Larger British orders and pressure on Germany's naval race

The Orion, King George V, and Iron Duke classes were each ordered in batches of four, but the Queen Elizabeth and Revenge programs broke that pattern. The five Queen Elizabeths, the later sixth order, and the eight Revenges were both a quantitative expansion and a way to raise the price of continued competition. Building 15-inch-gun ships at that scale intensified German political arguments between supporters of army and naval spending. Procurement became strategy by signaling that matching successive dreadnought generations would require resources Germany might prefer to devote elsewhere. The class orders therefore belonged to the political economy of the Anglo-German naval race.