How could the Royal Navy recover institutional knowledge lost as the service shrank?
Short answerRebuild the documentary and scholarly infrastructure that preserves professional history, much as the Navy Records Society did from the 1890s.
NotesA shrinking service can lose accumulated institutional knowledge. Rebuilding it requires access to documentary evidence and historical analysis alongside the recollections of serving officers. In the 1890s, senior naval-intelligence and academic figures created the Navy Records Society to publish papers and books for professional use. Institutions of that kind can preserve lessons that personnel turnover and organizational contraction would otherwise erase.