Late-war success distorts the history of US fire control

Why do many accounts overestimate American fire-control systems throughout the Second World War?

They take the excellent state of US fire control in 1945 and assume it existed unchanged from the beginning of the war.

The mature late-war system should be separated from earlier American capability. The United States developed very effective fire control and radar integration, but that performance followed extensive testing and wartime improvement. Treating the 1945 result as a constant erases the development path and exaggerates early-war capability. The aggressive testing of fire-control systems such as the Mark 37 also contrasts with the much poorer institutional response to the Mark 14 torpedo. A weapon's final reputation should not be read backward through its entire service history.