Sorry, should have qualified that: No boat got lucky against an American BB. The Allied boats scored a couple of BB kills, too: The Kongô, sunk by the Sealion (21 November 1944), and the Shinano, a BB-hulled aircraft carrier, sunk by the Archerfish (29 November 1944).
The primary purpose of an aircraft carrier is power projection beyond the range of surface ships.
BBs, in the current world situation have only three primary purposes I can think of, and two of them are political: Prestiege, intimidation, and amphibious gunfire support. In that last role, they are unexcelled by anything in the inventory or currently in planning. The DD214 is a nice idea, and will work reasonabley well, but there are times when a precision application of massive artillery support is the only thing that will do the trick. BBs are remarkable sharp-shooters, being designed to score hits on small moving targets at ranges where the curvature of the earth itself must take part in the calculations. Moderized shells (RAP, Base-bleed, sub-munitions) can make the BB even more deadly. A single boadside can place upwards of 5700 pounds of High Capacity shells (AP would be in excess of 13,000 pounds), all at once, on a single target. Sustained fire, at typical muzzle elevations, is about 1.5 rounds per tube per minute (30 seconds nominal cycle, plus 96 degrees of total travel in to bring tube to firing elevation and return it to loading elevation at 12 degrees per second), and with nine tubes, that’s 13.5 rounds per minute - or - in excess of 25,000 pounds of High Capacity shells on target per minute, sustained. Now, let’s try a more sedate pace of one round per tube per minute. That would make the throw-weight over 17,000 pounds per minute.
If it’s armor piercing (The AP shell is capable of penetrating up to 32 feet of reinforced concrete), the numbers would be over 24,000 pounds per minute at a leisurely rate of fire, or over 36,000 pounds per minute at a high rate of fire. That’s 18 tons of bang per minute.
Not quite…The USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese sub in 1945. The Indianapolis had just delivered the first atomic bombs and was headed for Australia (I think) when it was sunk. It took four days for anyone to realize the ship was missing and to find the survivors in which time some 600 of the 900 sailors who survived the initial attack had been eaten by sharks. I believe the captain was court martialed for this because the ship wasn’t performing evasive maneuvers. Interestingly the captain of the Japanese sub testified at the trial and stated that evasive maneuvers wouldn’t have helped the Indianapolis at all since the sub was in a perfect position to fire but the captain was found guilty anyway.
For those who think BB’s are somehow invulnerable the Indianapolis sunk in 12 minutes after being hit by WWII era torpedoes. The torpedoes we have today are much more lethal and I don’t think the BB’s have any more armor than they did in WWII. Even if their upgrades included extra armor I’d be willing to bet the new torpedoes more than make up the difference. US torpedoes don’t even hit the sides of ships any longer where armor is the strongest. Rather, they detonate under the ship where armor is weaker in an attempt to break the keel of the ship which is pretty much the end for that ship.
I’ve never seen it personally but I’ve seen footage which is still pretty damn impressive. The real thing in person must be stunning. Try this link for a good WOW picture.
Damn…beat me to it. I was just thinking, “Hey…Indianapolis is a city name not a state name.” Ahh well…
FWIW though the USS Arizona and USS Utah, which were definitely battleships, were sunk at Pearl Harbor. Granted being at port didn’t help but it still puts to rest the notion that Iowa class BB’s are unsinkable.
I don’t believe that anyone would claim that the Iowa class was unsinkable. (Anyone who would make such a claim may be safely ignored for the rest of the discussion.)
Still, the Arizona and Utah were each at least two developmental generations older than the current four, were roughly half the size of the Iowa, and they were sunk by aircraft using 1,600 lb. bombs. As noted throughout this thread, there are rather few SAM or STS missiles lying about in anyone’s armory that carry 1,500 lbs. of armor-piercing explosive. (Actually, the Utah was sunk by torpedoes, but it was already obsolete, having been retired to a target ship status.)
Uh-oh, Little Nemo, that’s one hell of a post, mainly because it’s so utterly wrong. Battleships played a very important role in World War II, and anyone who doesn’t recognize this needs to review the conflict. Battleships were the principal arbiters of sea power in the Mediterranean until 1943, when the chances for a naval engagement there had become nil. It was the battleships both sides needed to knock out of the conflict to gain operating room, and both sides did so: the British at Taranto and the Italians at Alexandria. Many people go about saying “see, it was Taranto that spelled doom for the battleship, seeing as it was sunk so easily by aircraft”. How many go about saying “see, it was Alexandria that spelled doom for the battleship, seeing as it was sunk so easily by midget submarines”. I don’t see any raised hands, which is because the conclusion is wrong in both cases. Sinkings in harbor are just no criteria for warship usefulness or survivability. In the same way, Pearl Harbor was not the end of the battleship in and of itself – not even the vaunted Imperial Japanese Navy understood that the end of the battleship had come until after Midway. American reliance on the aircraft carrier in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor had as much to do with the usefulness of the carrier as it had to do with the problems of keeping the battleships under adequate cruiser and destroyer cover, and with enough fuel, to operate them.
However, the more useful fast battleships (which could operate with the carriers, unlike the old battleships) performed a multitude of useful roles, notably during the Guadalcanal campaign, when it was battleships, and not carriers, that protected the Marines ashore from enemy surface ships. Thereafter, battleships ceased to be of much use in the surface combat role, and mainly reverted to being AA platforms, but they were still very valuable. Also note that it was battleships, again, that protected the Leyte invasion from attack, almost exactly (we’re two days off) seventy-five years ago. The summary is: battleships were the most powerful tool of naval warfare at night, when aircraft played no role of note.
Also, to the person who considered that BISMARCK was a good example to prove that battleships were obsolete: BISMARCK was destroyed by battleships. It may duly be pointed out that it was carrier air that damaged her fatally, but even then, BISMARCK cannot count as a good example: she would have suffered EXACTLY the same fate, regardless of what kind of ship she would have been, simply because operating single large ships in the face of air reconnaisance is stupid, stupid, stupid.
Off of Little Nemo’s back now, and on to other subjects. It should be noted that the comparison of the strike power of a battleship and an aircraft carrier is like comparing apples and oranges. A battleship can sit off shore for extended periods of time delivering fire steadily – say every half minute. However, not for very long. No battleship, the IOWAs included, can fire their ammunition load without a significant reduction in accuracy, range, volume, and speed as time goes on. Firing wears out the tubes, reducing accuracy and range; break-downs reduce volume and speed. It seems very unlikely that an IOWA could fire her for truly extended periods of time, without a change of barrels somewhere down the road, fairly soon into the action.
On the other hand, a carrier cannot put up the same volume of fire for the same duration; but it can do either longer than the battleship can do both, that is, it can bomb the same place for weeks on end without pause, or it can put up more ammunition in the same place in a much shorter duration (if we assume (quite reasonably) that a single F-18 can lug at least the weight of one BB shell [of 2700lbs], then the F-18s of a single CVW can lug four times the weight of one salvo and deliver it almost simultaneously). In any event, it has much greater flexibility and range.
But it has a different role. It can do things that a battleship can’t, and should do so: it can seal off bridgeheads far inland, it can provide all sorts of air support (reconnaisance, close air-support, medevac, air interception, naval interception, electronics warfare support etc.). And it can’t do a lot of things that a battleship can: give artillery support for the duration of an attack, be on-call with large amounts of explosives for quick delivery, deal with targets as soon as they appear.
In general, ground troops prefer artillery fire to aircraft for their support – the Vietnam conflict is full of stories where aircraft support had failed, but the naval fire support from even a destroyer, but more frequently heavy cruisers like NEWPORT NEWS broke the enemy defenses.
Without battleships, the roles that the battleship would have done will be up to carriers. That adds to the strain of doing things which other ships could do much better, but which no ship now in the fleet or likely to come into it will be able to perform adequately. Cruise missiles are just no answer – they can’t adequately target moving forces, they can’t force the enemy to keep his head down, they can’t be fired for any sustained period of time, they can’t control approaches the way a 406mm gun does. I think the American desire for a cruise-missile armed ship is understandable, because amphibious fire-support is unlikely to be needed in the near future, and the cruise-missile can hit, among other things, places like Kabul or Bagdad; but that is not to say that the battleship is obsolete. In fact, the battleship is only obsolete in the role it had at the beginning of the last century. In the role it had at the end of the last century, its usefulness hasn’t declined. It is still the most potent support weapon for any operation within 20nm of the coast.
If this site is to be believed it goes to show just what tough hombres a battleship is (and I know that flies somewhat in the face of my previous posts…I knew they were tough but geez…they’re really tough).
The site I just linked offers the following tidbit:
Mind you many of those 400 shells were 406mm and 356mm from two British BB’s so they weren’t all plinkers from a destroyer or something.
After all of that the Bismarck still hadn’t sunk. According to the linked site the British BB’s retreated due to fuel issues and left some cruisers to mop up. Even after the cruiser Dorsetshire popped two or three torpedoes into Bismarck (at this point the Bismarck was a burning wreck but still floating) it was the sailors aboard Bismarck who ultimately scuttled the ship.
That was one tough mofo…
Still, I maintain it is easier to attack something than to defend it. If BB’s were a threat on the oceans today then someone would dream up a way to sink them. Indeed such weapons already exist such as the Russian Shipwreck missile or modern torpedoes. That there aren’t a lot of Shipwreck missiles about only means that they are too expensive when an Exocet will get the job done against most ships you are likely to face. If a country saw a need and had the means they would get as many Shipwreck missiles as they needed.
Add to that that a direct payload comparison of missiles today with the shells of a WWII BB doesn’t tell the whole story. Explosives are more powerful today as well as design improvements such as shaped warheads. A Harpoon may not carry the 1,500+ pounds of explosive that a 400mm+ WWII shell does but it focuses what it does have in a very tight spot thus getting more bang for its buck. I have no doubt some parts of a BB might still shrug that off but all parts? Sooner or later a soft spot will be found.
Imagine a flight of 20 attack aircraft each carrying 4 Harpoon missiles (easily within their capabilities). That’s 80 missiles flying at once to the BB. The Harpoon is considered to have a 95% flight reliability and so far has a 100% accuracy record in combat ( cite ). Even assuming the BB and it battlegroup can shoot down 75% of the missiles that is still 20 direct hits. While after reading about the Bismarck I can believe that the BB might actually survive that I simply can’t believe it will sail away with nothing more than scorch marks. At the very least your likely to blow off its radars, antennas and other fiddly bits making it return to base for repairs which is almost as good as sinking it in the short till the BB can manage to return at which time they can do the same thing again. This is a strike that is easily achievable by many countries today and is merely using a relatively wimpy Harpoon. It only gets worse from there.
For shore bombardment and amphibious assaults I agree nothing can beat a BB in its abilities. I just don’t see many ‘storm the beaches’ type scenarios happening anymore making the BB somewhat of a battle platform without a mission.
First I’m gonna say that I really, really, doubt the figure of 400 shell hits on BISMARCK, and really, really, doubt the figure of 12+ torpedo hits, too. The site gives no source for its claims, so I dug out WARSHIP QUARTERLY, Issue 28, which gives the shell hits from RODNEY at an estimated (by RODNEY) 40, and by KING GEORGE V as around 40, too. This leaves some 320 hits; two, I think, go to PRINCE OF WALES earlier in the chase, leaving 318 which would all have to have been scored by DORSETSHIRE, NORFOLK, and RODNEY’s secondary battery, neither of which could have inflicted critical damage on BISMARCK.
Torpedo hits are more difficult, but that’s the whole problem with the estimate: who counted twelve? The British, the Germans? Where’s the source – neither Muellenheim-Rechberg’s account, nor Ludovic Kennedy’s, nor the cite above, indicate a specific number of torpedo hits.
In any event, I find the argument “if they were a threat, someone would devise a means to deal with it” unconvincing. Carriers are a threat: why isn’t everyone capable of sinking one?
Carriers are a MUCH harder target than a battleship (assuming the BB has no protection from airplanes). A carrier will engage the enemy at ranges of hundreds of miles from the carrier if at all possible. The air defenses of a battlegroup sans planes is much less allowing planes to get within 100 miles (or 60 or so for a Harpoon).
A carrier also need not get very close to shore. The whole point of a BB is to get close to shore to bring its main guns to bear. Yes a modern BB can lob Tomahawks and the like but so can a lot of other ships for less money. You have the BB to pound the snot out of ground targets with its main guns and the BB must be no more than roughly 25 miles or so from shore just to hit the beach. If it wants to fire at something 15 miles inland it must be 10 miles off shore.
A carrier on the other hand can remain several hundred miles out to sea giving it plenty of time to respond to any threats. Fast land based attack aircraft can launch from (say) 100 miles inland and close the distance to the BB sitting 20 miles off shore in minutes…too quick to vector planes on the attacking craft before they could launch their missiles (remember the planes only need to fly 60 miles or less depending on the weapon to be in range of the BB in this case). Those same planes would have to travel much longer to reach the carrier which gives plenty of time for the carrier to respond.
Finally, I think a carrier is dead from any country able and willing to commit to its destruction. Any country capable of popping say 50 or so attack planes in the air at once could probably overwhelm the carrier’s defenses. If you are in an all out war such an attack would likely be forthcoming given the carriers extremely high target value…on a straight-up tally taking out a carrier is worth losing 50 planes (I say straight-up tally since other considerations obviously come into play…say if you only have 50 planes to begin with it may not be a good trade). A flight of bombers with cruise missiles might even be better being able to attack from hundreds of miles away.
I should say that I do not advocate bringing the IOWAs back, as I think I forgot to mention that; they are a sixty-year old design and they have sixty-year old equipment – or in some cases, even older equipment, as they were refurbished using material from battleships of older classes used as memorials. They were kept because it was cheaper to keep them than to build new ships – but new ships with guns of at least 20cm are really needed if the U.S. is still serious about amphibious assault; which all-in-all it might not be to the same extend it was ten years ago, or fifteen: it does not retain LSTs, and the new generation amphibious group is centered around helicopter-borne assault forces with only a secondary feature of over-the-beach assault.
But the concept is still valid: bringing heavy guns to bear on an enemy while offering adequate passive protection against enemy weapons.
I agree that a carrier can be destroyed if enough force is applied – same thing with a battleship, EXACTLY the same thing even. Before an enemy will reach the battleship, he will have to pass combat air patrols and missile umbrellas from escort ships; and then, the passive defenses of a heavily armored ship. Your previous point that anti-ship missiles can only be held up by armor to a point is true, but few nations possess enough anti-ship missiles. Argentina, for example, ran the entire Falklands War with but six Exocets in their stock; other nations, such as Iraq, may have more similar weapons, but there is always a lot of defense. Iraq managed few missile launches during the Gulf War, and when it did, ship-mounted missiles took the Iraqi missiles (usually SS-N-2 Styx derivatives of 1950s vintage) down fairly easily. It’s all a matter of threat assessment – just as you would not sail a carrier into an area infested with enemy air power of superior strength, you wouldn’t do so with a battleship.
Also note that a carrier and a battleship, except for the carriers airgroup, possess the same defenses of point-defense weapons. So, a battleship with a combat air patrol above it and within a ring of escorts stands the same chance of survival as a carrier, with your comment that a carrier is standing further off duly noted; that risk comes with the territory. It is hardly an argument against the usefulness of the battleship in its niche of the battlefield.
BigE, I remain unconvinced. Even you admit “It was the battleships both sides needed to knock out of the conflict to gain operating room, and both sides did so.” The fact that battleships were sunk when needed is an indication of their vulnerability. As I have said all along, the battleship relies on close range weapons; it can’t compete with ships that use long range weapons. Can any battleship advocates cite an example of a battleship(s) sinking an aircraft carrier(s)?
Battleships might be the ideal vessel for amphibious support. But the fact remains that with a maximum gun range of thirty miles it’s necessary to sail a battleship into the middle of the battle for its weapons to be useful which negates the protection of its escorts. I have to question how long a battleship would last in that situation in the face of real opposition.
“By far the largest Battleship of WW II. With a maximum displacement of 71,659 tons was the Yamato class Battleship, she was also the heaviest armed and armoured of all battleships.”
Well, the only example I can think of is HMS Glorious, which was lost to gunfire from the Scharnhorst. But the Scharnhorst was an 11" battle-cruiser, and going by the Indianapolis argument (“The U.S.S. Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser, not a battleship. The difference is not in any way trivial.”) we must discount this.
Anyway, the loss of Glorious is commonly attributed to her captain’s distaste for his ship’s aircraft. I’ll try & find a firm cite for this, but for the moment I’ll have to make do with paraphrasing author John Winton, who said something like “He’d have been happy to have 15” turrets fitted along her flight-deck". Which point adds itself to the argument given by both sides of this debate: the wrong capital ship (BB or CV) used the wrong way is a liability, not an asset.
That’s not a logical argument to make: carriers were sunk when needed, by submarines, surface ships, and their own kind. Proof of vulnerability is not equal to proof of uselessness, if we accept that all ships are vulnerable. The mere fact, however, that battleships were targets so valuable that they were actively sought out in their harbors, where any attack was bound to be extraordinarily risky, is testimony to their usefulness.
Again, I do not advocate the reinstitution of the battleship as queen of the seas; I’m just noting that the battleship has abilities that no other ship has, and that it has a role in todays world; it had an even greater role in World War II, when it fought alongside the carrier as the carrier’s most valuable and powerful escort.
Today, it has but a secondary role. I don’t think the idea of the 1980s, of a BB surface-action group, is very useful. As you and other addressed, missiles badly outrange the battleships guns, and the remedy, putting missiles on the battleship, is foolish: if one admits one has to put missiles on the battleship to make it a surface-action group centerpiece, then why not make an all-missile ship that centerpiece.
However, as an amphibious support ship, is is outstandingly valuable. Also, of course, as a simple bombardment tool. For many regions of the world, it would be close to ideal – witness Korea, where so many of the principal connections run along the coastline, or Japan (ditto), many Arab Emirates (including Kuwait), much of Libanon and Israel, etc. are all in range of battleship guns, and more so if submunitions were employed.
Also: the only battleships sunk by carriers (except those in harbor) are YAMATO and MUSASHI, against the only carrier sunk by a battleship, GLORIOUS (plus, perhaps, GAMBIER BAY). So the evidence from that would hardly be conclusive. Again, of course the carrier is superior to the battleship as a means of naval combat. It’s just not superior as a means of amphibious support or artillery bombardment.
During world war 2, several-day bombardments by battleships were commonplace. There was no rebarreling logistical crisis during the major amphibious operations to my knowledge. I think you’re severely overestimating the effect of barrel wear - even the big guns can typically go thousands of rounds.
**
IIRC, Iowas have significantly better armor than the bismarck did.
**
I also bet if you take 20 starships, each carrying 80 photon torpedos, they could beat the living shit out of a battleship.
If you’ve got 20 planes with 4 harpoons a piece in harpoon range of your carrier group, you’re going to lose a whole lot of ships. How does this make a case against the battleship? Sure, if you use an overwhelming amount of force on it, it’ll probably be disabled. But so will every other ship in our navy. So I fail to see your point. It can still take a HELL of a lot more punishment than anything else.
Assuming minimal investment (half the research is already done), 100 mile range shells can be designed. Something like 70% of the worlds population (and so I assume infrastructure) exists within 100 miles of an ocean.
This isn’t insignificant. They can be a hugely cheap infrastructure destroying weapons to any enemies we might have near the sea (almost all of them), let alone the intimidation factor, and the other services I mentioned they can perform at the beginning of the thread.
It’s not hard to modify shells to accept a guidance system. They already have artillery shells capable of laser (and maybe GPS, now) direction. A battleship shell could easily be designed with such a system, and boom, you have “free” cruise missiles anywhere within 100 miles of an ocean.
All at a fraction of the cost of an aircraft carrier.
Why would we go with the absolutely ridiculous idea that the BB would have no air protection? It would be protected under the carrier-group umbrella as much as any other ship.
**
With conventional shells, yes.
**
This is a valid concern. Standard procedure in this sort of situation would be to have an air patrol over the battleship, negating the “they just couldn’t be vectored in time!” argument. In any case, with improved munitions, a battleship could have a 100 mile reach. Meaning a) It can stay a decent distance offshore, or B) If it gets close, it can hit any air base within a decent distance of the shore, opening the ‘buffer zone’.
Or we can assume the BB would only move in when enemy air assets were sufficiently suppressed - This isn’t unreasonable, if the goal of the BB is to serve as a cheap infrastructure destruction weapon or an intimidation weapon. There’s no reason inherently why it would have to go charing in head first - but it could.
People learn in school that the age of the battleship was over when planes were able to drop bombs onto their decks. Learning this fact, they seem to embrace it as any person who thinks they have a firm grasp on any concept does.
Things have changed. The battleship was more vulnerable in 1945 than 2001.
It is true that airplanes posed a direct threat to the battleship and more or less nullified them for naval combat. They were somewhat vulnerable to air attacks during the second world war.
However, naval combat has completely changed.
You will no longer see any plane dropping a bomb onto the decks of a battleship. If any plane is within 60 or 70 miles of your carrier group, you’re in trouble. This is true whether you’re a carrier, destroyer, cruiser, or battleship. If an aircraft can hit a battleship with a missile, it can also easily hit a carrier. They’re all under the same umbrella of protection now.
Given that modern missiles are designed to be small and fast, and that our ships have virtually no armor, modern anti-ship missile design inherently has a smaller warhead. The bigger ones with the larger warheads are naturally less effective - they’re slower, and a bigger radar target. Much easier to kill with stand-off weapons.
Given that the only missiles likely to hit a battleship could just as easily hit a carrier - and that the battleship is MUCH MUCH more likely to survive it without serious damage, I don’t see how these assertions of vulnerability hold water.
I basically stated that battleships are equal in terms of actual likeliness of being hit by a missile than any other ship, but much, much more likely to survive even if they are hit.
Some responded with “Yeah, but if you take a whole crapload of planes and put a whole crapload of missiles on them, and then get them really close to the battleship…”
Well, of course, if you completely stack the odds against the battleship to the extreme, it’s not going to come out too well. However, this is true of every ship in the navy - even more so. They’re much less likely to survive such an attack as a battleship, so I don’t understand the point behind this argument.
And… I’ve been busy for a few days, hence my many posts right now.
Cite please? I only ask because the only cannon I know of capable of making that type of range was the Paris Gun. I just don’t see that being mounted on any ship. In addition, that gun hurled only a 120kg shell with a ‘whopping’ 7kg of explosives. A far cry from the Volkswagon hurling Iowa guns. Granted we are technologically more savvy today but we are talking about pretty straightforward ballistics which even our WWII counterparts had a pretty good handle on (which is to say I would be surprised at any quantum leap in gun launched technology).
Look…the point here isn’t if a BB is a tough ship or if it can perform some roles well. The point here is at what cost do you get those things and does it make sense to keep them around?
Comments have been made to the effect of, “Well duh…of course the BB needs an air patrol umbrella.” Fine, you have now just increased the cost of operating a BB to include an aircraft carrier for its support. Back in WWII the BB protected the aircraft carrier because in those days surface ships had to close within 20 miles or so to blow you up. No longer…now you are asking for a carrier to protect the BB not to mention the entire surface group normally associated with protecting a carrier.
Now we are talking MUCHO big bucks and for what? A ship that excels in shore bombardment when such shore bombardments happen almost never anymore? I know a BB shelled Lebanon but it wasn’t especially necessary. In addition by putting itself close to shore a BB increases its risks of being sunk many times over. Few countries in the world has carriers to go out and seek out our carriers. Why bother for a BB? It’ll be in range of dozens of land based airfields making it much easier for an enemy to mount a concerted and corrdinated attack on the BB. It’s not just planes either…field artillery might be able to reach the BB as well as land based missiles. Targeting the BB would be no problem since anyone on shore with some binoculars could call in coordinates.
Well, you say, take out the enemy airfields and field artillery first and maintain air supremecy before putting the BB there. Cripes…you’ve just won 90% of the war. At that point standing a BB off the coast is more for show than anything else. Unless the enemy has managed to station thousands of troops to repel an amphibious landing and those troops have somehow avoided all air attacks then maybe the BB is useful. This also assumes that an amphibious assault is the only or the best way to get troops on the ground. If you have such complete air supremacy then setting-up a landing field for planes shouldn’t pose much of a problem and you can fly your troops in…faster and cheaper.
I love battleships. I think they are amazingly cool pieces of machinery and damn impressive ships. However, when adding the costs of running one compared to what roles it can fill the balance sheet does not work out in its favor.
This is the same line of reasoning taken by the anti-tank crowd when man-portable ATGMs became available, yet we’re still using tanks. Why? Because they’re still useful. They can be destroyed by almost every other kind of unit on the battlefield, but still, we make them, improve them, and field them.
The same goes for the BB. Of course they’re vulnerable. So are the the precious CVs, CGs, and DDs. Even the SSN is vulnerable. Why do we bother building any of them? because they’re useful.
Rather than thinking up ways to describe how vulnerable they are (all ships are horribly vulnerable!), think instead: What is the mission? How can they be evolutionarily improved to better execute that mission? What is good doctrine for their use? What’s the most cost effective way for achieving that mission?
To offer some thoughts:
Remove the midships turret and implace a VLS system. This could accept everything from Standard SAMs to cruise missiles to MRLS missiles, and would radically improve the flexibility and bombardment capability of the ship, while giving it some organic AA capability, allowing it to contribute to Battle Group defense, restore it’s anti-shipping capability, and would only somewhat reduce it’s artillery capability.
Remove most of the secondary battery. The 5"/38 guns are mostly useless at this point. Maybe emplace a handful of modern 5"/54 guns for use on shore targets that don’t require the big guns. This will open up more space for MLRS systems.
Include a full UAV section, including several aircraft, a manitenance secion, and the necessary C[sup]3[/sup]I.
Invest in the creation of a range of shells, including Super High Capacity, RAP, Base-Bleed, Sub-Munitions, and Guided. AP (bunker-buster) and standard High Capacity (general purpose) are already done, the rest aren’t particularly difficult.
This will give you the benefit of a heavy-duty naval gunfire support system that can fend off limited cruise missile and air attact, can contribute to the protection of the ARG, and is so armored that it can withstand any conceivable shore counter-battery fire. Attach it the ARGs and MAUs, and you’ve got a interim solution to the naval gunfire support mission. Something will have to come along to replace it, but I suspect that the solution I’m suggesting would last 20 years or more, and since we don’t go about doing large numbers of amphib assaults simultaneously, two should be plenty.
