Interwar destroyer abundance enabled experimentation and conversion planning

Postwar destroyers were roughly seventy percent larger than their prewar predecessors, and navies possessed enough of them to tolerate harder training. Captains could exercise aggressively because damaged ships did not represent the loss of an irreplaceable fraction of the force. The surplus also encouraged design comparison, exchange programs, and long-term study of how older hulls could be adapted. Royal Navy conversions of V and W-class ships were therefore not improvised wartime ideas but the result of years spent planning new escort roles for aging destroyers.