British rearmament before the Second World War shows why expanding an existing programme can beat adopting a technically superior system. The Royal Navy declined to switch its new construction to the very high-pressure boilers used by American and German ships. Crews, trainers, dockyards, and supply chains already understood the established British machinery. Changing standards during rapid growth would have imposed a bottleneck across training, logistics, and sustainment. Standardisation was a strategic resource in this case, rather than mere technological conservatism.
Notable Point · 1:40:48-1:41:28
Standardization can matter more than superior machinery
The late-1930s Royal Navy kept familiar boilers because adopting higher-pressure machinery during expansion would have created training, supply, and maintenance bottlenecks.