How a navy explains its place in national strategy

Bennett moves from shipboard culture to the way a navy understands its national role, including grand strategy, economics, heritage, historic ships, and relations between officers and the lower deck. HMS Victory, HMS Belfast, and the United States' wider preserved fleet show how historic warships give naval identity a public material form. Clarke argues that the Royal Navy long assumed the public and government already understood its value. After 1918, that assumption left much of the service poorly prepared to make a continuous case for funding against competing institutions. A small number of figures, including Admiral Henderson, learned to advocate more deliberately, but their habits did not immediately become a service-wide public culture. In his interpretation, the Falklands War finally exposed the danger of weak advocacy when the fleet entered combat with too few suitable ships.