How does asymmetric advantage differ from strategic advantage?
The Memorandum | No. 29.2025
Between the 2023 Integrated Review Refresh (IRR), which attempted to ‘generate strategic advantage’, and the June 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), the focus of British security policy has taken a subtle shift. The new document stresses the importance of asymmetric advantage to the defence and security of the United Kingdom (UK). While the text carefully avoided defining asymmetry, or the thinking behind the change, the evident conclusion is that asymmetry offered an obvious approach to maximising the strategic impact of a relatively modest increase in defence spending while avoiding language which might favour a particular armed force. In truth the shift is no more than a belated recognition of reality – the UK has always been an asymmetric strategic actor, because it is small, insular and globally engaged.
Asymmetric advantage is achieved by abandoning conventional military balances to favour approaches which exploit and enhance national interests, aptitudes and capabilities.
Most of Britain’s opponents – past, present and no doubt future – have been and will remain large continental states with far greater human and industrial resources. Their scale and terrestrial focus can be a source of weakness, requiring extraordinary levels of military power to secure contested borders, protect resources and sustain authoritarian, imperialist regimes. They have tended to lack the naval power to secure revenue-critical exports and bulk imports. This group includes major threats which the UK currently identifies: the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia and Iran. Critically, Britain is unlikely to be engaged in a conflict with any of these powers without significant allies – so it does not need a symmetrical defence posture. A British asymmetric balance would enhance allied capabilities in both Europe and the Middle East, complementing allies which tend to focus on terrestrial security.
Asymmetric advantage is achieved by abandoning conventional military balances to favour approaches which exploit and enhance national interests, aptitudes and capabilities. In the 21st century, Britain retains much of the ideology, experience and strategic architecture which shaped successful asymmetric conflicts in previous eras, meaning the current declaration is little more than a restatement of the obvious. The tools of asymmetry can be refined and sharpened, not least international law and key alliances, as they are reinforced by applying asymmetric logic to procurement, recruitment and planning. This shift of focus exploits deeper cultural strengths which flow from history, inclusive politics, outward-focused economic development and distinctive world views which reflect shared histories and contemporary agendas.
A century ago, the UK’s greatest strategic thinker – Sir Julian Corbett (1854-1932) – demonstrated that a successful ‘British Way of War’ had exploited asymmetric advantage, relying on a dominant sea control navy to protect the British Isles against invasion, secure the existential food, fuel and raw material imports which sustained state, industry and population, and apply economic pressure at and from the sea to break the economies of hostile powers. These methods – which Alfred Thayer Mahan, American naval officer and historian, stressed in his The Influence of Sea Power upon History series (1890-1905) – explained why France could not defeat Britain between 1660 and 1815. Napoleon understood that he was engaged in a war between a whale and an elephant, famously dismissing the British as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’; mere ‘Carthaginians’ who would be swept aside by his revived ‘Roman’ Empire.
Critically, the strategic asymmetry of seapower rendered Napoleon’s long-threatened, but never attempted, invasion of the British Isles impossible, while his endless economic war with the UK, and the empire-building aggression it prompted, culminated in the invasion of Russia in 1812. This in turn ultimately created a pan-European military coalition, funded and equipped by Britain, which brought Napoleon to ruin in 1814 and again in 1815. Global maritime power had enriched the UK and impoverished Napoleon’s subjects – economic pressure ruined his calculations, and this time the ‘Carthaginians’ won the asymmetric war between land and sea, which both Corbett and Mahan attributed to the application of an economic blockade of the entire Napoleonic Empire.
The UK was only able to operate as a great power in a multipolar world (roughly between 1714 and 1945) by exploiting strategic asymmetry. As a maritime economic and strategic power, relying on naval dominance for insular security, the Royal Navy was the ‘Senior Service’, and national strategy necessarily pivoted around sea control.
In simple terms, strategic (as opposed to tactical) asymmetric advantage is a question of priorities. Most major powers throughout history have been terrestrial, primarily focused on borders, expansion and land-based tax revenues, leading them to pursue symmetric strategies, big armies, fixed defences and latterly air forces. Given the scale of potentially hostile rival powers, this model has never been an option for Britain, which has had to rely on sea control, trade revenues, economic warfare and alliances rather than land power. Today, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) relatively rich in land and air power, not least through the accession of Finland and Sweden, an asymmetric British maritime strategy would significantly enhance European security in vital maritime regions, especially when the United States (US) is increasingly focusing on the Indo-Pacific.
The connection of sovereign capabilities and asymmetry in the third pillar of the ‘strategic framework’ of the NSS is significant. The UK was only able to operate as a great power in a multipolar world (roughly between 1714 and 1945) by exploiting strategic asymmetry. As a maritime economic and strategic power, relying on naval dominance for insular security, the Royal Navy was the ‘Senior Service’, and national strategy necessarily pivoted around sea control. This was supported by an inclusive political system which empowered trade, led by the City of London, which funded the national debt, and a wider commercial community. Critically, naval success shaped national identity, from defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588 to victories at Trafalgar and the Battle of the Atlantic. The defeat of Napoleon was a triumph of asymmetry, as was the Second World War, with Britain contributing naval, economic and industrial power rather than relying on the malign combination of mass conscript armies and extorted funds which have impoverished so many continental states.
Nowhere has that asymmetry been more obvious, and more relevant, than in the strained geostrategic relationship between the UK and Russia. When the military expansion of Russia, an immense Eurasian empire rich in human and material resources, reached the sea in the early 18th century, Britain blocked further expansion by deploying naval forces which threatened the new capital, blocked export trades, collapsed the Russian economy and supported subject peoples seeking an independent future (notably the Baltic States, which did so in 1919) without risking any ground forces.
In the Crimean War (1854-1856), Britain and France defeated Russia through economic pressure imposed at sea, while an expeditionary army captured and destroyed the Russian naval base at Sevastopol, which posed a direct threat to Istanbul – the Ottoman Turkish capital. In the Baltic region, an allied fleet demolished two more Russian naval bases and threatened St. Petersburg, the Russian capital. The allies adopted an asymmetric maritime strategy, ignoring French military methods and exploiting British maritime and technological advantages, notably steam propulsion and unrivalled strategic lift capabilities. Pinning the Russian army down on defensive tasks along the coasts of the Black, White and Baltic seas and the Pacific Ocean rapidly broke the Tsarist economy. It is little wonder that the Russian Empire, and after it the Soviet Union, devoted massive resources to countering British maritime asymmetry, as did other potentially hostile major powers in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Historically, Britain’s ability to operate as a major power in the international order depended on the asymmetric exploitation of insular geography, as well as the economic dynamism which sustained the necessary naval dominance, minimising the risk of an invasion, bankruptcy or starvation by acting as a hegemonic maritime power; one that was defined by naval success. Today, with offshore wind, undersea pipelines and cables joining food and raw materials on the list of existential security concerns, sea control must be a priority.
Rather than obscuring real strategic change behind an ambiguous, undefined term the NSS has shifted the balance of British security effort towards Corbett’s precise formulation – the new strategy is necessarily maritime.
Prof. Andrew Lambert FKC is Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of King’s College and the Royal Historical Society, as well as Director of the Laughton Naval Unit. He was awarded the 2018 Gilder Lehrman Book Prize in Military History for his book Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World.
This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Advantage Cell.
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Many thanks for that;
The destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the naval base at Sevastopol were major strategic successes – as was the economic meltdown which obliged a weakened Russia to sue for peace. The regime accepted that the war had been a major defeat, prompting major social and economic reforms. I wrote about this some years ago...
As for the ‘Thin Red Line’, that action ended with the Russian forces in full retreat...
It's interesting how english try to present the Crimean War as their victory. British were shamefully defeated and retreat. Especially if we shall remember "Thin Red line".