Continuing Italian battleship construction still made strategic sense in the Mediterranean. Taranto caught the ships stationary in harbour, a condition very different from manoeuvring at sea. Carrier aircraft could damage and slow a battleship, as later happened before Cape Matapan, while surface forces completed the sequence. The raid exposed vulnerability under specific operating conditions rather than making the capital ship instantly obsolete.
Notable Point · 2:14:20-2:15:01
Why Taranto did not make battleships irrelevant
The raid punished battleships caught in harbour without removing their value in the confined Mediterranean theatre.