ABSTRACT
Navies have always been, and will doubtless remain, political instruments-to a far greater extent than either armies or air forces. This has more to do with their inherent operational flexibility and the fact that international law regards a warship as a lawful extension of the sovereign state than with the notion that their use is merely an extrapolation of Clausewitz in being a continuation of policy by other means. From the earliest days of organized military forces at sea, warships have been used diversely for self-defence, projecting power, and as the means of conveying emissaries in the conduct of relationships with other states. It is this latter use of warships, rather than the use of merchant ships or other vessels engaged in commercial activity, for furthering the foreign policies of a state that we want to look at more closely in this essay and examine how that role has grown not just with the evolution of the state system but as a function of technology. Perhaps we should ask whether a naval role which has been in use in various ways for over 2,500 years is still relevant today. Some will argue that modern technology and ‘new thinking’ have rendered that
concept obsolete, but in today’s rather complex world it is hard to find enough reasons why such an argument can be sustained. Others will argue that the advent of technology, communications technology in particular, has greatly increased the diplomatic potential of warships in that they now have considerable flexibility, mobility, and endurance. Regardless, we now live in a very much more complex world in which things happen more quickly and frequently without warning. In this, states need to have a range of options through which they can respond rapidly to threats to their security or to the security of their broader geographic and economic environment. For reasons we will discuss later, navies have become the first response to crisis situations; a role into which they have grown to a far greater extent than either armies or air forces.
