Why the U.S. four-piper reserve was accidental

Was the U.S. Navy's stock of mothballed four-piper destroyers deliberately created for a future war?

No. Their later usefulness was accidental; completing the ships cost less than cancelling them.

A viewer asks whether the U.S. Navy's large stock of completed four-piper destroyers, later available for the Second World War, reflected deliberate reserve planning. The outcome was accidental. The ships were completed because cancelling them would have cost more than finishing them, rather than because planners had designed a future mothball fleet. Contractual and sunk-cost decisions therefore created military options for a later crisis without a grand strategy behind them.