When cruiser orders consumed carrier and battleship capacity

Shipyard allocation looks different when judged by what else a scarce building berth could have produced. France gave a La Galissonnière-class cruiser to a yard also associated with capital ships and future carrier orders, while the builder of Béarn did not receive the follow-on carrier work. The cruiser took roughly four years from laying down to commissioning, comparable in elapsed time to the much larger Strasbourg-class battleship discussed here. Substituting a carrier would not have been effortless, but the cruiser could have gone to a yard already repeating that type of construction. The example turns industrial organization into a strategic choice about whether France obtained another cruiser, a capital ship, or badly needed aviation capacity.