Churchill and the carrier construction pause

At the start of the Second World War, Churchill accepted a pause in big-ship construction while Britain concentrated on escorts for the expected submarine war. The criticism is that this repeated the First World War mistake of planning around a short conflict. Escorts were urgently needed, but a carrier stopped in 1939 could not be improvised when a later crisis demanded another flight deck. Pausing battleships was easier to justify because Britain already had a strong European battlefleet and battleships consumed enormous quantities of equipment and material. The Royal Navy possessed too few carriers for worldwide commitments, despite Churchill's earlier support for the Fleet Air Arm, Royal Naval Air Service, and aircraft carriers. The delay exchanged immediate escort output for a later shortage of naval air power, leaving Force Z without carrier cover.