The OP is looking for something else than the usual BB/BC discussion.
It somehow leads me into thinking that the submarine could be a different element.
'Swarms' of submarines could be stationed at the critical naval bases. This, i believe, was what the admirals feared.
rather than focusing on the massive BB's, maybe a 1914 'e-boat' could be more useful?
Airships would be excellent in the scouting role.
Combine this with the first type of carriers, the North Sea could have been rather unpleasant for GF.
Just a thought. Maybe not war-winning, but surely something else.
oh yes: get an admiral who can grasp a new concept!
What admiral couldn't grasp a new concept? The Dreadnought "revolution" was just eight years old - that's only about as old as the i-phone 8 is today, and much younger than Teslas that many people are still trying to get to grips with. The "modern" sub was about the same age (or youth). Eight years is the blink of an eye in history; it's just two Olympiads and in some sports there's plenty of athletes who are still training for the same events over a longer timespan than that and still getting better at something as simple as riding a bike or sailing a boat.
Aircraft were just as young - the first one flew off a ship less than four years before WW1 broke out. The navies of the world didn't take until about 1920 to create the aircraft carrier because they were all staffed exclusively by morons, they took that long because even with an enormous amount of development starting from the far-sighted but flawed Beardmore design of 1912, that's how long it took to work out in reality rather than in forums with 110 years of hindsight.
In 1914, carrier-sized aircraft were dropping darts and using pistols to shoot at each other. In 1918 the RN was seriously planning a multi-carrier strike against the HSF in harbour, using torpedo bombers. That represents about a thousand-fold increase in one factor alone. How many people who "could not grasp a new concept" have overseen a thousand-fold increase in one factor of a new concept, and an almost infinite increase in others?
These admirals were handling incomparably greater changes than most of us (probably any of us) have had to - why on earth do they deserve such an insult? Maybe it's harder than you think to work out things such as fuel storage, airflow over decks, how to get 1/4" mahogany planking built with 1914 technology to handle slamming the seas at 40 knots, the design and build of many dozens of sloops, etc etc etc, while also expanding your forces enormously, fighting a war, introducing convoys, researching ASDIC, introducing AA guns, etc etc etc.
They had "E Boats' in WW1, in the form of the Thorneycroft CMBs. They did very little of use, and late in the war proved to be very vulnerable to seaplane biplanes. So how are they going to be as useful as you imply? The CMBs were designed to be launched off mother ships but that idea is very easy to think about 110 years later on a forum and incomparably more difficult to actually carry out in the North Sea.
The Germans has Zeppelins. The British shot them down, because neither side was stupid.
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