How oceans became new technological battlefields

“LARGER FLEETS win,” says Rear Admiral James Parkin, the Royal Navy’s director of development. Out of 28 maritime battles, he says, all but three were won by the bigger fleet. When Russia invaded Ukraine last year it had around 20 warships in the Black Sea. Ukraine’s navy barely existed. On day one, it scuttled its sole frigate—a rusty Soviet-era cruiser on which this correspondent once hitched a ride to Odessa—to stop it falling into Russian hands. Yet the war at sea, like the one on land, has confounded expectations. “After the war we will certainly write a textbook,” says Vice-Admiral Oleksiy Neizhpapa, Ukraine’s navy chief. “And we’ll send it to all the NATO military academies.”