The Royal Navy (RN), the Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States Navy all recognised these issues before 1905. The RN modified the design of the to include a secondary armament of guns that could fight at longer ranges than the guns on older ships, but a proposal to arm them solely with 12-inch guns was rejected. The was laid down as an all-big-gun battleship, five months before "Dreadnought", but gun shortages allowed her to be equipped with only four of the twelve 12-inch guns that had been planned. The Americans began design work on an all-big-gun battleship around the same time in 1904, but progress was leisurely and the two s were not ordered until March 1906, five months after "Dreadnought" was laid down, and the month after she was launched.