ABSTRACT
Naval planners, or at least those who determine the size and shape of the world’s fleets (and the two groups may these days be very different) always have a difficult job, balancing future threats against present ones, trying to get the best value for money and juggling the differences between their commitments and the resources that they have been given in order to meet them. This book’s review of seapower up to and into the twenty-first century offers little comfort and suggests that their problems, instead of getting easier, are more likely to get worse, because in addition to what might be regarded as their perennial problems in preparing for unknown futures,1 there are five major challenges and remaining areas of critical uncertainty. They therefore find themselves seeing ‘through a glass darkly’.
