Institutional memory favors balanced naval forces

Long-lived security institutions can be cautious because their accumulated experience exposes the risks of betting everything on a novelty. A commercial disruptor may gain by concentrating on one breakthrough, but a security organization can become dangerously unbalanced if it does the same. Experienced navies can test a new weapon and add it to the force without making it the answer to every mission. The first destroyers emerged from that tension between exploiting the torpedo and preserving a fleet able to perform many different tasks.