Admiralty departments, intelligence workloads, and quality control

The nineteenth-century Admiralty already had specialist staffs, but their work remained divided between departments. The Naval Intelligence Division became a staff by default, while the Third Sea Lord's office handled research and development and the Second Sea Lord's office handled personnel. First Sea Lords could resist closer coordination because they lacked a comparable staff of their own and feared for their position. Keeling proposes that an integrated organization would relieve intelligence officers of unrelated administrative work and give the government clearer advice about naval requirements and international developments. His counterfactual also gives an established quality-control section a better chance of detecting the fuse problems that emerged around the First World War. Those benefits depend on the staff being organized and functioning well enough to identify and address problems.