Tirpitz was officially appointed State Secretary in charge of the Imperial Navy Office on 15 June 1897. A new era was about to begin, one sufficiently distinct from earlier periods for later historians to refer to the ‘Ära Tirpitz’. If not for the impact of his policies, the sheer duration of his term in office (1897–1916) provided ample justification for this labelling. However, the State Secretary's naval policy did not achieve what it was meant to. Tirpitz himself later despondently acknowledged that the work of his lifetime would come to a close under a negative prefix. This was not least due to the measures his British opponent had rather unexpectedly taken from around 1904/5 onwards, which were to falsify Tirpitz's basic assumptions. Though the roots of the State Secretary's ultimate failure can accordingly be traced back to pillars central to his very own plan, these fallacies did not emerge until the last years of his first decade in office.

Most of the documents in this chapter are selected so as to present a more or less detailed view of Tirpitz's programme as it unfolded almost unimpeded during the first seven to eight years of his term in office. This plan basically centred on an armaments programme designed to secure Germany's rise to world power status in the face of anticipated British interference. At the same time, it aimed at emancipating the fiscal foundation of the Imperial Navy from budgetary control of the Reichstag. Seen in a broader context, both objectives were aimed at the ulterior objective of shielding Prusso-German constitutionalism, which favoured the rule of pre-industrial elites, from the political effects of the industrialisation by relying on this very same industrialisation in Germany's quest for world power status. As a rather complex armaments programme the Tirpitz Plan had to take into account and integrate political, economic, fiscal, strategic, tactical, and technical matters and consider their interdependency. International politics and strategic or operational naval concepts to be applied against the designated opponent suggested the creation of a specific naval capability which could only be created by observing given tactical and technical needs and potentials. Likewise the required naval capability had to be provided for under the twofold constraints of the industrial capacity available, and the willingness of parliament to appropriate the funds requested.