Just attended this. Very interesting, lots to think about!

To be fair, he does also make some good points about the Hundred Year's War that I was not aware of, and which are often missed.

The UK depends on the sea for imports of both food and energy. Literally, without the sea we would starve in the dark. It is also by undersea cables that we get ~99% of our international data flows. His second sentence is flawed also; I'll get to that later.

The learned judge is wrong in his very first sentence. He writes that "until the development of air transport [England] was dependent on the sea for both trade and war." Of course the UK is still dependent on the sea for both: 80% of trade and in every major war most kit goes by sea.

It’s a good day to delete your account on academia dot edu

I'm delighted that I'll be speaking at KCL at 1715 on Thursday 2 October about sea power thought in the Cold War. There is much from what our predecessors worked out that has relevance today. Do join in person or on-line:

www.kcl.ac.uk/events/sea-p...

There is much talk of AI in warfare, but rather less progress in applying it usefully to naval tactics. In this short piece for The Naval Review I reviewed a recent German effort. There is some way to go yet...

www.naval-review.com/book-reviews...

If you want to know more about what historians actually do, I've covered that in two posts, one on what the job of a research historian actually is (acoup.blog/2025/03/07/c...) and another on how that research moves through other kinds of historians to reach the public (acoup.blog/2020/07/09/c...)

OK, I think we'll end the conversation here. I wish you well.

If you're so sure of your points then you'll be happy to give me your name and address.

I'd be grateful for your name and address, or are you going to hide behind anonymity? I have plenty of blind spots, some of which I'm aware of, but you're made a very serious allegation which I reject profoundly.

And you get pretty close to calling me racist, which is something I despise. Granted I was sumarising slightly, but your response is not worthy of the reasonable person I am sure you are.

So you've accused me of at least two things I didn't say: I didn't say it was solely the fault of POC, as you allege in your last sentence above, or make any reference to race, and nor did I say that Churchill was blameless, iaw your next message. I'd say that Churchill had more faults than most.

I am sorry, but blaming Winston Churchill for the Bengal Famine is nonsense, and has been demonstrated as such repeatedly. The weather, the Japanese invading Burma, the Axis sinking merchant vessels and (Indian controlled) local government are all in the frame, but not Churchill.

⚓No More Napoleons: How did Britain manage Europe from Waterloo to WWI?

Join Prof Andrew Lambert for the launch of the Corbett Sea Power Centre + the 2025 Peter N. Davies Lecture

🗓️18 June |17:15 | Strand Campus & Online
🎟️Free & open to all – Register: bit.ly/4kGshce

Had great fun recording this podcast on Economic Warfare with my friend and colleague @andrewlivsey.bsky.social for the Marriner’s Mirror and @rnssc.bsky.social series: Seapower Past and Present. Have a listen!

open.spotify.com/episode/1Za0...

Excellent. My children know it word for word because it was the lullaby I sang to them when they were babies.

This is a genuinely good summary of how history is written: acoup.blog/2025/03/07/c...

Great in-depth article about Norway and allies' defence of the High North

I once had the pleasure of writing a non-letter...

The British ship survived the cyclone, the three US and three German ships did not.

Do you consider the Royal Navy to be a thinking organisation? King's College London have kindly published a summary of my article on the development of Royal Navy tactical doctrine in the Cold War. With the return of peer competition there are some lessons for today. www.kcl.ac.uk/thinking-wel...

Culture famously eats strategy for breakfast* but there has been little written about Royal Navy culture recently, and some of it is wrong. This is my attempt, kindly published by RUSI.

(* though Drucker probably didn't say it)

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....