Не мельчи

Впрочем, статья хоть и содержательная, но пресноватая. Однако, есть в ней один действительно острый фрагмент, на который я на днях обратил внимание, когда решил статью перечитать. Цитирую:

In 1912, the navy received 21.8 percent of the total Austro-Hungarian defense outlay, a far cry from the penury of the Jeune Ecole years and a remarkable amount for the fleet of a traditional land power. The unprecedented budgets of the pre-war years came courtesy of a coalition of powerful special interests that joined forces to promote the navy's cause: heavy industry and the leading Vienna banks, with links to the Trieste shipyards and commercial shipping lines; the circle of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the Dual Monarchy's leading naval enthusiast; and the Austrian Navy League, which grew to be the world's second largest behind only the German. The traditional battleship school had a strategy requiring the expenditure of far greater sums of money, but ironically it proved to be easier to market politically than the less expensive Jeune Ecole. Reflecting its origins as a French strategy for warfare against Britain, Aube's theory had assumed that the ruthless destruction of commerce in wartime would be mutual but feasible nonetheless because, owing to Britain's dependence on maritime trade, it would hurt her more than it would hurt France. To embrace the Jeune Ecole fully, one had to write off the merchant marine of one's own country and, consequently, risk the alienation of the domestic interests linked to domestic shipping and overseas trade, constituencies that normally would be strongly pro-navy. And, of course, the construction of a fleet of cruisers, no matter how large, could never provide the same sort of stimulus to domestic heavy industry as the construction of a fleet of battleships requiring dozens of expensive heavy guns and thousands of tons of armor plate.