Battleships have been sunk by very primitive ASM’s
By Torpedos from Submarines
By frogmen
Why do you want 2000+ casulties for free?
Hmm. Let’s see…
Pros:
- firepower
- armor might increase survivability (though I’d like to see how thick it needs to be to survive direct hit from Mach 2.5 anti-ship missile)
- big platform allows for variable equipment and armament
Cons:
- cost
- huge operation cost means you need to keep it safe at home rather than risk loosing it to terrorist explosive-laden boat somewhere at the shores of Somalia
OR - needs battle-ship group akin to carrier group for it defense, which further restricts possible mission scenarios and increase operation costs
- huge signature means it can be detected and targeted from very far
- probably rather slow, even with nuclear power
- no or very limited stand-off capability
- lack of precision bombardment capability (though it can be eventually solved through development of guided 16inch munition)
So, we would need to throw A LOT of money at something that we wouldn’t use anyway. I’m not convinced.
I don’t have the knowledge to be able to debate battleships, but I did want to point this out; having a navy of unquestioned dominance didn’t stop us from getting into wars.
Huge compared to what?
The non-nuclear Iowa has a speed of 33 knots, which compares favourably with other ships, including nuclear-powered supercarriers and frigates 1/10th its weight.
To ships with smaller displacement, fewer sticking-out bits and less power output.
I stand corrected.
I agree. Military dominance may deter some enemy aggression (some will just be done unconventional means where conventional military power is useless) while greatly increasing the likelihood of military aggression from the dominant side.
A multilateral equilibrium is probably better for peace. A multilateral equilibrium with treaties agreeing that anybody who starts shit gets knocked down by everybody else would be best but that is still some ways off.
Armor is a losing proposition against guided anti-ship missiles. Battleships were armored to be able to engage smaller surface combatants with impunity. They could do that, because a smaller ship could only carry a smaller gun, with a smaller warhead. Missiles changed that - a frigate can now deliver a ship-killing missile. Also, missiles move the engagement range out to 100+ miles easily - no enemy ships are going to be stupid enough to blunder within gun range. And while a battleship may survive more missile hits and keep floating, superstructure elements like antennas etc. will be gone. It’ll be floating, but it’s questionable whether it’ll be fighting. WWII technology killed battleships.
(Besides, if the enemy is able to project ship-killing munitions out to battleship gun range, your invasion fleet with its thin-skinned landing craft is doomed.)
As for weight of shell, easily available data (Wikipedia, natch) says that a 12-round MLRS launcher salvo firing the M31 rocket (actually, I guess, missile) puts 2400 pounds of HE on target, guided, with a 20-mile range. Decent enough, compared to the 2700 pound free-flight shell and 23-mile range of the battleship gun. But then the gun and breech alone weigh 120+ tons, not counting the turret and gunlaying mechanism etc. It is a beast of a weapons system to drag around.
An entire MLRS vehicle weighs 28 tons. We can probably strip off the tracks and engines for shipboard use, and use some of the weight for a better reloading system, the high reload time being a bit af an Achilles’ heel for the MLRS.
The only thing the battleship gun delivers that can’t be matched otherwise is the pure weight of the 2700 pound shell - but if I was the one needing super-heavy fire support, I’d take a 2000 pound JDAM or LJDAM with its much higher precision. If I didn’t have a target that explicitly needed a 2700 pound warhead, I’d much rather have the ability to engage 12 targets with 200 pounds each.
If you were to sit down in 2009 and design a coast bombardment ship, you wouldn’t end up with a battleship.
All the armor of a battleship is in the wrong location. It was designed to fight other ships armed with naval rifles - low trajectory high speed shells so armor was concentrated on the sides. Teak decks. Modern anti-ship missiles and guided bombs have top attack trajectories (similiar to anti-tank missiles which attack the thinner top armor). Relatively easy to penetrate into the depths of the ship to deliver a lethal blow.
Torpedoes used to impact the side of ships below the water line hence battleships had thicker belts of armor placed below the water line. Current torpedoes (and underwater mines) destroy the ships by detonating below the keel breaking the back of the ships. Other torpedoes have multi-stage shaped charges to penetrate conventional armor and then produce additional after-armor effects.
Backers say we can add all kinds of anti-missile missiles, self-defense guns but the this entire makeover drives costs completely out of the ballpark and doesn’t address below water attacks.
New projectiles would need to be developed. The only current projectile is the MK19 Mod 0 which has grenades same as the MLRS (rocket/unguided is correct). 400 total for an explosive weight of “ta da” nineteen pounds out of a total shell weight of 1880 lb. Former Navy depots like Crane, Hawthorne, and McAlester might find some old common, AP, or HC (high capacity) rounds rusting away that haven’t been destroyed yet but the explosive weight is actually less than 10% of the round’s total weight. Range is 36km.
Couple of other notes. the guided version of the MLRS called the GMLRS has two warheads with the biggest bang being a <200 lb explosive weight unitary warhead. It also has a reduced grenade warhead with 400 grenades. Range is approx 70km max.
I didn’t realize that English was not your first language. And it’s exactly because it’s become so prevalent that I made the comment. It is truly a abomination and I like to draw attention to it when I see it in hopes of curbing it before we start getting all of those “English is a living language! This is just a natural change!” comments. I only started seeing this is the last 2 or 3 years.
I understand how fads start–people see other people wearing huge sunglasses (or some such) and think: “Hey that’s cool! I want to be just like them!”. I don’t understand people seeing a misspelling and thinking: “Wow! Using “loose” when the writer really meant “lose” is pretty hip! I think I’ll start spelling it that way!”
Rant concluded. 
I rather favor the railgun variety. 290 miles, mach speed, time on target in minutes. Still faster than airplanes, especially in cases of multiple targets. Fire, change target, fire, change target, fire…
The 1940s Battleship is dead. The 2009 one is just being reborn.
As a class the BB will be back once they can’t justify the size of a cruiser, it just wont have 9 sixteen inch guns, and a brace of five inch guns for secondarys.
The reality was that Battleships were the nuclear weapons of their age, how you were viewed as a power rested on the amount of tonnage that your fleet carried. Those days are gone and we have missiles and bombers on the strategic chess board now , with most of the remaining battleships being tourist attractions.
In todays world a battleship is naked where it counts , as has been posted above , a single mark 48 torpedo would in likely hood cripple a bb if not outright sink it, and precision guided weapons would make hash out of the top side of the ship where its armor was weakest. The Iowas were a transitional ship, to bridge a gap between the sodaks and the newer montanas that were on the drawing boards.
To get the speed that was required to escort the fast carriers , something had to give and that was armor. I am not against bringing back the Battlewagon class, but the threat no longer exists that would justify the tonnage. It needs a new role in tommorows navy , and there is some justification that its coming.
Declan
The cruise lines could probably make good use of a battleship for cruises near the Horn of Africa.
For that, I think a PT boat would suffice.
I think cruise lines generate less income that would cost to escort them with friggin battleships.
For missions like that you need something fast, cheap and numerous.
I wouldn’t mind bringing back the Yamato Class battleships - suitably modified, of course.
I can see several problems with this, which I hope will not be too much off-topic for a while before returning to the question at hand.
First off, to state that battleships were obsolete in 1930 is so utterly misinformed that even to ask “cite?” seems superfluous. There was nothing, not the aircraft, not the submarine, nor any other kind of warship capable of doing what battleships were capable of doing in 1930. Any navy without a battleship could not but fail to achieve anything more than the very occasional lucky sea-denial success. Any nation without battleships in 1930 could not hope for more than France managed to achieve 1805-1815 – very limited victories against secondary objectives.
Second, there’s a certain doubt to be levelled at the arguments of someone who’s idea of what the U.S. Navy should look like is Sweden’s navy. To say that the Swedish and American strategic situations and requirements are entirely different is an understatement. Sweden’s navy is a coast-defense force of limited strategic reach, while the U.S. Navy’s is a globally-operating force. It’s customary to decry the strategic vision of Navy planners, but really: they know their stuff. The centerpiece of the carrier needs the protection of air-defense cruisers and submarine-defense destroyers (although increasingly, these functions are taken up by the same ships) and so do the amphibious ships. So unless you come up with a landing-craft-submarine, you’ll need surface ships.
And will there never be another high-seas battle? Hopefully there won’t. But I bet China is not betting on it, and nor should the U.S. Navy (unless it is required to do so politically).
As for the question of the battleship today.
I think it would pay to look at what’s meant by “battleship” and how that might relate to things useful today. If we start off simple, by looking at the evolution of the battleship, these things stand out:
[ul]
[li]Origins: the battleship comes from the sail ship-of-the-line. From the s-o-t-l, first the British and then other navies developed iron, turreted warships which still had the function of standing in the line of battle in a large-scale naval engagement. It’s not for nothing that even into the 1900s, pre-dreadnought battleships were called ships of the line, and served the same purpose as their wood-and-sail predecessors. The dreadnought battleship was an extension of the same concept. The modern battleship still more.[/li][li]Characteristics: a battleship is usually characterised by large guns and strong armor, because it needs to be able to sink other battleship while not being sunk itself.[/li][li]Uses: battleships had one primary use: sink other battleships, because only in this way could the threat to the real uses of the sea, i.e. communications, trade, invasion, be permanently erased. The Greek victory at Salamis was not important because of the ships the Greeks sank, but because in sinking them, they gained control of the sea and sea communications; the same holds true for Lepanto, for Trafalgar, for Jutland. "Battle"ships enabled the victor to avoid the threat of invasion and allowed him free use of the oceans.[/li][li]Reason for deactivation: in the U.S. and Britain both, cost, and their lack of utility in peacetime. [/li][/ul]
Several things stand out here, I think. The two central characteristics of the battleship, guns and armor, have very different usefulnesses today. A 16" gun today might actually be much more useful than it was in 1945. Thanks to submunitions, GPS guidance, rocket-assistance etc., a battleship today could range deeply inland with great precision, a rapid rate of fire and fairly good sustained rate of fire. It would be superior in this case to aircraft.
Armor is a much different matter. Missile combat so far has shown that the greatest danger to a warship is not the warhead, but the fuel and the resultant fires (see *Stark *and Sheffield), and modern warships’ vulnerabilities may lie more in soft- and mission kills than in outright sinkings. The experience that South Dakota had in the naval battle of Guadalcanal is a significant one: although at no time in danger of being sunk by the Japanese battleship gun fire, she was essentially mission-killed by loss of radar fire-control. The same will hold true for a modern battleship with its essentially unprotectable electronics. These same electronics will make it necessary to completely redesign a modern battleship, compared to a World War II one. Today’s warships are volume-critical, not displacement-critical.
And the battleship was not built for the secondary operations it could do well, like shore bombardment, or carrier escort. It was built for sea control, a function fulfilled today by the carrier, and a function the battleship had probably ceased to be able to fulfill by the advent of guided missiles (not guided bombs) an carrier jet planes.
In summary: it will not pay to reactivate a battleship. They were not built for the role they would fill today. There is a use for a 16" gunship, there can be little doubt of that; the question is, is there enough use for it to justify the necessary cancellation of other projects. Regrettably, I think there is not.
I think your assessment of usefulness of 16 inch guns is somewhat overoptimistic.
First, we don’t have system like that operational now - that means it will cost a lot and take years to develop and field family of modern ammunition, as well as integrate it with fire control systems.
Range for 16 inch is about 40 km. Even with ERFB, base-bleed or rocket assist we can only hope to extend it by up to 40%. Say, 56 km maximum. Quite a lot for barrel artillery, but next to nothing compared to heavier rockets, not to mention missiles. Heck, even guided aerial bombs like SDB have twice that range. Nothing close to stand-off. Note, that we can achieve 30 km with your standard ground-based 155 mm howitzers now - using ammo currently fielded.
Another point, it’s too powerful. Sure, you can deliver metric ton of mines for area denial, or cover several acres with submunitions, but nowadays we want something with more finesse. There are little scenarios where massive human waves of Chinese infantry will be assaulting over areas that have no civilian population. Most of thing that 16 inch would do would be labeled as war crime nowadays.
As for direct hits, there are few targets hard enough to warrant such heavy AP fire. And caves of Afghanistan are well out-of range. Harpoons, bunker-buster bombs and the like are enough for hardened targets and more versatile to booth. Also, guided munition while useful as extension of existing systems, are not really worth it when developed from the scratch. What you would get would be something with cost and efficiency similar to Harpoon, but much inferior range. And, on the other hand, not that much more capable than existing artillery systems using existing munition.
Overall, I think that 16 inch artillery is answer to question that nobody is asking today. It has very thin area of conditions where it excels over existing systems, and I don’t think it’s worth pursuing.
Billy Mitchel’s 1921 demonstration of the aircraft’s ability to sink a battleship effectively rendered the battleship obsolete. This message was driven home at Pearl harbor, the sinking of the Bismarck, the Battle of Midway, and the sinking of the Yamato. It just took a long time for the message to sink in (zing!).
The problem with any battleship is that no matter how big and powerful it is, it can only be at one place at a time. An aircraft carrier with it’s wing of dozens of fast and relatively cheap aicraft can control an area for hundreds of miles around it.
This wouldn’t be a true “battleship” though, in the sense of a giant ship covered in armor and bristling with cannon and missle. More like a cruiser - fast, but with a lot of firepower. And really it depends on how small they can make a powerful railgun. We could just be talking about a relative small destroyer.
These things go in cycles. Currently airpower dominates, but as soon as someone makes a useful energy weapon, anything flying in the air becomes obsolete. “If you can see it, you can hit it” renders anything above the horizon a target and thin skinned vehicles like airplanes and missles won’t survive such a conflict. So, you’d be back to creating weapons platforms that would survive equivalent weapons from the enemy. Tanks would rule the battlefield on land, while the new battleship, designed to power the weapons and survive against other equivalent ships, would rule the waves again.
But how close are we to a working energy weapon powerful enough to knock aircraft and missiles out of the sky or small enough for a tank? It seems like we are as close to these as we are to a working Fusion reactor. You know a rolling 20-50 years.