“Urgent steps” must be taken to stop the decline of Britain’s Royal Navy “before it’s too late,” Vice Adm. Sir Jeremy Blackham and research professor Gwyn Prins wrote in the August/September 2010 edition of the RUSI (Royal United Service Institute) Journal.

In 2007, the two wrote an article titled “The Royal Navy at the Brink,” where they argued that the Navy was “on the cusp of losing coherence.”

Their latest article warns: “The trend of British maritime decline has not altered since our 2007 analysis. How could it? The downward momentum in naval construction requires decisive action to reverse it.”

“[T]hree years on, our projections both of the Royal Navy’s future fleet strength and of the threat to international maritime security now seem, if anything, over-optimistic,” they write.

“The defense establishment as a whole faces grim problems,” the article says.

Britain has grown to take its security for granted. “We now live in a time in which wars touch few people directly. … Today, the assumption is that good order is a natural condition and can be taken for granted because ‘nothing happens’” (ibid.).

The Ministry of Defense, the writers argue, has been infected with two flawed assumptions: That in a globalized and interdependent world, nation-states will become less important, and multinational intuitions will come to the fore; and that “soft power” is more effective than “hard power.”

To fix Britain’s naval problems, the country needs “a bonfire of current assumptions, plus the demolition and rebuilding of current institutions” (ibid.).

Britain, as a major trading nation, is actually more dependent than ever on the sea. Ninety-five percent of the UK’s trade by volume is carried by sea, and 90 percent of its trade by value. Eighty percent of all liquid fuel has traveled by sea at some point.

Most of the UK’s trade goods, the authors point out, travel through one of the world’s eight major sea gates: Hormuz, Malacca Straits, Bab el Mandeb, Suez, Gibraltar, Cape Horn, Cape of Good Hope or Panama.

Britain used to control or have sea bases by many of these sea gates. Now it only has Gibraltar.

Even the Internet depends upon the oceans and sea gates. Ninety percent of global e-mails travel through undersea fiber-optic cables. These cables also run into choke points—often in similar places to critical sea gates.

If a hostile power took control of the ocean, Britain could be shut down.

Yet Britain’s Navy seems set on a path of increasing weakness. Britain currently has 23 surface combatants. This seems set to shrink to 21 by 2021. At that time, the average ship will also be 21 years old—what used to be considered retirement age. By 2035, the fleet is set to shrink to only 19 vessels.

Only 16 new surface combatants are set to enter service between 2002 and 2031. “This,” writes Blackham and Prins, “is a rate of building below that of any other significant maritime nation.”

This has more implications than just having a small navy. If Britain’s shipyards are not building warships, they may shut down. Britain could lose the skills and technical ability necessary to maintain a navy.

The Royal United Service Institute was founded by the Duke of Wellington in 1831, when Britain was coming into the height of its power. Much of that power depended upon its navy.

Now, as the RUSI Journal article points out, Britain is weak, and getting weaker. The Navy may have to endure further budget cuts as Britain struggles to balance its books.

“The Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it,” Winston Churchill said during World War ii. He was highlighting the offensive capabilities of Britain’s bombers, but it also shows how completely Britain depends on the Navy for its protection.

Already Britain is vulnerable to a naval siege by a foreign power. All it would need to do is shut a few sea gates.

For more information on this prophesied future, see our article “The Coming Siege.”