British officials tried to express a battleship's firepower as an equivalent number of medium bombers. The comparison ignored whether the aircraft could reach the naval targets Britain expected to face and counted only one battleship salvo. A second salvo would immediately overturn the apparent equivalence, while choosing Nelson or Rodney made the naval side of the comparison unusually strong. The example exposes how procurement debates can be loaded by selecting convenient platforms, ranges, and time horizons.
Notable Point · 18:59-20:24
Why bomber-versus-battleship arithmetic misled planners
An interwar comparison between medium bombers and a Nelson-class battleship illustrates how narrow firepower arithmetic could distort service-budget arguments.