What counts as naval culture?

What is naval culture, and at what levels does it exist?

It is the layered body of identity, tradition, institutional learning, and shared practice found across a maritime nation, its navy, individual ships, and their crews.

Naval culture is difficult to isolate because it overlaps with national maritime identity, heritage, professional practice, and life aboard individual ships. Bennett treats sea blindness as evidence that a society can lose the habits that once made maritime affairs part of national culture. The discussion uses the saying that a ship takes three years to build, a crew thirty years, and a tradition three centuries to show why hardware alone does not create an effective navy. Tradition preserves learned behavior and gives crews a shared sense of how naval work should be done. Bennett therefore separates culture into national, service, ship, and crew levels while stressing that they continually influence one another.