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Warships are an important symbol of sovereignty. The special immunities they enjoy have led to them sometimes being characterised as ‘floating pieces of national territory.’ Naval vessels are also essential for countries to project power and protect their interests. However, navies are under pressure as they are forced to carry out an increasingly broad spectrum of tasks, while being subjected to shrinking budgets in most advanced economies. So what solutions are there to optimise fiscal expenditure to best meet the core demands of warfare, while developing complementary mechanisms for missions at the lower end of the spectrum? One choice is private naval power.
Until the 16th century, navies in Europe generally did not belong to a kingdom but were borrowed from feudal lords, private shipowners or even leased from foreign powers. It was not until Henry VIII that the first permanent navy was established in 1546, with France following suit in 1624. The transition towards state owned navies accelerated around the same time as the treaties of Westphalia (1648), when European kingdoms began evolving into modern states.
During the 18th century, the Royal Navy became the dominant global marine power. And so it was the Royal Navy’s main rivals, such as the American and French navies, which were most in need of privately owned ships. Privateers played a celebrated role in the attempt to regain an asymmetrical advantage over the British, making decisive contributions during the American War of Independence and then to the War of 1812 against the Royal Navy.
But even in the conventional sphere, private ownership of naval assets had continued to play an essential role. In 1746, during the Battle of Negapatam, only one of the nine warships fighting for France belonged to the French state and the other eight to private investors. Conversely, in 1781, when the French attacked the ships of the British East India Company, it was to prevent them from reinforcing the Royal Navy. However, this movement ran out of steam in the mid-to-late 19th century when construction techniques were becoming too specific for private shipowners to be able to just fit guns to otherwise merchant vessels, as they had done before.
This brief historical overview raises two questions, which are still relevant today: 1. What is the relationship between hull ownership and sovereignty? 2. What functions do privately owned vessels serve within naval strategy?
At its simplest, the question of sovereignty can be formulated as: to what extent does the title of ownership affect a state’s free disposal of a warship? The Israeli Navy provided an operational answer to this question when, on 24th December 1969, five French built Saar-III class corvettes, destined for Israel but tied alongside port because of an arms embargo, escaped from Cherbourg.
From an accounting point of view, it is questionable whether state financing of a ship on credit, on the international debt markets, at a variable rate and with an investment horizon shorter than its presumed lifespan, offers a greater sense of sovereignty than its direct ownership by known private investors, furthermore with a direct relationship with the flag state.
In reality, what these answers have in common is the crew. Returning to the indisputable definition in Article 29 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – ‘Belonging to the armed forces of a state’ – this question has been largely settled: belonging must be understood as ‘forming part of’ and not ‘being the property of.’ This is why many navies (already) use chartered ships:
Bearing the external markings: flag and hull number;
Commanded by an officer on the naval list;
Armed by a crew subject to military discipline.
So, ultimately, what defines the sovereignty of a warship is its flag and crew, not the owner of its hull.
The other question which needs to be answered is: how do private hulls effectively serve naval strategy? Privately owned ships can be used as auxiliaries to increase mass and firepower, whilst also shielding more advanced ships during combat. During the Anglo-French war of 1778-1783, the decision to put second rate ships in the front line in India to preserve their most advanced naval vessels (the ‘74 guns’) for the North Atlantic was a decisive factor in the French victory in the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781 which enabled their strategic victory by ensuring American independence. Both in terms of numbers and in terms of innovation, the eternal military principles of ‘economy of means’ and ‘concentration of effort’ were successfully applied and contributed to France’s victory. In the contemporary era, privately owned auxiliary ships could carry out a similar function.
Likewise, private ships could be an answer to the growing list of demands that navies face and the communicating vases’ effect between ‘high spectrum’ and ‘low spectrum’ missions that has become more pronounced in recent decades.
Until the mid-twentieth century, ships had three main missions: transport, fishing and war. But following the expansion in the exploration and exploitation of the seabed – for mining, digital communications and energy transportation – new demands have been placed on ships, which can be grouped together in a surveillance function – to tackle illegal fishing, pollution, trafficking, and sabotage.
This function has been entrusted, by default, to navies or similar bodies (coastguards, auxiliary fleets, specialised administrations). But the nature, prerogatives and risks of these missions have little in common with naval combat missions, so much so that even state chains of command are often different.
As a result, today’s military budgets are constantly having to arbitrate between, on the one hand, the needs of the ‘higher end of the spectrum’, which are increasingly demanding in terms of financial resources, for both qualitative (innovation) and strategic reasons (return of the war of attrition), and on the other hand, resourcing the ‘lower end of the spectrum,’ whose military (or at least governmental) nature can be justified by their missions and prerogatives, but whose budgetary fungibility with the former is questionable (why should anyone have to arbitrate between missiles and a navy patrol boat, but not between a navy patrol boat and a police patrol boat?). Again could these lower spectrum missions be adequately handled by privately owned vessels, allowing navies to focus their resources on traditional high spectrum missions?
The human mind often falls victim to what behavioural psychologists define as the ‘linearity bias’, which, in a very simplified way, makes people think that if something is good, more of it is better.
As far as warships are concerned, this bias can be observed at two levels: firstly in terms of state ownership, and secondly in terms of technical complexity. On both these levels, history perhaps teaches us that there is an optimal balance to be found:
Between state ownership of high-end assets and private ownership of the others;
Between the level of technical sophistication of combatants and the acceptability of compromises in the commercial range of non-combatants.
To convince ourselves of this, we need to reread the history of 74-gun ships: a marvel of technological innovation, spared by the use of commercial ships to fight in India, which led to a victory with undisputable strategic consequences.
Julien Lalanne de Saint-Quentin is an Associate Fellow in Comparative Geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy and has been an officer in the French Navy for 27 years.
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