Tillman battleships as a naval-policy question

The Tillman designs are placed in the context of rapidly increasing battleship size and cost. Asking where incremental growth might end was a legitimate congressional oversight question even for viewers who favour naval spending. Tillman did not personally draw the giant ships; he asked engineers to show the maximum designs that could be built, and their answers later carried his name. The point then turns back on a sympathetic naval audience: enthusiasm for fleets can obscure the policy logic of a critic, so interpretation requires awareness of one's own bias. Commissioning an extreme design study is distinct from personally advocating every feature shown in the resulting plans.