A "take" on the Washington Naval Treaty - It was a solution to a problem that was more apparent than

A question about the impact of the WNT building limits on the British ship and warship building industry and overall industrial base in the interwar era:


So which is it? Did the the British shrink down their warship building industry disastrously as part of the Washington Treaty, to their detriment in countering the rise of 1930s aggressors?

Or did the Washington Treaty allow Britain to benefit economically from avoiding a naval arms race that would have been ruinous to Britain?

Or was there a happy medium, some limit that Britain would have needed to avoid to economic ruin, that could have been negotiated, but the limits of the Washington Treaty as written amounted to an 'excessive' crippling of naval production lines?

1. The British shrank down their artificially inflated warship capacity by 100%.
2. The British saved about a half trillion pounds.
3. The WNT from the American point of view was just about correct. 

Never considered is that the British could never have manned the fleet they wanted. 

1. 2023 unit conversion over 100 years. Credit NOMISYRRUC. 

2. The British have to dredge and build infrastructure for these huge ships.
3. Look at the projected crew sizes and needed added small boys. (Destroyers and auxiliaries.)
 

1. I have to use a baseline somewhere. I do not think many modern people understand why a Mark 8 torpedo in $10,000 1922 dollars would be considered expensive. They get a better idea if I hit them with the 2023 $240,000 price tag.
2. The G series and the N-series were as big as the Hood. The Hood was a problem. You will see that the KGVs were considerably smaller,  as was the Ark Royal? 
3. You build a full support system for the GF in 1930s battle fleet terms which was the faulty thinking of the times, you have to build a minimum of 8 destroyers and 2 light cruisers per battleship, using Jutland thinking. The Wickes / Clemsons  were designed by the same idiot (David W. Taylor) who gave us the 1923 South Dakotas. Unseaworthy, and that is the USN definition, not the British navy one, is "charitable". The British WWI destroyers were mostlty North Sea boats and were a bit small and wet themselves.  They were not really blue water units.   

1. When it comes to money, I stand by my benchmark.  It is s stable comparator to use present monetary value for those who live today. I find it convenient in that it comes as a complete shock to modern people, just how much their ancestors wasted on "armaments" during a depression.   
2. Treaty compliance? No. Ark Royal's length was length restricted at 800 feet with the flight deck overhang added AFTER her launching. Her hull length was restricted to the same length as the KGGs or about 750 feet; which was the ACTUAL work length of British docks, not 860.   
3. 16 battleships = 128 destroyers. Then you need convoy escorts for commerce and naval reserves for fleet trains.  The British negotiators complained when they were not allowed a minimum of 60 cruisers. They thought the USN could get by with about 30. You probably know how I would analyze that position? 

The British have how many barbette assembly stands? 10? How do you build 30 barbettes and test them in a 5 year period? The Americans built 10 battleships and suffered massive delays with TWELVE barbette stands in 5 years.  Then you have the British armor plate bottleneck, the fact that the British navy had completely screwed up their gun policies, and their defective propulsion plant technology and the mistakes made in fire control systems that were not solved until AFTER WWII.   

I would be cautious about assuming unit for unit replacement, under those conditions, much less "expansion" until I had a firm grasp on the guns' problem, just for starters.


  

1. Argument over the total cost of a program is based on a difference in opinion on how to benchmark the costs. Over a 10 year or 20 year time-scale as would be involved in this specific situation, how do you propose to set a SCALAR? An aircraft carrier of the superheavyweight class built in 1960 was 350 million 1960 USD. That same aircraft carrier today would be about 4.2 BILLION dollars. Which fits well with the actual costs and capabilities of a QE class aircraft carrier. Mind you; I am not including the air group, the bodyguard ships or the aviation and shoreside support.

I can measure those costs and assign a scalar. They are not nebulous in modern dollars by simply taking the year build and factoring inflation. I am sure that the posters to this board know how it is done and can follow the mathematics as applied. You may want to go the other way. THAT was not how I was trained to compute costs; as it creates a false sense of "economy" over time. I suppose we will have to disagree. Over 20 years a 500 billion dollar naval budget 1920-1940 in adjusted 2023 British pounds in the heyday of "empire" is not only logical, it fits close to what was spent.

2. I expected that attempted observation. As I wrote to @raharris about such subject matters, it is not a matter of a few "simple observations".

3. Ark Royal WAS the benchmark and an important one. It was longer than any actual capital ship the British planned and built in the 1930s, due to dockyard length restrictions specifically in Malta and Gibraltar, but also in the majority of home dockyards, too. I believe Vanguard was built to about 820 feet for the same relaxed reasons that Hood was (speed) and became a subsequent problem like akin to Hood.

4. Displacement only affects hull length to a certain extent. You go short and fat as with a South Dakota or long and skinny as with a North Carolina. Your real limiter is throughput into the screws as thrust and also your hull slippage in wetted area as drag. You want long and skinny if you can build to it for speed. The British did not build long and skinny because their docks were too short. Simple enough as Occam would say. It was the same reason they screwed up the hull form of the Ark Royal as to flight deck operation desired characteristics. The dock usage length limited ship length.

5. The Number 16 is the natural fit as to real time history to what the RN could peacetime man and maintain as to battleships.

6. The Americans were well aware of the cruiser question in 1927, not 1930 in Geneva which I should have made clear so as to negate the "cruiser question" mispresentation British historians still maintain down to the present. The British wanted many cruisers for surface raider trade protection and attack, not fleet escort in the WNT talks.

7. The destroyer question (175 British) actually related; shows that the British had not quite got the memo on the First Battle of the Atlantic. Cruisers were USELESS against submarines.

8. I have tried very hard to be on topic when it comes to the British navy.

The question "The Washington Naval Treaty It was a solution to a problem that was more apparent than real"

The fact is that the Washington Naval Treaty solved many problems that would have led to war much sooner than it did. And no, I am not claiming an Anglo-American arms race, or an American-Japanese arms race, because until 1935, there was no race. Just jockeying within the treaty. The treaty did that much right. The treaty actually worked. Then two things happened, The Italians and French jumped the reservation and there was the AGNA, which gave them and the Japanese the excuse they needed to resume the arms race.