German gun calibre follows rather than drives

The order in which navies adopted larger guns complicates the usual account of the naval race. A numerically inferior challenger might use heavier weapons to compensate for having fewer hulls, so Germany should have led calibre growth if it drove that part of the competition. German capital ships instead followed British increases. Britain had little need to enlarge its guns merely to outbuild the German fleet in numbers. American willingness to build fewer ships with 14-inch batteries supplied the more immediate technological pressure, forcing Britain to protect its qualitative lead as well as its numerical one.