Bring back the battleships?

Great Debates
21

About The Ayes of Texas:


Basically, a wealthy Texan industrialist thinks the US is headed the wrong way and is giving in to the dirty Russian commies. The Soviet fleet is coming to Houston as part of a ‘showing the flag’ tour. Our hero pays for and directs the restoration of the Texas, where it sits in the Houston Ship Channel. Under cover provided by this project, he actually establishes a secret project to re-engine and re-arm the Texas as a supermodern, superfast nuclear powered battleship cum hydrofoil armed with energy weapons.
In the end,


The Texas takes on and destroys the Soviet fleet in a battle in the ship channel which includes the explosion of the Texas’s reactors.
There was a sequel (not involving the Texas, but including some of the characters from the first book) called Texas on the Rocks. That one has some coolFlettner sailaction.

22

Would it be better to say that battleships as mounts for big guns are a waste of money?

BBs have two big weaknesses: above and below. WW2 showed that they were vulnerable to air attack and WW2 and the Falklands War demonstrated how effective torpedoes were against them. However, the same could be said about aircraft carriers.

So, what if we put them in the centre of the battle group with the carrier and re-cast them as a platform for large weapons? Weapons too large to be carried on smaller ships. Are there such weapons? Nuclear missiles come to mind.

Umm… Normandy? Korea?

23

This isn’t '44 or '51. Aircraft with precision attack munitions flatten all defences.

24

Don’t be so sure. We didn’t use Apaches in Kosovo in 1999 because we were so concerned about their vulnerability to ground fire.

25

This argument goes on and on.

It is simply impossible to restore an old BB to operation. Such a ship would require too many expensive sailors. Darn shame, but that is that.

A new ship designed to do shore bombardment would be way cool, but would not be a battleship. No acreage of armor. No vast secondary batteries. No anti-air guns.

26

But you still need to justify a BB over all the other inexpensive alternatives like the rocket assisted shells, missile and high altitude bombing with smart bombs and even FAE. **Alessan **brought up MLRS on a small ship. Another good solution.

27

I don’t think so. It couldn’t hurl nearly the amount or weight of ordnance that a battleship could, nor would it be armored as a battleship would be.

28

The “softening up” naval fire on D-Day was largely ineffective. The most USEFUL naval fire was from destroyers with crappy, little 5-inch guns.

29

Assuming they get through. Just the same as with an aircraft carrier.

30

It’s a moot point - no-one would ever perform a landing without air supremacy anyway.

31

I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for battlewagons myself, but their day came and went. They had their heyday as the queens of the sea before carriers began to replace them. They were once the epitome of technology, a heavily armored warship able to fire the largest of caliber shells further than any other ship could reach with a pretty good accuracy for the day.

Much as there is a conventional wisdom that battleships were obsolete in WW2, they were anything but. They were no longer the queen of the seas, that mantle was passed to aircraft carriers, but there were a lot of surface engagements that occurred, particularly during nighttime. For example 4 of the 10 battleships lost by Japan during WW2 were lost to nighttime surface engagements. These were days when aircraft were pretty much neutered at night. Even without that, the days of the battleship were clearly numbered; nobody built battleships after WW2 ended. Post WW2, the entirety of their reason for existing became shore bombardment.

While nothing can beat the crap out of shore targets like a battleship can, it’s become a very niche role. The cost of maintaining a battleship for service is very high, in large part due to their age and manning requirements. No doubt a purposely designed battleship from the ground up today would require far less crew, and maintenance might be lower, but it would require a huge investment, and the only return would be shore bombardment. Again, it’s a very niche role in the modern world for a very large cost

Much as I get nostalgic about battlewagons, even the reactivation of the Iowas during the Reagan administration was probably anachronistic and a huge waste of money in the end. Their only real combat use after reactivation was to bombard Kuwaiti shores as a diversion, no amphibious assault was planned.

Battleships no longer control the seas, they are very expensive to maintain, and the only thing that they can do better than any other naval ship is shore bombardment - though with the advances in technology, it’s far too close of a game with carrier aircraft that now can operate at night and in all weather conditions and can drop ordinance far, far more accurately than in WW2. For the very ,very few countries that can afford to build carriers or battleships, what would be the more logical choice for the investment - a battleship which can only beat a carrier (possibly) at shore bombardment or an aircraft carrier which is *extremely *versatile and very good at pretty much anything it can do - which cover a **lot ** of ground, from sea denial to sea control to tactical air strikes to strategic air strikes far, far out of range of a battleship’s guns.

From pure nostalgia for all that they did at one time, I’d love to see a role for battleships in the modern world, but frankly there isn’t one.

32

While the Navy might be able to afford loosing a few against an enemy, **losing **a few might prove more costly.

Sorry, I just can’t let the abomination of the constant misspelling of “lose” and “loosing” go by without comment. It is a far greater threat to the USA than any anti-ship missile. Please stop this NOW (everyone-- not just you abel29a).

33

There was a cartoon online which I cannot find now and said, more or less:

Maybe someone can find it.

34

Bah, I blame the ‘o’ key of my keyboard - it must have gotten some jam on it or something and gotten semi-stuck :slight_smile: (Plus, it’s become such a prevalent error to make, how can you expect a poor non-english speaking foreigner to keep tabs on what is the correct word in that situation :slight_smile: )

35

While I am in agreement with you on the issue of battleships, and I don’t think dissolving the military down to nothing will cause peace - or even less warfare, it always irks me to see this one Roman quote tossed about unchallanged.

"To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they (Rome) call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. " - Gaius Cornelius Tacitus

36

Quite true. But that didn’t keep us from doing an old-fashioned beach storming during the Clinton administration (Somalia, wasn’t it?). As I recall, the leathernecks bitched about all the television lights on the beach. Seriously.

37

Deleted; too much of a hijack

38

Well, we went into Somalia in December 1992, during the waning days of the Bush I presidency. I don’t really remember if it was there or a beach assault during the Iraq-Kuwait thingy that the tv crews filmed the Marines coming in.

39

Revive the battleship? It would be stupid beyond belief. There is no role for these things anymore, and they are vulnerable to cruise misiles. The battleship was obsolete by 1930. So are most surface ships (except for carriers). We ought to reduce the surface fleet to carriers and destroyers and some fast gunboats (like the Swedish navy has done). There will NEVER be another fleet-fleet slugfest on the high seas, because no other navy has them (unless you count the UK and France, who are unlikly to be enemies).
As for getting involved in 3rd-world civil wars, you WOULD THINK we might have learned a few lessons from Somalia, iraq, Afghanistan…:smack:

40

Great Post but as to Reagan’s reactivation.

This was discussed while I was serving and was fairly well known in the service and I thought outside of it by those interested in the military. The BBs were brought back primarily as big impressive flag-waving flag ships. It was much the idea of the “Great White Fleet”. It was meant to impress and awe. The cost to bring them back was actually cheaper than building a state-of-the-art Cruiser of the time though of course operational expenses were huge.

The other part was the the Iowa’s class armor was much greater than that of any other ship floating in the 80s except for some of our carriers. What I recall and it might be off, is very few of the nations that were not our allies had Torps and Missile that could disable or sink an Iowa class. Maybe this was hype or pure scuttlebutt but the idea was the BBs were for 3rd world nations and never the USSR or China.