| By 1904, Britain's capacity to maintain her naval supremacy was threatened by financial crisis. In 1904, Admiral Sir John Fisher, the service head of the Admiralty from 1904 to 1910, thus proposed that the battleship and armored cruiser be replaced by what was to become known as the battle cruiser, whose adoption, he believed, would enable Britain to reduce her expenditure on warship construction. In 1906, the Admiralty agreed, at Fisher's insistence, to develop Arthur Hungerford Pollen's mechanized system of fire control. Battle cruisers equipped with the Pollen system, Fisher was convinced, would be able to destroy their opponents before they could be hit in return, which would mean that their lack of heavy armor protection would be no disadvantage.; In 1908, however, Fisher was persuaded that the service had formulated an alternative manual fire control method that was comparable in performance to Pollen's mechanized approach and much cheaper, which resulted in the rejection of the Pollen system in spite of its success in trials. Fisher was subsequently not informed of the complete failure of the manual system, and thus did not reconsider his views. Battle cruisers, which were built in numbers from 1906 to 1912, were not, as a consequence, equipped with an effective fire control system, nor did they take the place of battleships as Fisher had intended.; Administrative economies, changes in the balance of naval power that were favorable to Britain, the disruption of the German battleship program by Britain's introduction of a new model battleship, and a substantial increase in tax revenue from 1909, enabled Britain to maintain her naval supremacy without recourse to Fisher's strategy of replacing the battleship with the battle cruiser. The failure to provide Britain battle cruisers with a means of hitting their opponents before they could be hit in return, however, resulted in heavy losses at the battle of Jutland in 1916. |
