The Fleet Air Arm was caught between services

Who should have been changed to avoid the Fleet Air Arm's interwar problems?

The structural arrangement mattered more than individual personnel: carrier aviation needed to remain separate from the Air Ministry's competing priorities.

The 1918 settlement placed carrier aviation between services with different priorities. The Air Ministry increasingly treated heavy bombers as the main route to victory, while the Navy needed aircraft for fleet operations. Small single-engined naval aircraft consequently drew resources away from what the Air Ministry regarded as its central task. Fighter Command and other RAF branches also suffered from that concentration on bombers. Keeping carrier aviation under separate naval control is the proposed way to remove much of the dispute. Changing individual officials would leave the institutional conflict in place.