Anglo-German naval arms race
The arms race between Great Britain and Germany that occurred from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the advent of World War I in 1914 was one of the intertwined causes of that conflict. While based in a bilateral relationship that had worsened over many decades, the arms race began with a plan by German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in 1897 to create a fleet in being to force Britain to make diplomatic concessions; Tirpitz did not expect the Imperial German Navy to defeat the Royal Navy.
German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was the primary architect of the strategy of creating a "fleet in being" to force concessions from Britain after 1897
HMS Dreadnought had the fighting capability of two or three normal battleships.
Jacky Fisher, First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910, guided the design process for the dreadnought-style of battleship and reorganized the Royal Navy to protect the home isles.
Bernhard von Bülow, German Chancellor from 1900 to 1909, initially supported Tirpitz's plan but grew increasingly skeptical of the strain upon German finances
An arms race occurs when two or more groups compete in military superiority. It consists of a competition between two or more states to have superior armed forces, concerning production of weapons, the growth of a military, and the aim of superior military technology. Unlike a sporting race, which constitutes a specific event with winning interpretable as the outcome of a singular project, arms races constitute spiralling systems of on-going and potentially open-ended behavior.
1909 cartoon in Puck shows (clockwise) US, Germany, Britain, France and Japan engaged in naval race in a "no limit" game.
