Samuel Pepys was the first knowledgeable commentator that I know of to write about the obscene, out-of-control costs of naval shipbuilding. Unfortunately there have been few since who were as devastatingly effective as Pepys. Pepys' views were formed, of course, as Chief Secretary to the Admiralty in the mid to late seventeenth century. As an intelligent, articulate and enlightened administrator/politician he quickly realised the perfidy of the British warship builders of the time and of their counterparts in the Navy and the bureaucracy.
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