Do you know that WWII battleships were upgraded with missiles and modern defense systems?
Are you telling us armor does not matter on a warship? If a ship’s readiness level is sufficient then armor doesn’t help?
I don’t think it’s an issue of if armor matters. It’s more of an “is it worth the engineering tradeoffs to have it in this modern age”
It seems to me the choice is either to get serious about armor or forget it.
All the way back to WWI we see the notion of big gunned, low armored ships getting creamed. The armored ships just did better. (Although some say the admirals did not fight the big gun/low armor/fast ships properly and instead put them in like fully armored ships…with bad results.)
Certainly making 20 ships for the price of one makes some sense. But if you can ruin every ship with a single $25,000 missile then does that make sense?
Certainly the Soviets made the Granit missile which was a carrier killer. A massive, supersonic missile. But those were very expensive and had few platforms to launch it (it was very big).
Battleships, like carriers, are not alone. They have a flotilla around them.
I think you can make a good argument for and against them.
The short answers is yes. The long answer is… not appropriate for this forum.
Not that you’ve answered my question (your vision for battleships of the future) but since you’ve cited the (not really) “modernized” Iowas as an example, I’ll just note that all those systems (the missiles, the more advanced radars and communications systems) imposed the vulnerabilities I discussed, re: sensitive electronics and cabling in minimally or unarmored parts of the ship. Which is to say that my criticism still stands: they might be able to stay afloat, but don’t expect them to be able to absorb a couple cruise missiles and be of much use against an opponent who is, as demonstrated by having already scored successful hits, armed with missiles.
We have examples of battleships taking a massive pounding and they kept going (for a bit).
We have examples of low/no armored ships taking one or two hits and being done. Either sunk or so massively wrecked as to be utterly useless.
Your argument is akin to telling cops to not wear body armor since it still hurts if you get shot and, if you get shot enough, everyone dies.
Battleships were vulnerable. You can make thicker armor, but then somebody develops a bigger bomb. And in WW2 it was clear that battleships were vulnerable to planes and submarines. Like the carriers, they required escort vessels for their protection.
As for taking damage, a bigger ship has an advantage anyway, regardless of armor. And historically the worst thing to happen to a ship was generally a fire that got out of control. Some Japanese ships were lost this way, and more recently HMS Sheffield.
Good points. WW2 showed that lots of smaller ships were more useful, plus carriers.
There is little point using battleships today. They cost a huge amount to operate and require very large screws by modern standards. In terms of bang for the buck, all you really have is an artillery platform with very big guns. About the only advantage of those guns over missiles is that you an bust concrete bunkers - but so can air-dropped bombs. A BB as a missile carrier to eliminate the range problem? True, but why use a BB for that? A modern ship can do that just as well, and is much, much cheaper.
These days ships rely on missiles and rapid firing guns for protection against missiles, not armor. However you design the ship, there is never enough armor. And it is easy to make a bigger missile that goes through any armor.
In modern warfare preparedness is more important more armour.
Had HMS Sheffield been in a state of readiness that the rest of us were she would not have been a complete loss.
For HMS Sheffield to have carried enough armour to have a realistic chance of defeating the incoming missile it would have required a complete change to the whole of NATO naval doctrine - now if you happen to be a marine engineering consultant who has an input to NATO boards I would suggest your knowledge of naval architecture is unlikely to be relevant.
Designing warships to carry that much armour, which in the end is pretty much ineffective is costly, and not on the mission.
Worth remembering that Yamato armour was defeated by dumb bombs coming in from the air in lumps of less than 1000kg - yes it took a lot, but the reality is a lot was available - are you suggesting we return to building 70k ton battleships with massive armour shedules so they can be sunk by much more effective modern weapons?
It does not matter how thick or how well designed it is, modern weapons can defeat every form of mobile armour and the vast majority of static protective barriers.
Preparedness to respond appropriately it the single most important aspect, this could be through early strikes, early detection right through to having all the measures necessary for damage limitation up and running before damage occurs.
We have weapons that can blast through over 6 metres of reinforced concrete and their accuracy is undreamed of by our WW2 forebears, it is absolutely impossible to protect a moving platform from such weapons - armour is of only limited use and this is in very specific roles where specific threats faced can be designed against
We had ships struck by dumb bombs, at least 6 of them, and many of those bombs passed right through without going off, had they been armoured those bombs would not only have exploded within the ships, that armouring would have concentrated the explosive power dramatically - we would have lost a goodly number of those ships - perhaps even enough to make the mission unviable. In other words thick armour would have made the vulnerability of those warships worse, not better.
Where bombs did explode within the ships not only did they not result in loss, most did not even impact the operational capability of those ships - modern warships are designed to enable the blast to escape the confines of the hull outwards - which is why they have very many more frames - (not to be mistaken for compartments)
For what it’s worth, I walked the decks of USS Iowa a few months ago and got a real feel for the variety of armor thickness. The WWII era turrets and helm were well protected (as was the hull, I presume), but the modern missile and AA systems hardly at all. There’s nothing about the armor of that battleship that would prevent a lucky hit from turning it back into an obsolete WWII ship.
This is historically well-founded. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_or_nothing_(armor) for the doctrine of how to install armor on ships.
The problem today, as explained by casdave just above, is that the armor-defeating capability of modern weapons greatly exceeds any possible armoring of a modern ship of any size.
In a sound-bite: “All” has become technologically obsolete, so “nothing” it is.
And then ship designers make up for that vulnerability as best they can with other lighter more implementable solutions such as networked surveillance, CIWS, damage control, etc.
In your policeman analogy, the unarmored officer can run faster, carry more other gear, find cover more agily, etc. Those advantages are real. In the case of actual policemen, not analogies, the tradeoff today is such that armor helps their effectiveness & survivability more than it hurts it. So most modern police are armored.
In the event armor-defeating small arms ammunition became commonplace we’d see police forces adapt. At first they’d go with heavier armor with ceramic plates, a la army battlefield armor. If ammunition later improved to defeat even that we’d probably see police pretty quickly switch back to no armor rather than burden the officers with 100# of defense that pretty well obliterates their offense.
Another area where the analogy breaks down is that unlike navies, police are generally not facing a professional opponent. Even in an era with widespread criminal use of armor-defeating ammo, the police will still encounter plenty of skirmishes against knifes, small caliber belly guns, traditional lead-based ammo, etc. So there will still be incremental value to light armor long after it’s readily defeatable by top-of-the-line criminal weapons. Navies not so much.
The thing is, none of our modern high-tech navies have been tested in a full scale battle, much less a full-blown war, for 3 quarters of a century now. Just like how Pearl Harbor was a wake up call/death knell for battlewagons, the next war will likely reveal quite a few surprises. My suspicions are that subs will the only vessels still (mostly) operational a year in (even if they have their own set of vulnerabilities), and fleet carriers will just be big fat targets littering the bottom of the ocean.
The fact is that naval offense has consistently kept ahead of naval defense, throughout history. People point out the flaws in the protection schemes in the Bismarck’s and Yamato’s, while downplaying the flaws in the Iowas-precisely because the former got literal baptisms of fire which starkly (sorry) revealed the deficiencies in their armor and anti-torpedo systems. The Iowas were never tested like that.
But, as peacetime navies where at worst they might have to sail in and quell some minor uprising or invasion somewhere in some 3rd world country, they are more than adequate to the job. Until the real shooting starts, at which point all bets are off.
May be happening right now. The USS Bonhomme Richard, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, is on fire at dockside in San Diego right now. The fire is ‘massive’, and it’s not being put out yet. Even if extinguished rapidly, the fire may cause so much damage that, like the submarine USS Miami, the vessel gets decommissioned rather than repaired.
Returning to the point of the OP, fire is an incredibly deadly threat to warships. Numerous retired warships, in what are known as SINKEXs, have endured tremendous damage from ordnance, whereas an operational naval vessel would have long since sunk. These retired vessels have everything flammable or explosive removed. USS Thatch, a sister ship to the Stark mentioned upthread, took a staggering amount of abuse in its Sinkex vs the Stark.
On July 14, 2016, the ex-USS Thach took over 12 hours to sink after being used in a live-fire, SINKEX during naval exercise RIMPAC 2016. During the exercise, the ship was directly or indirectly hit with the following ordnance: a Harpoon missile from a South Korean submarine, another Harpoon missile from the Australian frigate HMAS Ballarat , a Hellfire missile from an Australian MH-60R helicopter, another Harpoon missile and a Maverick missile from US maritime patrol aircraft, another Harpoon missile from the cruiser USS Princeton , additional Hellfire missiles from an US Navy MH-60S helicopter, a 900 kg (2,000 lb) Mark 84 bomb from a US Navy F/A-18 Hornet, a GBU-12 Paveway laser-guided 225 kg (500 lb) bomb from a US Air Force B-52 bomber, and a Mark 48 torpedo from an unnamed US Navy submarine.
After WWII battleships proved how tough they were at Bikini where they were used as targets for the hydrogen bomb test blast. A couple survived fairly intact, although the entire crew would have been killed by the radiation.
The Nevada had to be sunk by torpedoes to take her down.
No idea why you’re pointing out the USS Stark as any kind of failure; IMO, a 4200 ton frigate being hit by TWO Exocet antiship missiles, being able to put out the fires, put into a friendly port for temporary repairs from a destroyer tender, and then sail back to the US, all under its own power is a massive ship design and damage control training success.
And FWIW, after doing some research, the fuel was often what did the damage from kamikaze, especially to those battleships hit by them.
Some people just like the BFG platforms. We see similar arguments for the A-10. The Tiger tanks are the post popular (and well-known) tanks of WW II to the general public. It’s the reason Dirty Harry carried “the most powerful handgun in the world.”
One of those things is not like the others – A-10s actually perform as intended.
That or this happens (that is an actual imprint of a kamikaze plane that hit the belt armor of a warship and splatted against it like a bug on a window).
But we did see some examples in WWII with the Bismarck and Hood being the prime examples. Hood was under-armored and the result was devastating. Bismarck got creamed later but absorbed massive amounts of shells before sinking.
Heck, in WWI the idea of the lightly armored, big gunned ships was done in. The lightly armored ships just had no staying power. The armored ships did.
If one side brings big armor the other side needs an answer. I remain skeptical that an Exocet can do much harm to a WWII battleship beyond blowing off antenna and some other minor harm. You need a bigger missile. And the Soviets made one in the Granit missile which is fearsome but it is so big and expensive that few planes can carry it and it costs a lot to make. Less than a battleship of course but a battleship is not alone (or shouldn’t be).
Harder to kill is, well, harder to kill and the other side has to go to more trouble to do that. The Bismarck saw pretty much the whole British navy in the Atlantic and Med dedicated to its destruction and it almost escaped to safety anyway. A testament to how durable it was (apart from that rudder shot which hobbled it) and just how terrifying the British viewed it…they simply could not let that ship roam around.
And that was a BB on its own. The US would always have a flotilla with them.
Back in WW2 during the Taffy-3 action in the battle off Samar, apparently when the destroyers and escorts were fired upon by the Japanese with armor-piercing fire from cruisers and from battleship secondaries, many of those would just poke a hole right through the “tin cans” without detonating inside. Which, sure, is still troublesome if the exit hole is below the waterline, but unless it goes directly through something important (with apologies to whoever may have had the misfortune of having been standing right there) will not be as bad as if they blew up.