Testing and institutional honesty separated torpedo programmes

Why did some navies correct early-war torpedo failures faster than others?

Extensive testing helped, but institutions also had to trust operational reports instead of defending a flawed weapon against the evidence.

Torpedo failures involved both technical faults and an institution's willingness to accept reports from operational crews. German authorities eventually believed trained submariners and corrected their weapons, while the U.S. Bureau of Ordnance resisted evidence for too long. Britain still experienced failures, but extensive trials in varied waters reduced the scale of its opening-war problems. A later comment rejects elaborate explanations for the Mark 14 programme's resistance to evidence and identifies bureaucratic inertia as the simpler cause.