Bases

Norfolk

The Atlantic fleet is based at Norfolk, on an anchorage that was in naval use before the Realm existed.

The site is the Navy’s oldest continuous establishment and the nearest thing it has to an ancestral home. It holds the Atlantic carriers, the greater part of the surface fleet, the principal repair yard on the east coast and the operational headquarters that the Board in New Westminster does not entirely control. The split between the Board’s seat and the fleet’s headquarters is a recurring theme of naval administration, and every proposal to resolve it by moving one to the other has foundered on the objection that the losing city is a polity capital with members in the Commons.

San Diego

The Pacific fleet is based at San Diego, and it is there because of what happened at Honolulu.

Before the Second Great War the Pacific fleet’s main anchorage was at Honolulu, forward, exposed, and chosen for reach rather than safety. After 1945 the main base moved to the mainland and stayed there. The stated reasons were logistical and were real: the yards, the industry and the manpower were on the coast, and a fleet based where it is built is a fleet that spends less time crossing an ocean to be repaired.

The unstated reason was that the fleet had been caught at anchor once. No document says that the move was a response to the attack. Every officer who has served in the Pacific fleet believes it was.

Honolulu

Honolulu remains a forward anchorage, a repair facility, and the Realm’s principal naval memorial, and the three functions coexist uneasily.

Ships still base there on deployment and the harbour is still working. It is also where the Realm’s dead from the attack are, where the ceremony is held each year, and where a visitor arriving on a commercial flight can see a working warship and a memorial from the same road. The Navy is conscious that the combination is unusual and has declined several proposals to separate them, on the ground that a memorial in a place where nothing happens any more is a different and lesser thing.

Guantanamo

The Caribbean base is at Guantanamo, held under a lease from the Republic of Cuba, and it is the Navy’s unreckoned wound.

Its military value is genuine and has never been in serious dispute. It commands the Windward Passage, it is the only deep-water facility the Realm holds in the eastern Caribbean, and it supports the patrol and interdiction work that occupies most of the Navy’s peacetime effort in those waters. That the base is useful is not the argument.

The Alaskan station

The Arctic presence is a seasonal station at Nome, in the Kingdom of Alaska, and it is growing because the ice is not.

It was a weather and communications post for most of its life, manned in summer and largely shut in winter, supporting a patrol pattern that assumed the northern approaches were closed for most of the year. That assumption has been failing for two decades. The station is being enlarged, the patrol season is lengthening, and the Navy has a small number of ice-capable hulls and a requirement that is outrunning them.

The Realm’s northern frontier is with the Russian Republic, which has more icebreakers, more Arctic ports and a longer institutional interest in the region than the Realm has ever had. The Navy’s internal assessments of the northern balance are not published. Those who have described them in general terms have not described them cheerfully.

Guantanamo

How the Realm came to hold it

The lease came out of the Platt system imposed on Cuba after 1898, under which the Realm reserved a right of intervention and the legal basis for naval stations. The form of the arrangement presented an agreement between states. The circumstances in which it was concluded did not permit the Republic to decline.

In 1934 Prime Minister Franklin D. Roosevelt negotiated away the intervention right and kept the lease. The decision was deliberate and the naval staff were the reason for it: the Board held the base to be indispensable to the Caribbean approaches, and Roosevelt, whose naval instincts were thoroughly engaged, agreed with them. He surrendered the general tutelage and retained the part of it that floated.

That is the Navy’s share of the thing, and it is not a small one. The intervention right, the more obviously objectionable instrument, went because a Prime Minister judged it indefensible. The lease survived because a service said it needed the harbour, and the service was believed.

The argument since

Cuba has never accepted the lease as valid and has said so continuously for ninety years. The Realm’s answer has always been the treaty text, which is a good answer in law and has never once persuaded anybody in Havana.

The position hardened rather than softened after the non-invasion settlement, which constrained the base without closing it and produced an arrangement that satisfies nobody: a Realm that has renounced intervention in Cuba while holding a naval station on Cuban soil against the wishes of the Cuban government. The inconsistency is permanent, it is visible to every party, and it is managed by not being discussed.

What the Navy says, and does not

The Navy’s public position is that the base is held lawfully under an instrument the Realm did not breach, and that questions of its political propriety are for ministers.

This is the correct constitutional answer and it is also a way of declining to have a view about a situation the service created and continues to benefit from. The Board has never conducted an internal examination of the 1934 advice. No First Naval Lord has been asked, in public, whether the advice was right. The Realm has held an inquiry into almost every other difficult thing in its modern history and has held none into this.

What stands in place of a reckoning is the argument that the base is useful, which is true, which has been true throughout, and which was equally true of every arrangement any empire ever declined to give up.

The Second Great War

Honolulu

The war began for the Realm with the fleet at anchor and aircraft overhead, and the Navy has never fully finished arguing about it.

The carriers that crossed the northern Pacific in radio silence achieved what they were sent to achieve. The anchorage was struck, ships were lost, men were killed in numbers the Realm had not contemplated in a single morning, and the Navy that had been the instrument of the Realm’s security was, for some months afterwards, the reason the Realm had none in that ocean.

The service’s institutional memory of the attack is not principally about the ships. It is about the interval between the indications and the event: the signals that were collected and not assembled, the assessments that were written and not read together, and the assumption, held everywhere and by everybody, that the enemy would begin somewhere else.

The blame

Responsibility was settled on officers who were available rather than on the arrangements that had failed, and the verdict has never been formally revisited.

Two commanders were relieved and their careers ended. The inquiries that followed were conducted quickly, under conditions in which the Realm needed a finding more than it needed a complete one, and they produced a finding that a country at war could act on. Later work, most of it after both men were dead, established that the intelligence system had failed above them, that the warnings which reached them were less clear than the warnings which reached the capital, and that no competent officer in their positions would reliably have done otherwise.

No formal review has ever set the original findings aside. Proposals to do so have been made in Parliament four times since 1958. Each has been declined on the ground that the matter is historical, that the records are complete and public, and that a posthumous revision of a wartime finding sets a precedent the Realm would not wish to follow.

The Navy’s own position is more uncomfortable than the ministry’s. The service has never asked for the findings to be revisited, and the reason generally given inside it is that the officers relieved were relieved by the Navy, that the Board of the day concurred in the relief, and that a service asking for its own wartime judgement to be overturned would be asking to be forgiven rather than corrected.

The Pacific

What followed was the largest naval effort in the Realm’s history and the service’s technical making.

The fast carrier task forces were built, manned and learned in under three years. Escort carriers went to sea by the hundred. The submarine arm conducted a campaign against Japanese shipping that did more to decide the Pacific than any single surface action, and did it out of sight of the public that credited the carriers. The Navy ended the war with an instrument of a kind that had not existed when the war began, and with the conviction, which it has never wholly lost, that it is at its best when it is rebuilding.

The Cold War

Under the ice

For forty years the Navy’s principal task was following other people’s submarines, and almost nobody outside it knew.

The contest with the Russian Republic at sea was conducted by attack submarines in the Arctic and the North Atlantic, trailing Russian boats, mapping the acoustic conditions that make trailing possible, and establishing a set of practices that both navies understood and neither acknowledged. It was patient, technical, extremely dangerous and entirely invisible. Crews returned from patrols they could not describe to families who learned not to ask.

The work is the direct ancestor of the Navy’s present self-image: technical, quiet, uninterested in ceremony, and privately contemptuous of services whose achievements can be photographed.

The collision

There was one collision, both governments denied it, and neither has declassified anything about it.

What is known publicly is that an American boat returned to a northern facility with damage inconsistent with any reported event, that a Russian boat was reported lost in the same period, and that the two navies conducted a short and unusually formal exchange through channels normally reserved for other purposes. What is not known publicly is anything else.

The Realm has released no documents. Russia has released no documents. The families of the Russian crew were told what the Russian government told them. The American crew signed undertakings that are still in force, and the small number who have spoken about the patrol at all have spoken about the weather.

Ships and the yards

The Realm builds its own warships, in yards spread across a handful of coastal polities, and no procurement decision has ever been purely technical.

Every class ordered is thousands of jobs in particular places, and the places have members in the Commons. A yard in the Province of Virginia and a yard in the Commonwealth of California do not compete only on price and capability, and both know it. Work is distributed with an eye to distribution, hull numbers are split between yards on grounds that have nothing to do with efficiency, and the Navy’s technical staff produce assessments which are read carefully by ministers who then decide on other grounds.

The Navy resents this and cannot escape it. Its standard complaint is that the Realm builds ships where it is convenient to build them rather than where it is cheapest, and that the difference is paid for in hulls. The standard answer is that a Realm which concentrated its warship-building in one polity would find, within a generation, that it had one polity’s opinion about whether to have a Navy at all.

The compromise has held for a century because both propositions are true. It produces a shipbuilding industry that is more expensive and more distributed than it needs to be, and a Parliament in which the Navy has friends in more places than any other service.

Sailors

Recruiting

The Navy recruits on aptitude and not on territory, is proud of being the Realm’s least regional service, and draws overwhelmingly from the same dozen coastal counties it always has.

Both halves of that are true and the service states only the first. There are no naval equivalents of the Army’s territorial regiments, no recruiting areas, and no formation whose identity is tied to a polity. A rating may be posted to any ship in either ocean and expects to be. The selection process is technical, the training is long, and the culture that results is genuinely indifferent to where a person is from.

And the intake comes from the coasts, generation after generation, in families. The counties around Norfolk and the ports of southern California supply numbers out of all proportion to their populations. The Navy has studied this, has run recruiting campaigns in the interior at intervals since the 1930s, and has moved the figures by a few percentage points at considerable expense. The service is national in its rules and coastal in its composition, and the gap between those two facts has never closed.

Women

Women went to sea earlier in the Navy than in any other service of the Realm, and the Navy has never stopped mentioning it.

The technical branches opened first, then general service, then command, and the deterrent squadron along with the rest rather than after it. The arguments raised elsewhere about habitability and cohesion were raised here too and were dealt with faster, partly because a service that selects on aptitude has a harder time explaining why aptitude stops mattering at a particular point, and partly because the Navy saw an advantage and took it.

The Navy’s account of this is a little too pleased with itself and is substantially accurate. It moved before the Army and it moved before the Air Force. It also moved because it was short of technical people then as it is short of them now, which the official histories mention and the recruiting material does not.

Custom

The bell

A ship’s bell outlives the ship, and that is the Navy’s central tradition.

The Army’s colours accumulate honours and hang in cathedrals for centuries. The Navy has nothing that accumulates, because the objects it would accumulate are ships and ships are broken up. What it has instead is the bell: struck with the ship’s name and the year of her commissioning, rung aboard throughout her service, and removed when she pays off.

The bell then goes to the next ship of the name. A modern escort may carry a bell older than the Realm’s aircraft, older than its submarines, occasionally older than the memory of what the first ship of the name did. Children of the ship’s company are christened over it, filled with water on the day and the name afterwards cut inside the rim, which means that a bell in service carries a list of names of people who have nothing to do with the Navy and never will.

When there is no next ship of the name, the bell goes to the Naval Museum at Norfolk, where the wall of them is the closest thing the service has to the Army’s colours, and is visited by fewer people.

Commissioning and paying off

A warship’s commission is a royal instrument and the ceremony that reads it out is the shortest in the Realm’s ceremonial repertoire.

The commission gives the vessel her legal character as a warship of the Crown. It is read on the quarterdeck, the ensign is hoisted, the bell is rung, and the ship is in commission from that moment. The whole thing takes under ten minutes and the Navy has resisted every proposal to lengthen it.

Paying off is longer and sadder and is not public. The ship’s company forms up, the commission is read again, the ensign comes down and is folded, and the bell is unshipped and handed to the commanding officer. Ships’ companies traditionally leave the ship by the same brow in reverse order of joining, so that the last person off is the first who came aboard.

The wardroom

The Navy’s social institution is the mess rather than the regiment, and the customs of the wardroom and the mess deck carry the service’s culture between generations more effectively than any written instruction.

They are minor, numerous and enforced without reference to rank: what is not discussed at dinner, when the loyal toast is drunk and why it is drunk sitting, who may and may not enter which space uninvited. Outsiders find them arbitrary. Their function is to give a group of people confined together for months a set of rules that are not orders, and by that means a form of social life that a chain of command cannot supply.

The badge

The service badge is a crowned eagle gripping two crossed fouled anchors, over a scroll reading EX CHARTA, with a single date beneath it.

The motto means from the Charter and is not a sentiment. It is the Navy’s standing constitutional argument compressed into two words: that the service holds its authority from the founding instrument rather than from the ministry of the day. Officers quote it at ministers, who find it less charming than the Navy does.

The badge carries one date and the Army’s carries two. The Army was raised twice, in 1741 as provincial corps and in 1775 as a Continental force, could never agree to abandon either, and put both on its badge with a stroke between them. The Navy has 1784, the year the first ship was commissioned under the Charter, and nothing else. The Navy did not design its badge to make that point. It has never once passed up the opportunity to make it.

The Navy and the other services

The Air Force, and the fight that made it

The Navy owns its carrier aviation, and it owns it because it won an interwar argument that shaped the Air Force permanently.

When the Air Force was formed the natural proposition was that it should fly everything that flew, and for a period in the 1920s it did. The Navy’s case against was operational and was made with great persistence: that an aircraft flying from a ship is part of the ship, that the people who fly it must be trained by the service that fights the ship, and that an arrangement dividing the two produces aircrew who are visitors aboard the vessel their lives depend on.

The Navy prevailed, and the shape of the Air Force follows from it. Carrier aviation is naval. Land-based maritime patrol is the Air Force’s, which is the boundary the settlement drew and which both services have occasionally tried to move. The argument is studied in both staff colleges and each teaches it differently.

The Marine Corps

The Marines are a separate service of the Realm, carried in the Navy’s ships, and the arrangement is a standing argument about who commands once the force is ashore.

The Corps has its own chief, its own budget line, its own aviation and its own logistics. It does not have its own shipping, and it is not going to get it, because a Realm that has been careful with defence money is not going to fund two amphibious fleets. So the Marines are independent on the establishment and dependent in practice, and the question of when naval command of an operation ends and Marine command begins has been settled by written agreement three times and reopened after each of the three.

The Coast Service

The Coast Service is the sixth service and the Navy’s relationship with it is warmer than its relationship with the Marines, mainly because nothing is at stake.

In peace the Coast Service does rescue, port security and maritime law enforcement and the Navy leaves it alone. In war it integrates as a combat auxiliary for coastal defence and port protection and the Navy takes it seriously. The two services exchange people freely, and a substantial number of Coast Service officers began in the Navy, which the Navy regards as a compliment and the Coast Service regards as a recruiting problem.

The other realms at sea

The Crown’s other realms maintain their own naval forces, and their scale follows their size.

The Union of South Africa and the West Indian realm maintain genuine navies: small by the standards of the two great fleets, competent, and answerable to their own ministers and nobody else’s. The smaller realms and the European duchies maintain coastguards, fishery protection, or nothing at all, and rely for anything beyond that on arrangements made realm to realm.

No realm’s navy is subordinate to another’s, and the point is made with some emphasis whenever an exercise brings several of them together. The American fleet is one navy of the Crown among several, not the Crown’s navy with local auxiliaries, and the distinction is maintained by everybody in public and is complicated in private by the fact that one of those fleets has five ballistic-missile submarines and the others have none.

Assessment

The Royal American Navy is the Union’s own creation, holding the Union’s ultimate power, governed by a form nobody defends.

Those three facts sit oddly together and the article has not reconciled them because the Realm has not. The Navy was made by the Charter and is the only service that owes nothing to any past before the country. It is junior to an Army that predates the Realm and will always be junior, and it minds less than the Army supposes. It holds the whole of the deterrent, which makes the Realm’s second service the custodian of its first responsibility.

Its strengths are real and are mostly invisible. A submarine force that has kept an unbroken patrol cycle for sixty years, a technical standard that the civilian economy poaches from constantly, a working relationship with another sovereign navy that survives changes of government in both realms, and a culture indifferent enough to ceremony that it can be reorganised without a mutiny.

Its failures are real too and are of two kinds. The first is present and manageable: it cannot crew what it owns, the shortfall is in exactly the trades it can least afford to lose, and a decade of remedies has slowed the decline without reversing it.

The second is older and is not being managed at all. The Navy advised a Prime Minister in 1934 that Guantanamo was indispensable, the Prime Minister believed it, and the Realm has held a base on unwilling soil ever since. No Board has examined that advice. No inquiry has been held. The service’s position is that the propriety of the arrangement is a matter for ministers, which is constitutionally correct and is the answer of an institution that would rather not.

And the form of its own government has been saved by being made real. The Board of Admiralty had not decided anything for seventy years. The Navy defended it because it was old, because the alternative was untried, and because the service had seen off three previous attempts. The reviewers made a better case than their predecessors, the First Naval Lord three times declined to say that the Board worked, and in October 2028 the government kept the Board on condition that it vote.

Whether a Board that has recorded no dissent in nineteen years will record one now is not known. What is worth recording is that a service entirely comfortable being modern about ships, aircraft, women and nuclear weapons has settled on the form of its own government as the thing worth being old about, and has never set out why.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Royal American Armed Forces, the joint establishment of the six services
• Royal American Army, the senior service and the article this one is built against
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies, the instrument that created the Navy
• Governor-General, holder of the second key
• Republic of Cuba, and the lease
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, who surrendered the intervention right and kept the base
• The Second Great War, and the attack the Navy was not ready for

Categories

Institutions · Crown and State · Defence