The High Seas Fleet's anti-climactic surrender in November 1918 offset the search for offensive solutions to the North Sea stalemate and the submarine menace. For some, the termination of hostilities had revealed congenital defects in the Admiralty's strategic system, especially poor preparation at the war's outset. Richmond cited weaknesses in the Navy's pre-war educational and strategic policy for continuing ‘the Doctrine of No Doctrine; so many officers so many ideas is the present Service rule. Hence, lack of preparation of war, as no one had clear & agreed upon views as to how war would be conducted.’ The scuttling of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919 was further proof that ‘The wheel has come full circle; the Navy has ended as it began with unpreparedness’. Post-war reflections by those unaffiliated with the Admiralty's planning were equally negative. Stephen King-Hall, a Grand Fleet lieutenant in 1914, compared the Navy to a ‘prehistoric Brontosaurus’ at the beginning of the war ‘a very big body with a very small brain’. Such analogies of the Admiralty's pre-1914 and wartime strategies ignore the reality that a carefully developed strategic policy was in place by 1912, the product of a planning trend initiated after 1888, constructed throughout the 1890s, and adapted to meet the case of a war against Germany by the NID, John Fisher, and the Admiralty beginning in 1902.