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WHY BRITAIN SHOULD RESURRECT 'LETTERS OF MARQUE' FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

In 1708, a Bristol trading captain named Woodes Rogers departed England in command of the 'Duke' and 'Duchess', two heavily armed merchantmen, with a commission from Queen Anne authorising him to wage war against French and Spanish shipping. The letter of marque had transformed him from a private citizen into a state sanctioned privateer. Over three years, Rogers circumnavigated the globe and captured – amongst many – a prize Spanish treasure galleon worth approximately £800,000. Rogers returned home having demonstrated the value of private enterprise under sovereign aegis: strategic power could be projected with minimal Crown expense.

Three centuries later, on 18 December 2025, Senator M. Lee (R-UT) introduced S.3567 to the 1st Session of the 119th Congress. Named the Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025, it proposes to give the US President authorities "to issue letters of marque and reprisal with respect to acts of aggression against the United States by a member of a cartel". The US Government is also reportedly considering "enlisting private companies to assist with offensive cyberattacks". The historical inspirations are clear and the modern utility of private enterprise for British national purposes is worth considering.

What are Privateers?

Letters of marque were state-issued licences authorising private individuals to wage war on designated state enemies. Britain once dominated privateering. Elizabeth I's sanctioning of Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh transformed merchant adventurers into instruments of grand strategy against Spanish hegemony. The British Monarchy issued as many as 4,000 letters of marque during the Napoleonic Wars. In the war of 1812 alone, American privateers captured 1,300 British vessels. Privateering allowed governments to project power to complement or negate sovereign economic or military resource. The system worked because frameworks were clear, courts enforced rules and strategic objectives aligned with commercial incentives.

The 1856 Declaration of Paris formally abolished British naval privateering, yet in the United States the Constitution still empowers Congress to grant letters of marque under Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution. As the national defence conversation in Britain develops, with many difficult fiscal choices that lie ahead of the Government and all departments. Meanwhile, Private offensive cyber operations are reportedly occurring daily around the world and the consequences of unregulated private cyber capabilities are already visible. The Israeli firm NSO Group was ordered to pay damages by a US federal court for using intrusion cyber capabilities in June 2025. Whilst Ukraine's IT Army operates today as a volunteer cyber militia with tacit government blessing but minimal legal framework. The choice is not whether private actors will conduct cyber operations – they already do – but whether democracies should harness them through regulation.

Not doing so may cede advantage to adversaries exploiting unaccountable proxies.

Why could it be important?

The world of Great Power Competition and the looming threat of war crystallises the defence imperative and security challenge facing Britain today. The Strategic Defence Review 2025 said "innovation and industrial power are central to deterrence and decisive factors in war", going beyond pure military force to a 'whole of society' approach. The British Army stands at approximately 73,000 personnel – its smallest since the Napoleonic era and much reduced from 102,000 in 2006 – and the broader Armed Forces and security services will inevitably concentrate on protecting critical government and military networks, rather than the national infrastructure that underpins economic activity. More capacity is needed as capacity shrinks and threats expand.

Private companies and enterprise could fill this gap. British Private Military Companies (PMCs) alre...

THE BRITISH ARMY'S 20:40:40 SOLUTION TO THE 'SURVIVABILITY PARADOX'

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has brutally validated an old truth about modern war: it requires not just military forces in the field but the societal ability to regenerate, outproduce and outlast. As the British Army's Chief of the General Staff observed in January 2026, "Russia is not looking at your front lines, they've priced that in. They will only take you seriously when it comes to deterrence, and strength, when they see your factories producing at wartime production rates."

This article outlines the British Army's emerging '20:40:40' concept that offers a solution to what Phillips-Levine et al recently identify as the "survivability paradox" – the vicious "self-reinforcing cycle" where "scarcity drives concentration, concentration incentivizes survivability, survivability increases costs, and rising costs further constrain force size.".

Operational imperative

Consensus academic and military analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian War has concluded that modern wars between near-peers will almost certainly remain as attritional as those of the past, which means, "as [a] conflict drags on, the war is won by economies, not armies". Today, the industrial scale of Russia's war effort is immense and continues growing. In 2024 it produced approximately 1,500 tanks and 3,000 other Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFV) whilst achieving 85% of their recruitment targets despite the pressures of economic sanctions and mounting casualties. The reality is that Britain cannot match such a defence industrial output, but nor should it seek to. Instead, it should pursue an asymmetric advantage "by making the component more survivable to protect the investment [force]."

The 20:40:40 concept is the logical corollary and draws on lessons from Ukraine that show the battlefield application of drones and combines them with extant British Army doctrine to achieve distributed lethality. The British Army will not simply incorporate emerging technology into an old-style fighting system but will instead rewire the system.

Defining the Layers of Distributed Lethality

The concept of 20:40:40 describes broad proportions of the force – people, platforms, software and sustainment – that are designed to 'endure, be risked or be expended' to keep the combat network functioning. The British Army does not seek for every formation or unit to become '20:40:40' but rather that the whole force will apply the concept differently by role and echelon. It is the Land component within the broader Integrated Force that harnesses and integrates together cross-domain capabilities alongside the other single services.

20:40:40 was announced in June 2025 (image above) and is to be the British Army's most significant conceptual evolution in generations. It is a deliberate move away from platform-centric to a network-centric approach warfare and seeks to maximise lethality by layering 'Reconnaissance Strike' (or 'Recce-Strike) combat systems of crewed / uncrewed sensors and effectors. It is designed to dismantle a peer adversary's fighting systems whilst protecting and preserving friendly combat power, an approach many will recognise from 'systems warfare'.

At the centre is a relatively small numbers of crewed 'Survivable' platforms (20%) that are the backbone of the tactical force. These are expensive capabilities such as armoured vehicles, helicopters or dismounted infantry that take longer to produce and thus replace which is why survivability is key. They are fundamental to achieving land manoeuvre and critical to missions such as seizing and holding terrain by maintaining Command and Control (C2) as well as Communication Information Systems (CIS) coherence.

Surrounding them will be a distributed layer of reusable uncrewed 'Attritable' (40%) platforms. They will cost less than those in the Survivable layer and are designed to operate at extended reach whilst still having significant technologically lethality. Thei...

The following work is an eye-opening insight into some peak Cold War contingency planning: how to defend Gibraltar – gateway to the Mediterranean and critical British military hub since 1713. Whilst (like all such plans) it may seem utterly far-fetched, the threat – however small – was real.

The latest in an increasingly hefty and impressive portfolio of work focusing on declassified archive material, veteran Wavell Room author and Thin Pinstriped Line blog titan "Sir Humphrey" sets out the very real measures taken to defend 'The Rock'. Regular readers will enjoy the delightful (and oftentimes farcical) similarities with UK defence matters across the decades… Editor.

Simmering Tensions

In the early hours of May 1982, following indications that a Spanish amphibious force, ostensibly on exercise, had begun sailing closer to Gibraltar, the Governor exercised powers to sortie armed Royal Navy warships, and deploy the Army onto the streets of the rock, to defend it from potential Spanish invasion. This sounds like the plot of a poor Cold War thriller but nearly happened for real. This article is about how in the 1980s the UK actively planned to defend Gibraltar from both Soviet and Spanish aggression in the most unlikely of circumstances.

In 1982 the UK and Spain had strained relations over the issue of Gibraltar since the Spanish closed the land border in 1969. Throughout the 1970s there was genuine concern that Spain could attempt some kind of military operation, leading to elaborate plans being developed to defend 'the Rock' against attack for long enough for cooler heads to prevail. The invasion of the Falklands by Argentina was a particular concern, given the vital military role played by UK military facilities in Gibraltar supporting the Task Force.

In April 1982 the Service Chiefs urgently reviewed plans and capabilities were needed to keep Gibraltar safe, both from Argentine attack and to deter the Spanish from taking advantage of a distracted UK both in the short and medium term. The plans to reinforce the Rock were known as Joint Tactical Plan (JTP) 52 existed to reinforce against the risk of Spanish aggression, but as the Chiefs noted "the plans concerns reinforcement of Gibraltar to meet a direct threat to the Rock, not a contingency plan for a war with Spain. Naturally should events escalate to such an unfortunate level, appropriate forces would be assigned as the situation dictated"!

There was an immediate concern about the presence of a Spanish amphibious force, with 4000 marines embarked operating barely 35 miles from the colony from 26 April to 4 May. While the threat was seen as extremely unlikely, it could not be ruled out. To reduce this risk two RAF Jaguar ground attack jets and an RN Lynx helicopter were dispatched to provide a level of anti-ship capability against Spanish vessels that posed a risk to the Rock.

The CINC in Gibraltar was sufficiently concerned about the risk from this exercise, however unlikely it may have been, to formally put in place "covert preparations to deal with any attempt, admittedly extremely unlikely, at an amphibious assault on Gibraltar".

These measures included covertly preparing and arming Royal Navy warships to be ready to sail at short notice to monitor the force if it moved eastwards out of the exercise area towards Gibraltar. If it continued, then the Army units would be brought to very high readiness, and aircrew in their cockpits. The proposed ROE stated that the Royal Navy would not engage until "enemy opens fire or have landed in Gibraltar and opened fire".

Spain did not, of course, invade, but it led to an urgent MOD reappraisal of the defences needed for Gibraltar to defend against "the situation in which a local Spanish commander might decide to attempt an unsupported and unauthorised adventure against the Rock". The conclusions were that there was insufficient anti-aircraft artillery, relying on WW2 40mm bofors guns to defend the airfield, insufficient counter bat...

Today, the British Army trains against a potential Russian enemy. Throughout the Cold War it trained against a possible confrontation with the Soviet Army and Warsaw Pact. In this respect nothing has changed. What has changed – self-evidently – is the Russian Army after three-and-a-half years of war in Ukraine. This article is about how the Russian Army fights in the war in Ukraine. It is not possible to say how it may fight in ten or twenty years. That caveat stated, insights can still be offered from what we observe today.

No tactical radio network

A first and fundamental point to understand about the Russian Army is that it lacks a functioning tactical radio network. Pre-war, the procurement of a modern, digital radio network was one of the biggest corruption scandals in the Russian MOD. Following the invasion, commentators quickly noticed the ubiquity of (insecure) walkie-talkies, as well as the general chaos of the invasion force. The reality is that just over 100 battalion tactical groups were sent over the border fielding three generations of radio systems connected in disparate, ad hoc nets (a British equivalent would be a force fielding Larkspur, Clansman and Bowman radios; most readers will not remember the first two). The loss of the entire pre-war vehicle fleets has exacerbated the problem; with the vehicles went the radios. Russian defence electronics industry does not have the capacity to replace this disastrous loss. It seems not to have tried.

So how does the Russian Army communicate? At tactical level it communicates with walkie-talkies (Kirisun, TYT, AnyTone, and others) and smartphones (on the civilian Telegram channel, although the MOD is about to roll out a new messenger system termed 'Max'). Starlink is widely used. As expected, Ukrainian EW daily harvests intercepts. Away from the mostly static frontlines, line, fibre-optic cable and HF radios are used.

The ability to communicate across voice and data nets, securely, is fundamental to an army. It is the lack of a functioning tactical radio network that has driven the Russian Army's tactics – you can only do what your communication system allows you to do.

No combined arms capability

The principal consequence of a lack of a functioning tactical radio network is that the Russian Army is incapable of combined arms warfare. The only observed cooperation between different arms is the now rare assaults involving perhaps one 'turtle tank' (essentially a tank resembling a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, covered in layers of steel plates and logs), and two or three similarly festooned vintage BMPs). They don't survive although one 'turtle tank' recently required over 60 FPV drone hits before it was definitively destroyed (the crew long abandoned their dangerous box and fled).

Following on, the Russian Army is incapable of coordinating an action above company level. The last period when true battalion-level operations were attempted was in Avdiivka in the winter of 2023-2024. However, these involved vehicles simply lining up in single file on a track and playing 'follow the leader'. Similar tactics were seen in the re-taking of the Kurshchyna salient in Kursk this spring, which was also the last period that witnessed sustained attempts at mounting company-level armoured attacks (there was an odd exception to this rule at the end of July on the Siversk front; all the vehicles were destroyed).

The level of operations of the Russian Army is company and below.

No joint capability

From the start of the invasion it was evident the Russian Air Force was incapable of co-ordinating a dynamic air campaign, air-versus-air, or in support of ground forces. By the autumn of 2022 Russian strike aircraft stopped crossing the international border altogether due to losses. The first glide bombs were recorded in the spring of 2023 (these are launched from Russian air space). Today, a daily average of 80 strike sorties and 130 glide bombs are recorded. These mainly target frontline pos...

Introduction

The Red Sea crisis has settled into an uncomfortable new normal. While the initial shock caused by the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM) has faded, the strategic implications of the Houthi campaign remain dangerously under-analysed in the context of future British Naval Doctrine. For the Royal Navy, the conflict would appear to cast a shadow over amphibious operations in littoral waters, where both the Carrier Strike Group (CSG) and the Littoral Response Groups (LRGs) are expected to conduct their operations. The Houthi campaign has inadvertently provided an example of a scalable, repeatable model of sea denial that fundamentally challenges the operating and financial rationale of Western naval power projection.

The Houthi Model involves the integration of sensors and shooters at the state level with the expendability and mass of non-state actor operations. This model poses a significant challenge for the Royal Navy, which relies on low-density, high-value assets.

The Tyranny of the Cost-Exchange Ratio

The frightening mathematics of modern air defence are grounded in the lessons learned from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. In the first few months of the Red Sea conflict, British destroyers, notably HMS Diamond, excelled at shooting down wave after wave of hostile tracks. However, there was an unsustainable price to pay.

The Houthis' Shahed-136 derivative costs approximately $20,000. The missile required to intercept it, an Aster-15 or Sea Viper, costs at least £1 million. While individual engagements can be justified by the value of a destroyed merchant vessel or a destroyer providing escort, the economics of sustained engagement are financially disastrous.

This creates a magazine depth problem that the CSG must confront. A Type 45 Destroyer has 48 vertical launch (VL) silos. In a saturation attack scenario, precisely the type the Houthi Model promotes, a destroyer may expend its entire primary magazine in minutes, shooting down targets costing its adversary less than a basic rigid-hulled inflatable boat (RHIB). It should be noted that at present, the Royal Navy can not replenish a surface vessel's VL silos whilst at sea.

Should the UK CSG deploy to the Indo-Pacific, it would face the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). However, the Houthi Model demonstrates that the PLAN need not risk its own high-value hulls to mission-kill a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier. It only needs to provide a proxy or 'maritime militia' swarm with sufficient cheap, attritable effectors to force the CSG to exhaust its magazines. Once the escorts are out of ammunition, the carrier becomes operationally irrelevant, forced to withdraw without a single capital ship being sunk.

The Littoral Response Group in Crisis: The Decommissioning Dilemma

The consequences for the Littoral Response Group could be the most profound. The current construct envisions the use of Bay-class and Albion-class vessels in the littoral zone to conduct 'raids' and achieve 'strategic effects' via the force insertion of Commandos. However, the basis for such an operational construct has now fundamentally changed.

In March 2025, the Ministry of Defence undertook the decommissioning of HMS Albion and Bulwark, the Royal Navy's two Albion-class landing platform docks. This was an exercise in cost-cutting that has resulted in a major capability gap. This capability gap now exists at a time when there is a considerable change in the doctrine surrounding amphibious operations. Albion-class vessels were designed to deliver amphibious landing forces at the brigade level. Their absence means that the Royal Navy has to rely on three Bay-class Landing Ship Docks, vessels that are already under considerable pressure due to crewing deficits within the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.

The capability gap is significant, as there are now no Bay-class vessels available to conduct sustained operations. With the Albion-class now retired, the capability deficit is pronounced. The lightweight, a...