The Paulding order looks substantial until it is placed beside the battle fleet it had to support. The comparison combines twenty-five pre-dreadnoughts with ten early dreadnoughts, spanning ships commissioned or under construction during the destroyer program. The early dreadnought classes run from South Carolina and Delaware through Florida, Wyoming, and New York. Using two destroyers per battleship as a minimum screening estimate gives a requirement of about seventy, with four or five per capital ship preferred in this argument. The Bainbridge, Truxtun, Smith, and Paulding programs together supplied only forty-two destroyers. Even concentrating all of them around the ten dreadnoughts offered much less margin than the raw total first suggests.
Notable Point · 26:35-29:58
Fleet ratios expose the Paulding order's limits
Adding twenty-one Pauldings and five Smiths raised destroyer strength, but thirty-five capital ships still left the US Navy far short of the screening ratios discussed here.