Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Great White Fleet - The Party is On!" video.

@ArcticTemper Not specific to your question, but if WWI had broken out in 08, it would have enormous ramifications for Italy. Italy fought it's own war with Turkey in 1911-12, the spoils of which were possession of Libya and several islands off the Turkish coast. If WWI had broken out earlier, or Italy had held off on it's own war with Turkey, then, at the conclusion of WWI, when Britain and France were carving up the ME, Italy could grab Libya for free. That would leave a considerable pile of money in the teens that Italy could potentially put into finishing the Caracciolo class battleships, which would have major implications at sea in WWII.
1
@garrettledford1147 Given the knowledge available in 1918, how would I prepare for a war 20 years later, that I would not know was coming, and did not know what technology would be ascendant? I would have looked at Hood, and the Italian Caracciolo class and decided that fast battleships were the way to go. Not thin skinned Lexingtons, not slow South Dakotas and certainly not the even slower Colorados, 3 of which had not yet been laid down due to the intervention of WWI. I probably would have laid down half a dozen ships with the size and power of the Lexingtons, but with the armor of the South Dakotas. We are talking a USN version of a G3. Of course, it takes 3 years to build a capital ship. The earliest I could get anything laid down would be 1919, so they would all be incomplete when the treaty went into effect, and, being way over treaty limits, they would not be completed, no matter how many other battleships the US offered to scrap to save them, but scrapped or used for target practice when 75-80% complete. All a titanic waste of money and effort, and the US goes into WWII without Colorado or West Virginia.
1