Treaty provisions repeatedly left room for the Royal Navy's preferred anti-submarine escort model and allowed such vessels to be built in quantity. The limiting factor was time rather than an absence of a viable design or legal permission. One counterfactual begins with recognizing the approach of war in 1936 and expecting it by 1940; that warning could have produced orders for roughly two or three dozen Bittern-class sloops. Those ships would have formed a stronger escort baseline before emergency corvette construction became necessary. Strategic warning and procurement lead time mattered as much as a sound technical concept in this counterfactual.
Chapter · 31:01-32:11
Treaty-era escort designs and the cost of too little warning
Treaty-era rules shaped the Royal Navy's escort model, but an earlier realization that war was imminent could have produced many more sloops before 1939.