A command crisis makes the counterfactual plausible

The scenario is not presented as a simple ship swap. It begins with the Admiralty's struggle over leadership and the overlapping personal and institutional pressures around Louis Battenberg, Fisher, and Churchill. Competing figures were trying to shape command while Battenberg struggled to make the staff machinery work coherently. That disorder makes a different Mediterranean appointment believable and exposes why the pursuit of Goeben became strategically consequential.