A navy is no more than the armour and the weapons-system of seapower. The hull, providing essential buoyancy, is the national wealth. The propulsion … - Correlli Barnett

[I]t was the shortage of resources – economic and financial – which posed by far the gravest question of all for the British Government after the fall of France in 1940. For whether or not England escaped defeat at the hands of the enemy, the mere continuance of the war would itself inevitably, inexorably, bring independent British power to an end through national bankruptcy and economic ruin. It was a situation which no British Government had had to face since England first emerged as a great power in the wars against Louis XIV.

Yet although Bonaparte could not perceive it, those atoms were held together by a principle – love of liberty; the right to arrange your own affairs in association with your fellows without being told what to do by a government and its bureaucrats. He could not begin to comprehend that through such free association and debate Englishmen might arrive at a union far more resilient than the brittle artificial unanimity he had imposed on France; at a truly national purpose in contrast to the mere acquiescence of the French people in his own designs. He failed as well to note the dynamism of a country where initiative and decision flourished everywhere in the soil of liberty instead of being the monopoly of one man at the top like himself. And despite his fulminations about English gold buying allies to fight against France, he no less underestimated the strategic importance of England's resources as the world's most powerful industrial and trading nation.

For the British...Jutland has a much deeper significance, for it was in fact a defeat for British technology. More than that, as with the French at Crécy and Sedan, a social system had been exposed by battle as decadent and uncreative. Jutland proves that already in 1914, when Britain and her empire had never seemed richer, more powerful, more technologically able, dry rot was crumbling the inner structure of the vast mansion. Jutland proves that the spectacular collapse of British power and British industrial vigour after 1945 was not a sudden disaster due, as comforting legend has it, to the sale of overseas investments in 1914–18 and 1939–45, but the final acute phase of seventy years of decline. For the principal armed service of a country—in its professional attitudes, its equipment, its officer corps—is an extension, a reflection, of that country's whole society, and especially of its dominating groups.