Events abroad like the Japanese Twenty-One Demands on China in early 1915, German attempts to begin unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of the "Lusitania" in May exposed US weaknesses to the public eye. They caused Wilson to reconsider his position and he ordered the Secretaries of the Army and Navy to plan for mobilization in July. The General Board argued that the Navy should be the equal to the strongest navy in the world, that of the British, not just to the most likely enemy, Imperial Germany, and advocated for construction of 10 battleships over five years, together with battlecruisers and smaller ships. Congress was debating the appropriation bill while the Battle of Jutland occurred in at the end of May 1916 and the British victory confirmed the value of the battleship in eyes of the Congressmen. They compressed the General Board's program into three years with four ships in FY 1917 and three in each of the following years. The first four ships, which became the "Colorado"-class, were only modest improvements over the preceding , but the changed attitude towards battleships allowed the General Board to propose much more powerful, and expensive, ships for the last two batches. The maximum price was set at $21,000,000.