The World's Major Navies. Ranked. (DEEP DIVE)

The sea is a brutal mistress, and some navies are better at impressing her than others. Some patrolled distant oceans with power to burn, others struggled to get much further than their own harbors.

This is a global ranking, where we separate the serious sailors from the peer-side pretenders, sorting the world's fleets into five tiers, from landlocked wishful thinkers to the unquestioned global superpower.

It isn't just about ship counts either, although that certainly plays its part. But instead, what it's really all about is capability. How far a navy can sail, how long it can stay there, and what it can do when it arrives, and whether it can do it again next week without breaking down or begging for fuel.