Naval development without the Korean War

How much would naval development change if the Korean War never happened?

The same trends would continue more slowly; jet aviation and modernization were already coming, but the war accelerated them and demanded ships ready for immediate service.

The Korean War accelerated changes already underway. The transition from piston-engined to jet aircraft would continue, but combat urgency brought new equipment and operating costs forward. Without the war, money might remain available to modernize some larger wartime carriers instead of demanding immediately deployable ships. The expensive reconstruction of HMS Victorious illustrates the scale of that choice. A later exchange attributes part of the rebuild's cost spiral to reconstructing the ship above the waterline before replacing her machinery, an example of poor modernisation sequencing as well as technical ambition. The answer also rejects the idea that Korea single-handedly saved armies and navies from an all-nuclear air-power model, because strategic-bombing claims predated nuclear weapons and had already failed to make other services unnecessary. The counterfactual changes timing, budgets, and the survival of particular hulls more than the basic direction of carrier aviation or combined-force strategy.