Small crews kept a dispersed sloop force affordable

Did manning so many small sloops make the force prohibitively expensive?

Not by contemporary standards: most required around one hundred sailors or fewer, far below the complements of capital ships and carriers.

A large number of small hulls could have created a serious personnel bill, but sloop complements were modest by contemporary fleet standards. The usual crew was roughly one hundred, with variation according to the weapons fit. Against battleships and aircraft carriers carrying crews in the thousands, each additional sloop was comparatively inexpensive to man. That economy helped make wide geographic presence possible without assigning a major combatant to every station.