Oil was the Navy's largest infrastructure revolution since coppering

Steam and sail had overlapped gradually, but oil required a radical replacement of infrastructure that already served a worldwide fleet. The scale of the change was comparable to copper sheathing, an earlier innovation that transformed operational availability. Oil improved the logic of coal strategy by making resupply at sea more viable and reducing the limits seen in long-range voyages such as the Russian deployment to Tsushima and the Great White Fleet cruise. Sustained global movement became easier, which justified the upheaval.