Commonwealth rearmament before the war arrived

Britain was already shifting administrative and defence responsibilities toward self-governing Commonwealth partners. Larger Canadian, Australian, Indian, South African, and New Zealand forces would have reduced the wartime burden of creating infrastructure and trained cadres from scratch. Another five or six years could have let those governments order cruisers, destroyers, and light carriers while expanding locally trained armies and naval institutions. The counterfactual matters because mature organisations can grow in wartime more cheaply and quickly than forces that must be created from nothing.