Exercise forces could make speed and tactical flexibility look decisive because a company might stand in for a brigade, or a brigade for a corps. Wartime operations had to move the full body of troops, armour, vehicles, and supplies, turning the problem into industrial-scale lift. Cruisers could lower enough landing craft from their davits for a company-sized exercise, but landing a brigade and its motor transport would require an unrealistic number of cruisers or the removal of gun turrets for vehicle space. The same exercise logic had validated destroyer anti-aircraft arrangements against scripted threats. The closing counterfactual asks whether building the interwar ideal earlier would have exposed its flaws through testing or reinforced the same assumptions.
Notable Point · 30:44-35:12
Exercise bias hid the scale of wartime amphibious logistics
The closing argument asks whether interwar exercises encouraged fast, sophisticated landing ships when mass warfare actually demanded many simpler hulls.