One should so hope. When you call the IN "it," you highlight the issue. It. The IN: A single entity, with a unitary, rational decision-making mechanism, untrammeled by human failings. Ah, utopia...
Smaller bureaucracies, without the inherent enmeshment of rank, nobility, and decision-making have made far greater mistakes. Usually as a result of human frailty, but often mired by other uncertainties as well.
Egos get very close to positions. Careers get built around these positions, and factions support their members. Positions become political. Venality, jealousy, and stupidity all play their part. Emotion is cloaked as reason.
Weapons, as well, have emotional and psychological effects, in addition to physical effects. You are planning on enough admirals, the right admirals, being convinced on a visceral, emotional level of the wisdom of jumping blind into a system, and separating their flagship from its jump drives. The bayonet is a prime example: physically, it should be irrelevant. Early studies were done to determine how many bayonet wounds there were in the US experiences in WWI, when they were ubiquitous in dispersal and training: very few.
This was, of course, and very rational, empirical study. It ignored the fact that the bayonet's effect, by the 20th century, was primarily psychological. One's body was typically not overcome by the bayonet; one's mind, specifically the inner, reptilian portion of the mind, whence comes fear and aggression, among other emotions, overcomes both both the rational and the automatic conditioned responses of training, and one flees in terror. That a single company could, in the latter 20th century, attack an identically armed company across open ground in a bayonet charge defies the physical. Each defending soldier shoots one, the charge is over. Empirically irrefutable; rational. Each defending soldier sees the bayonet, moving from a distance, tangibly towards his innards, and he drops his kit and runs.
That 20 should repeat the task against 100 in cover, over 180 meters of open ground in daylight in 2004 makes the point.
So the admirals, brave and wise to the last, have no inner qualms about abandoning their means of escape to some vague uncertainties. It's not enough, in a large bureaucracy, or system of bureaucracy, that the truth be there. It almost always is in the case of great, protracted, and expensive folly. It has to have champions, who are politically powerful enough, and competent enough to turn the tide of opinion. Often this occurs. In a free market, it happens more freely. In the case of doctrine and military theory, it often takes at least a very bloody defeat to change minds; even then, then wrong lessons can still be drawn. DeGaul had the right answer. France had the better tanks, and more of them. DeGaul did not have the juice to convince the others.
Tank destroyer doctrine was not accepted by the majority of the U.S. Army, but Leslie McNair still was influential enough to delay Ike's request for the M-26's to be produced for Normandy. Enough Zippos caused the Army to abandon the tank destroyer for what we today call the MBT. The M-26 was the MBT of 1944, notably absent. There were rational arguments in favor of the Tank Destroyer. I'm sure we could set up a computer simulation where they would win; I'm sure we could similarly set up one to have the opposite result.
That the truth will spread, just because it is true, flies in the face of human experience. Recognizing the truth is not universal, because often the right answer depends, at the very least, on knowing the right question.
Could BR's be decisively more effective in one measure and not be adopted because of the imperfect, indeed possibly incompetent, nature of bureaucratic decision-making for periods in excess of a century, where no overwhelming capital engagements made the truth inescapeable? I would say yes. Reasonable minds could differ. I do not differ, because I lack a reasonable mind.
