What Do Britain's Admirals Do All Day?

In a blog in 2015, I wrote about the huge number of senior officers in Britain’s supposed ‘armed forces’:

At the time, the Navy had 421 officers for fewer than 40 fighting ships and submarines. The RAF had 26 Air Vice Marshalls, 90 Air Commodores and 330 Group Captains for around 820 aircraft including just 89 fighters (most of the rest were small trainers and helicopters). As for the Army – there were so many officers and so few regiments we would put the Italian army to shame.

I also highlighted the lives of luxury our military bosses led at our expense – while ordinary troops risk their lives before coming home to collect their P45s and head off into a life sometimes of poverty, their officers were laughing all the way to the bank. In addition to their big salaries and generous pensions, the top 32 military bosses got over £156,000 a year each just in tax-free housing allowances. A further 390 officers received over £87,000 a year each.

Thanks to an excellent YouTube video by Mark Felton Productions, I have now come across the latest figures of how many admirals and ships we have in our once great Royal Navy. You’d weep if it wasn’t so farcical.

In 1939, the Royal Navy had 367 fighting ships, around 200,000 sailors and 53 admirals. That’s one admiral for every 3,773 sailors. In 2025, the Royal Navy has 25 warships (many of which are actually out of action being refitted or just lacking sufficient crew), 32,225 sailors (including reserves) and 40 admirals. That’s one admiral for every 805 sailors. I realise that today’s warships probably require fewer crew than ships in 1939. But applying 1939’s figures, we would only need around nine admirals for our much-shrunken navy, rather than the 40 we actually have.

Our 40 admirals are also rather expensive:

27 lowest rank of Rear Admiral – salary £108,201 to £119,000
10 Vice Admirals – salary £125,908 to £152,000
Three full Admirals – salary £165,284 to £185,000

Few if any of our admirals actually go to sea as there are no large taskforces of ships to command. Here’s a list of our 40 admirals, vice admirals and rear admirals and all the wonderfully-creative job titles the Royal Navy has chosen to give them to justify their continued employment while most (all?) never go anywhere near the sea.

Moreover, the Royal Navy also has a 63 commodores. I’m not a military man so have little knowledge of what the Royal Navy’s different ranks do. But I assume that captains are generally those in charge of ships. Incidentally, the Royal Navy has around 260 captains for its 25 warships. So, in one of my more cynical moments, I might be tempted to wonder what most of the Royal Navy’s 40 admirals and 63 commodores and 260 captains actually do all day.

I recently wrote a piece for the Daily Sceptic about my rather disappointing attempts to interest the media specialists and regional offices at the National Farmers Union (NFU) in a story explaining what may be the real reason behind Rachel Reeves’s farmers inheritance tax. The decision of the NFU to ignore me and my Daily Sceptic article led me to wonder whether the £36 million-a-year, 817-employee NFU really was a lean, mean fighting machine selflessly battling every minute of every day for Britain’s farmers, or whether it had become a bloated, self-serving bureaucracy interested more in its own comfort and welfare than that of the farmers who so generously pay the NFU employees’ salaries and expenses.

Most readers will have heard of Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s law can refer to either of two observations, published in 1955 by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson as an essay in the Economist:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion;
The number of workers within public administration, bureaucracy or officialdom tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done.

Another version I have seen is that any bureaucracy grows by around 4% to 5% a year regardless of the amount of work, if any, needed to be done.

Perhaps what we’re seeing throughout our military and the NFU and almost every other British bureaucracy – government departments, regulators, health services, quangos, charities etc. – are Parkinson’s two laws in action. For example, the size of the civil service has risen in each year since 2016, when it stood at 384,000. It has grown by 129,000 in that time, a 34% increase (3.7% a year on average) over the last eight years. The continually-shrinking productive part of the British economy is being asphyxiated by the ever-increasing costs of our bloated, self-serving bureaucracies. Unfortunately we don’t have a Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency to cut out this cancer. In fact, Labour is rapidly increasing the size and cost of the public sector, setting up new quangos, advisory bodies and increasing hiring in its deluded belief that you can generate economic growth by extracting ever more money from taxpayers to give to the Government to waste.

National bankruptcy beckons.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.