Building common naval culture in a fragmented age

What challenges does naval culture face in the age of social media and generational fragmentation?

Navies must bridge increasingly different experiences and deliberately document shared standards because older national reference points no longer bind crews together reliably.

Bennett argues that personnel no longer arrive with the same films, stories, and national reference points that once provided a common picture of shipboard leadership. A service could once assume that many recruits had seen In Which We Serve and The Cruel Sea, with the former offering a model of how a commanding officer should relate to the lower deck. Social media, subscription channels, and generational divisions now produce far more varied cultural experiences. Navies must therefore create bridges among people who may attach different meanings to authority, teamwork, and tradition. Written frameworks need to explain what is done and why, replacing assumptions that can no longer be taken for granted.