The Royal Navy's long drive toward automation

What was the Royal Navy trying to achieve through increasing automation?

It wanted the largest, most capable, and survivable worldwide fleet it could afford without carrying and feeding excessive crews, a goal pursued from improved sailing rigs to mechanized gun handling.

A global navy needs many ships, but every sailor adds pay, food, accommodation, and training costs. British crew-reduction efforts reach back to seventeenth-century rigging improvements that let fewer hands sail a ship efficiently. Later automation and gun-handling machinery continued the same logic, even though wartime additions such as emergency anti-aircraft weapons could temporarily drive crew numbers upward.