The decline and fall of the British imperial navy
A case study in incumbency and global economic dominance
The British Empire was one of the largest and most influential empires in history.1 As with the Roman Empire, sea trade was the lifeblood of the British Empire and naval dominance was integral to the existence and maintenance of the British Empire, along with superior infantry tactics.2
The rise of the British Empire is a story of displacement of an incumbent naval power through innovations in tactics, strategy, logistics, and technology. While the British Empire was not displaced forcibly by one of its opponents, the decline of the Royal Navy’s dominant position can be seen similarly through the lens of innovation and stagnancy.
The broadside paradigm
The British navy rose to prominence in 1588 as the galley became less important as a warship.3 This transition was driven by a combination of technological factors, including advances in rigging (sailing technology) and the development of cannon broadsides. Galleys were superior warships when it came to ramming attacks, boarding actions, and could mount equal chase armament fore and aft - often the largest guns that a ship could bear - but a galley is poorly suited for an exchange of broadsides. Sailing ships without banks of oars have more space for cannons.
Sailing warships were divided into two general types: Ships of the line designed to fight in large slow formations, and frigates designed for independent operation against merchant ships, privateers, and enemy frigates - also known as cruising operations. While large fleet engagements happened on rare occasions separated by years or decades, frigate warfare (such as dramatized in the film Master and Commander) happened nearly continuously throughout the Age of Sail.
As an American, I would be remiss not to mention several embarrassing moments for the British that took place when the United States Navy was not considered a credible force. Without the resources to build a fleet of first-rate ships of the line, the United States decided to build six oversized frigates - each powerful enough to defeat European frigates, but still fast and maneuverable enough to escape any ship of the line.4 In spite of the advantages in numbers and institutional expertise, the American super-frigates performed quite well against their British counterparts.
The first major challenges to the post-1588 paradigm of broadside combat by sailing ships date from the period of 1850-1876. The first part of that paradigm to fall was the reliance on sails: The French developed the first steam battleship, Napoléon, in 1850; the first ironclad warship, Gloire, in 1858; and the first steel-framed battleship, the Redoubtable, in 1876. Steamships could maneuver freely against the wind like galleys without compromising on broadside armament.
While the British lagged slightly in innovation, this arms race took place in a period when the French and English navies were not in open conflict; the British rapidly outbuilt the French after each of these developments, maintaining roughly a 2:1 advantage in numbers.
Armored cruisers were designed for cruising capabilities, with as much speed as possible combined with heavy armament, long operational range, and armor. With the doctrine of mass fleet action in mind, a more specialized class of long-range ocean-going ironclad warship was also developed, this becoming known as the pre-dreadnought battleship. Pre-dreadnoughts were slower, with heavier armor and guns than armored cruisers.
However, in the era of the armored cruiser, maximizing broadside armament remained an important consideration, and most armored cruisers and pre-dreadnought battleships retained the basic division of armament of the galleon: While chase guns were larger, the greater weight of fire was concentrated in broadside guns placed on the sides of the ship.
British naval doctrine and strategy still remained oriented around the paradigm of the defeat of the Spanish Armada: Defeat the enemy in a decisive battle, maneuvering to bring broadsides to bear. In 1905, there was a decisive battle at Tsushima between Japanese and Russian steel-framed warships, with fleets that included both battleships and armored cruisers. This would rewrite British naval doctrine - partially.
Dreadnought and Invincible
HMS Dreadnought was revolutionary in several ways: It was as fast as the armored cruisers of the previous generation, as well armored as the battleships of the previous generation, and had roughly twice the effective firepower at long range. The Battle of Tsushima had established that big guns were much better than small guns in the age of armored warships and long-range gunnery, and Dreadnought accordingly replaced the broadside intermediate battery … with a broadside heavy battery.
Like the Lord Nelson class before it, 60% of the gun battery of Dreadnought was designed for broadside action with limited traverse. The X turret was centerline and could fire to either broadside direction; the P and Q turrets could theoretically fire forwards or aft, but risked causing blast damage by doing so. This inefficient layout was one of HMS Dreadnought’s flaws, and it was shared by the next six British battleships (Bellerophon and Saint Vincent classes).
In the summer of 1910, two months after the last Saint Vincent class dreadnought was commissioned, the Austro-Hungarian Empire laid down its first dreadnought, the Tegetthoff class. The Tegetthoff class invested the same weight of metal in its main batteries … but had 20% more guns and roughly 50% more broadside firepower at any angle of engagement. The British were slow to adopt three-gun and four-gun turrets; the Americans, one of their chief rivals, were quick to adopt and master triple-gun turrets.
The British continued installing highly inefficient amidship turrets with limited firing arcs continually through 1914 with the Iron Duke class. The last battleship class ever built with a limited-use amidship turret was the Nelson class, which entered commission in the British Navy in 1927. No British battleship would be built with a turret layout as efficient as that of the Tegetthoff class until 1940.
Battlecruisers and speed
The second was that while as fast as older armored cruisers, the fact of the matter is that HMS Dreadnought was the slowest of the new generation of warships. The first battlecruisers, the Invincible class, designed at nearly the same time, were faster (25 knots) with a slightly more efficient (if weirdly asymmetric) turret layout. These captial ships had a different problem: Their armor was too thin.
British battlecruisers were vulnerable to weapons carried by older armored cruisers half their size and later heavy cruisers a third of their size, and their armor was too thin to effectively mitigate damage from the battleship-grade weapons they carried. British-style battlecruisers required substantial increases in armor in order to be fully functional warships instead of expensive liabilities.5 That wasn’t fundamentally impossible. In World War II, the most useful class of Japanese battleships were the Kongo class, British-style battlecruisers first laid down in 1911, reconstructed with improved armor sufficient to hold up against enemy cruisers.
The Germans, on the other hand, were already building battlecruisers that looked like the fast battleships of the next generation, with the kind of balance of speed, armor, and firepower that would remain useful in cruising warfare all the way into World War II. They also were directing a greater proportion of their building efforts to those battlecruisers. Britain was in the process of slowly and unwittingly losing their naval arms race with Germany.
Without the intervention of World War I, the next five years would have seen the Germans build four Bayern-class slow battleships and seven Mackensen-class battlecruisers that were effectively fast battleships; the British had plans to build six fast battleships, eight slow battleships, and four underarmored battlecruisers. The British also had a growing problem with ammunition design and quality that went undetected until the Battle of Jutland.
Extrapolating from pre-WWI trends, Britain was on track to go from the world’s premier naval power to one that would be outclassed in the Atlantic by the Americans, the North Sea by the Germans, and the Pacific by the Japanese.
The Royal Navy at the dawn of World War I
In 1914, Britain’s capital fleet6 included forty-one pre-dreadnoughts, each of which had half the effective firepower of HMS Dreadnought while costing nearly as much to maintain and operate. They were essentially oversized and overpriced coastal monitors, relegated to a strictly defensive role.
Britain had only just started to lay down its first class of mature dreadnoughts with efficient turret layouts (and also the first designed to exceed 21 knots), the Queen Elizabeth class.
Britain also had twenty-two dreadnought battleships with inefficient turret layouts and 21 knot top speeds; its older armored cruisers had 23 knots in short bursts. These ships were fast enough to protect a convoy, but not fast enough to pursue cruising warships or outmaneuver an enemy fleet. The only way that these ships could engage enemy warships was if enemy warships accepted the engagement, were heavily damaged, or were blockaded into a harbor.
In search of a decisive battle
The only thing that the largest naval battle of World War I proved was that the Royal Navy had made serious mistakes. In the Battle of Jutland, the British had a huge numeric advantage, with almost twice as many modern capital ships and over twice the nominal firepower; however, British battlecruisers were poorly equipped to survive contact with the enemy and British battleships were too slow to either gain an advantageous tactical position or to pursue a retreating German fleet.
The result was an indecisive engagement where British lost three times as many capital ships in spite of their large theoretical advantage.7 A decisive battle requires either a significant advantage in maneuver on the fleet scale (either through speed or logistic considerations) or a severe case of overconfidence on the part of one or both sides. Slow battleships could not achieve the necessary advantage in maneuver; British-style battlecruisers did not have the armor to engage successfully in fleet actions; and Britain’s position as the incumbent premier naval power made overconfidence on the part of their opponents significantly less likely.
Cruising warfare, where the broadside paradigm was less important, was the naval warfare of the future, and for that matter had accounted for most of the Royal Navy’s ship-to-ship fighting between the decisive defeats of the Spanish Armada and the indecisive Battle of Jutland.
The clearest rivals for the title are the Mongolian Empire for sheer physical scale and the Roman Empire in terms of duration, population, and cultural influence. Depending on political leanings, the Qing Empire and Russian Empire may gain honorable mentions, but existed in a period during which the British had clear superiority in terms of military power and control over the global economy.
In the historiography of the Romans, it is common to introduce the Romans as landsmen unfamiliar with ships, which was the state of affairs in the Roman Republic at the beginning of the Punic Wars. It is important to note that in that period, Roman influence was strictly confined to the Italian peninsula. Rome then built a vast armada of quinqueremes, defeated the Carthaginians, and became the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean Sea (and eventually the Black Sea as well).
The specific date of 1588 marks the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
This is similar to the intended performance profile of a battlecruiser.
After the Battle of Jutland, Britain would hastily add several hundred tons of armor to battlecruisers in service. The Admiral class then in construction was redesigned with substantially thicker armor. (Only the HMS Hood was completed out of this class.) The other two British-style battlecruiser classes to see service in WWII, the Renown class and Kongo class, were reconstructed to add armor and several thousand tons of additional displacement.
Here, I will use “exceeding 10,000 tons and carrying guns larger than 8 inches” as the criterion for a capital ship, following the convention of the Washington Naval Treaty. This is conveniently exactly the collection of ships that could easily threaten to
Specifically, three battlecruisers to one battlecruiser, and three obsolete armored cruisers to one obsolete pre-dreadnought battleship.