Missile enthusiasm was institutionally difficult to stop

How could Britain have avoided the missile-only mentality that shaped warships from the 1960s to the early 1980s?

There was little realistic way to stop it because senior advocates such as Lord Louis Mountbatten treated missiles as the transformative system that was bound to work.

Missiles promised a new era of reach and precision, so their advocates did not see themselves as accepting an obvious weakness. Senior leadership could attach institutional prestige and future planning to the new system. Once that momentum formed, warnings about lost gun capability were easy to dismiss as resistance to progress. The passage helps explain why the Type 22's missile-heavy design was a product of belief and authority as well as technical choice.