Interwar naval treaties permitted Britain to build large numbers of slow sloops because they lacked torpedoes and were designed below the relevant speed threshold. The Royal Navy could have produced a dozen to two dozen annually after 1930 without consuming treaty destroyer tonnage. Treasury reasoning instead compared ships of similar physical size and demanded a choice between them. The navy favored destroyers because their torpedo systems and high-speed construction could not be improvised as readily after war began. That rational wartime choice still left a shortage of adaptable presence ships and shows how legal categories and annual budgets can pull procurement away from a balanced fleet.
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Treaty rules distorted the choice between sloops and destroyers
Britain could build treaty-exempt sloops freely, but Treasury comparisons with similarly sized destroyers pushed money toward the scarcer warfighting design.