Armour-steel capacity cannot be switched back on overnight

Britain entered the war short of ship-quality armour steel because building holidays and reduced orders had allowed specialist industry to contract. Announcing a new construction program could not instantly restore factories, tooling, suppliers, and skilled labor that no longer existed at the required scale. A government could have kept otherwise idle capacity alive, but that would have meant paying a visible peacetime bill for output it did not yet need. Industrial readiness was a policy choice made years before the first emergency order was placed.