Here is an interesting article on the subject.
Personally I have always thought it was a bad idea to take them out. Just the sight alone of the Iowa or New Jersey is enough to scare off some little Iranian frigates.
The Navy got rid of them for a good reason and will not want them back for the same good reason; it’s a stupid waste of money.
That said, even your own link does not literally suggest, or suggest anyone is thinking of, bringing back actual battleships; it’s just talking about larger missile cruisers.
I am a bit unclear as to why one would want to spend billions of dollars on a ship that will intimidate the brown-skinned enemy of the day by their “sight alone.” (As if the sight of a 500-foot-long missile destroyer isn’t intimidating enough; have you ever seen one? They’re big.) In modern naval warfare, if they can literally see you, you’ve done something wrong.
No, of course we aren’t bringing back battleships. Some very smart defense thinkers are already raising interesting questions about whether investing in aircraft supercarriers is a good idea, which I think is a very valid debate, even though I still see tremendous value in them.
We are learning that distributed lethality – like a network of platforms that mix sensors and shooters – has tremendous advantages. A battleship is the ultimate in centralized lethality. I fail to see why we’re getting things so wrong with the distributed lethality model that we have to eliminate entirely for a surface ship.
Iranian frigates regularly engage US ships without fear now? News to me. Spending huge amounts of money on a class of ships with the justification ‘it will scare Iranian frigates’ seems pretty absurd to me, considering that existing ships can casually sink every Iranian frigate without breaking a sweat.
It would be a very short-sighted move–our enemies would immediately begin development on the red plastic peg.
According to Wikipedia, the US Navy has commissioned more than 70 Navy vessels since 1/1/2000 (to pick an arbitrary date) including:
34 Arleigh Burke destroyers
14 attack submarines
13 amphibious warfare ships (LPD, LHD, LHA)
8 littoral combat ships
2 aircraft carriers
1 Zumwalt-class destroyer (which seems to be what the article is calling for more of)
If that’s not enough to scare the shit out of Iranian frigates, I can’t imagine what would be. Certainly not a few more Zumwalts.
We’re working quite aggressively to add laser defenses and rail gun weapons to vessels, and our ships are quite large by world standards. I can’t noodle out what the author or the OP think we’re doing wrong, honestly.
No way. They’ve been decommissioned for about 25 years now, which is longer than they ever have been previously.
You’d have to start up God knows how many schools that are now closed to run this ships.
You’d have to gear up God knows how many maintenance programs on gear that is only on these ships.
And manpower is no longer free (it once was in the military). So manning these ships would be so much more costly than it ever was.
On the plus side, sinking these ships would be very difficult. A mission kill much less difficult of course. And the big plus on these ships now would be Naval Gun Fire Support (NGFS). But if you don’t think we’re going to land 8,000 Marines on an opposed landing, then these ships can’t do anything that can’t be done cheaper with a cruiser.
They are beautiful ships. But not cost effective for what they provide.
I suspect that most adversarial navies would find it significantly easier to sink / mission-kill an Iowa-class BB than a Nimitz-class CVN.
I was in SF when Uncle Ronnie wanted to bring back the really big ships of the Good Old Days.
Somebody suggested homeporting one of the (WWII) Iowa-class ships is SF.
We voted it down before the rest of the country realized the expense of the monstrosities:
5,000 sailors per ship.
The command center has armor 3 FEET thick! Which was impressive in 1943. By 1985, not so much.
Since we have a new generation who have no memory of that fiasco, see if you can find the USN’s attempt to get a “2 fer” of defending obsolete equipment and demonizing gays in the service.
Why do you think that? What is it about a BB that makes it “significantly easier” to sink than a CVN?
I think that the defensive capabilities of the BB is more impressive now than it was when built. The warhead of a surface to surface missile doesn’t compare to that of a 16 inch shell.
With current armament, I think a BB would be more difficult to sink now in many ways that it was in WWII.
But they were built to fight other BBs, with 18" or 16" shells. That weight of firepower doesn’t exist today. They are susceptible to mission kills yes. But I think they are hard to sink.
None of these arguments means that they should be brought back.
In that the point of a battleship is to get closer to the action, and the point of a carrier is to have its aircraft get closer to the action.
Out of curiosity, how much explosives do you think the typical anti-ship missile carries? In pounds or kilograms. You can guess if you want.
I have a pretty good idea I suppose. I wouldn’t have to guess. 
Well, four hits instead of five…
So considering that the USS Arizona was sunk by bombs that had roughly that much explosive power, why do you think that shells are the bigger threat?
What do you think the threat is to surface ships today? 500 pound bombs?
CVN’s are fast, WAY faster than a BB.
A Nimitz-class CVN benefits from all sorts of advances in radar, sonar, acoustic quieting techniques that make it both harder for the enemy to detect and better at detecting hostile ships / aircraft in its vicinity.
Nimitz-class CVN’s have much better counter-measures to combat modern anti-ship missiles and torpedoes.
They’re also quite a big bigger, which is it’s own advantage when it comes to soaking up damage, but they’ve also got more crew members available to do damage control. And Nimitz-class CVNs benefit in advancements in things like detecting fires and flooding onboard, to help damage control teams respond more effectively.
I can’t think of an advantage the BB has except for its armor. But it’s like a giant turtle: slow, practically blind (compared to modern warships), and fairly ill-equipped to fight off predators.
I think we are on the cusp of seeing antiship ballistic missiles becoming the predominant threat to surface ships.
We’d be better served with spending the money on LCS, which seem more flexible and agile, and you can have more of them thus you can deploy them to more places. If you buy a few heavily armored ships at great expense you are going to be strapped to deploy them to even all of the known hot spots out there…even if you have one per carrier group (which would cost a lot of money). In addition, the loss of a single LCS or even a few is not going to be anywhere near as costly as the loss of a single new BB class ship, even if we assume the new ships are going to be highly automated with much smaller crews. I’m not even sure what the mission would be…we don’t really need big guns for shore bombardment anymore, so at a guess you’d be talking about something that could add perhaps heavier anti-air to a carrier battle group. Cool as the new rail guns are I don’t see them having a ton of utility to our current force mix, and I think with modern weapons the heavily armored aspect is not going to have that much utility either, certainly not as a trade off to a carrier (i.e. as a target in the battle group to deflect fire from the carrier). I doubt one of the new BBs is going to be able to, from a cost effectiveness standpoint, soak up that much addition fire from the carrier to make it worth the price.
Don’t get me wrong…the old BBs were really cool. But today we just don’t need them from the perspective of cost to benefit. We get a lot more utility out of smaller, more agile ships we can deploy more of to more places than a few really big ships…of which role we already have the super carriers that fill the niche as the big hammer. Really, the Navy needs to be ramping up procurement on escort ships, since those are being run ragged, and things like LCS.
Well…you know, the Iowa’s could do 33 knots, right? I mean…that’s pretty quick for a large surface combatant. I don’t think they should be brought back, but even assuming this means we’d literally bring the original Iowa’s back from being museum pieces (which I doubt), they could keep up with a carrier task group. In reality, newer ones would be as fast as a CVN. They aren’t big slow turtles and haven’t been for a while. That’s not the real reason we shouldn’t bring them back.
If “Just the sight alone of the Iowa or New Jersey is enough to scare off some little Iranian frigates” then why don’t we just tow them out to off the coast of Iran and have them drop anchor? Or maybe put a battleship sized trolling motor on them and have them putter around with a minimum of crew?