Taranto planning may have predated the 1930s

The standard account often places serious planning for the Taranto strike in the early 1930s. A cautious qualification is that Royal Navy thinking about an air attack on Italian harbors may have begun in the mid-to-late 1920s. Italy's ability to contest Mediterranean access made such a theoretical exercise strategically relevant well before the wartime operation. The date of formal planning may therefore be later than the first consideration of the operational idea. The earlier date remains a possibility rather than a settled chronology.