1930 London Naval Treaty: An Introduction Part 4 of 5/Articles 14-16

British criticism of the treaty drew attention to its burdens while making the provisions that suited Royal Navy strategy easier to overlook.

Britain's seventy-cruiser target accounted for worldwide presence, maintenance, damage, obsolescence, and wartime losses beyond the peacetime hull count.

A comparison with modern naval procurement shows why a fleet that looks sufficient in peacetime may have little margin for combat losses or technical failure.

Articles 14 to 16 define cruisers and destroyers by displacement and gun calibre, then set category tonnage, heavy-cruiser numbers, large-destroyer proportions, and aircraft-platform limits through 1936.

The treaty's headline Anglo-American equality concealed a combined cruiser allowance that gave Britain substantially more tonnage.

The 16-percent large-destroyer allowance accommodated flotilla leaders that could carry staff, provide firepower, and protect destroyers as they moved into attack.

Britain needed cruisers for a global war, while Japan planned to wear down American and British fleets as they crossed the Pacific toward Japanese waters.

British naval planning covered a global Commonwealth whose dominion fleets remained small and whose governments expected a voice in deciding where their forces would serve.

A partly recalled 1922 confrontation with Turkey shows how a dominion could reject London's call for support, complicating the idea of automatic imperial mobilisation.

An Italian limpet-mine operation illustrates how damage could remove battleships for months even when it did not sink them, reducing an already stretched Royal Navy's usable strength.

Japan received submarine-tonnage equality, while Britain had strong strategic reasons to seek a world in which submarines did not impose anti-submarine burdens on its sea lanes.

A comparison between submarine development and US Marine Corps tanks shows how a service loses doctrine and practical skill when it stops exercising a capability.

Japan believed its naval strategy required far more submarine tonnage than the treaty allowed, while the Royal Navy was abandoning a fleet-submarine concept that contemporary propulsion could not make practical.

For a technically minded sailor, naval engineering was a good and unusually interesting job for its time despite the noise and danger.