Add to that only one of the Exocets that hit the USS Stark actually exploded; the first one to impact the ship failed to detonate.
The laser system (AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapon System or XN-1 LaWS) IS operational, though only on a limited basis, since 2014, IIRC…and there are plans to start wider distribution of the system. You wouldn’t really use a rail gun (which isn’t operational yet, as you say) for missile defense anyway. Since most of the ships in the fleet have some missile defense though it’s not that much of a stretch to think that a modern BB would have them as well…so, not exactly pie in the sky vaporware. A modern BB would be as well protected as a supercarrier wrt missile defense. I’d say from a survivability perspective it’s pretty high, since it would undoubtedly have SOME sort of modern composite armor on it plus the defenses of a battle group.
The real question is really does the Navy need such a platform? Is there a requirement and a mission that justifies the need for massed batteries of whatever on a single ship, or would it be better to have several ships (at a cheaper cost presumably) that could do the same thing and distribute the firepower (and risk)? All this talk about ‘slow’ battleships that would be vulnerable targets with huge crews really detracts from the discussion, since it seems to me a lot of people aren’t wrapping their heads around the fact that we aren’t going to bring those old museum pieces back…and a new, modern BB is going to be a totally different beast than an Iowa (which wasn’t particularly slow, wasn’t particularly vulnerable once it had modern anti-missile systems and other upgrades) and…well, it did require a pretty big crew, to be sure. 
Not anywhere near the energy needed to down an AShM, nor intended to do so. Even demonstrating such a capability is a future thing, again up to the imagination the practical capability*, which gives a lot of freedom for internet chatter, but still asking how a missile, especially a 50+ yr old one, could possibly be successful against an as yet non-existent defensive capability is funny, on purpose or not.
But yes as I said, a couple of times now, the all-in discussion of ships v the missile threat and re-activating BB’s is not the same. The former is a serious question with a lot of wrinkles to it, certainly not wiped off the table by as yet non-existent anti-AShM systems, but not definitely decided to the point of abandoning surface ships for all roles either. It simply has unknowns to it (real capabilities of targeting systems of the missiles, soft kill countermeasures/anti-countermeasures, as well as hard kill capabilities in real combat).
Whereas reactivating or building new BB’s is simply a ridiculous idea.
*including for instance in atmospheric conditions which absorb infrared light but don’t block a radar seeker on a missile. Even demonstrating shooting down a typical (for 30 yrs+) Mach 2.5 sea skimmer with a laser in ideal test conditions…hasn’t happened nor near happening.
But my point is that other ships have a role to play in a non-nuclear conflict. Carriers send out planes armed with missiles, torpedoes, bombs, and including nukes that can attack enemies hundreds of miles away. Smaller ships carry missiles that outrange guns. Submarines carry torpedoes and nukes.
In an non-nuclear conflict, those ships have a role to play, even if the enemy has some serious anti-ship defenses. What role does the battleship play? It can’t get within gun range of the enemy coast, because it is within range of all sorts of coastal defenses. Any plausible enemy navy that could plausibly be chewed to bits by the BB’s guns is going to be sunk by planes, subs, and destroyers armed with missiles, and those enemy ships are going to be fighting back with missiles and torpedoes. The battle will be over before the BB can fire a shot. Sure, it can carry missiles just like a DD. But then why not just build a DD?
And my only point about the nukes is that there’s no plausible scenario where the BB’s mission is so important that it’s worth risking the ship that doesn’t involve WWIII, in which case it’s all over anyway.
In games there are certain tactics or resources known as “winmores”. That is, if you’re winning they help you win faster, but if you’re not winning they don’t help you come from behind to win. And a BB is this sort of weapon. If you’ve already won the fight then sure, park the BB on the coast and shell those dug-in goatherds in the caves. But if you don’t have complete and total naval and air supremacy then you don’t dare to use it, and if you do then why are you bothering in the first place?
Sure, carriers will be just as vulnerable as the BB, and probably more so. But at least the carrier has a mission–launch planes that can attack and interdict the enemy over the horizon. Sure, the carriers are vulnerable to missiles, and so the hope is the carrier’s air wing will take out the missile or torpedo platforms before the enemy detects the carrier and sends it to the bottom.
Thank you for that.
A version of that turns up in a Poul Anderson novel, by the way (not on Earth).
And as I’ve said repeatedly, I think the only mission that I could foresee the BBs filling is that of NGFS, and the flight along the littorals. If that happens, the BB will be able to fight because air superiorly has been established. Without that no landing and no need for the BB.
I’m just curious where exactly we’re going to be conducting a WWII style opposed landing anytime soon.
Obviously this can’t happen against China or Russia, because they have so much defense in depth that any plausible Marine beach landing would be wiped off the map.
The only plausible scenario of Marines storming the beaches is where the opposition on the beach is a few guys on a technical. And in that case you don’t need a battleship, you need an F/A-18 to drop a bomb on those guys so the marines can just stroll onto the beach.
This is my point, any case where the battleship would help a landing is one where you’ve already got the resources to essentially stroll onto the beach unopposed. Any case where you would wish to hell you had that BB backing you up with its guns is one where you can’t plausibly imagine us actually doing, because it would be insanely risky. That sort of bloody Normandy/Iwo Jima assault was possible on WWII, but it’s not happening in 2017. Again, unless it’s WWIII. Good luck keeping WWIII non-nuclear.
I will admit a certain longing to see a thousand-foot ship with four on-board A1B reactors carving through the Pacific.
I was answering a question on whether a missile the size of a plane, necessary to disable a BB, would be able to get near a BB.
Former U.S. Navy submarine officer here…
After WWII, one thing that has altered the equation regarding the survivability of any single ship is the modern submarine with modern homing torpedoes.
To answer Trinopus’s question: yes, exploding beneath the keel of a ship is exactly how torpedoes are designed to work. What has changed is that a slow-moving WWII submarine would work to get itself in position to launch a spread of torpedoes at an enemy ship, hoping to score at least one hit.
If a modern submarine were trying to take out a large capital ship (such as a battleship or aircraft carrier), it would likely launch several (3-4) torpedoes, and all of them would likely score hits. No ship can survive that many large explosions beneath its keel. Note that (per Wikipedia) the Mark-48 ADCAP used by the USN has a 650-lb high-explosive warhead.
So how do you protect a large capital ship (such as an aircraft carrier or a battleship) against modern enemy submarines? You have to surround the carrier with a ring of defenses provided by escorts, and the best defense against an enemy submarine is a friendly submarine (or two). This is how you end up with a carrier battle group.
These escorts are a good use of resources to protect an aircraft carrier, which provides you with a mobile airbase that can travel the world’s oceans.
But would they be a good use of resources to protect a battleship? What does a battleship provide that the escorts themselves do not? The battleship’s large guns are much shorter range and are less accurate than modern missiles. About the only mission left for a battleship is shore bombardment, and that is a fairly limited role.
But you put it specifically in terms of defensive systems, lasers or railguns, which don’t exist as operational anti-AShM systems, and moreover in reference to an example of a missile which entered service 50 yrs ago.
Anyway to expand the question/answer to the real world as of now, could big missiles get near BB’s, and hit them? Yes, definitely. Would they certainly do so? Not necessarily depending what’s assumed for the overall scenario, with pretty much infinite variation (which missiles, launched from where by whom with what skill, what air defense ships or a/c defending the BB, what offensive capability other than the BB to preemptively neutralize the launch platforms of the missiles, susceptiblity of the missile seekers to electronic countermeasures and decoys, etc.) But a big gun ship has to operate relatively close to shore, tending to stack the odds in favor of especially land launched AShM’s, which don’t have as easy to detect and destroy launch platforms like surface ships or a/c. Although preemptively destroying missile armed submarines is also a highly questionable assumption, and an enemy isn’t going to make it easy to destroy his missile carrying a/c either (nor likely do the defense the favor of relying on his own vulnerable surface ships to be the sole missile carriers).
To go back to a previous example, would the USN risk ships close to shore against a system like ‘Bastion’ (integrated Russian system of coast defense radars and P-800 Mach 2.5 missiles) in a limited war? Very doubtful IMO. And a whole big effort by other platforms has to be made to destroy the coast defense missiles first, one has to ask again what’s the real point of ship which has to get very close to shore? That’s in addition to the correct points others made about extreme unlikelihood of using ships like BB’s in a general war against a peer opponent.
And all this is aside from the fact that the USN (let alone anyone else) doesn’t ‘have the ships to activate’ anymore in any practical sense. So embark on design and construction of a whole new generation of such ships, when the USN can barely maintain a critical mass of production of carriers, DD type ships and submarines, ships it really needs? It’s entirely absurd.
- I’d just reiterate that ship v antiship weapon in general is harder to make a broad conclusion about. As you surely know, homing torpedoes were extensively used during WWII by German subs from 1943. They had a limited effect because Allied ships soon introduced towed decoys effective against their seekers. OTOH the US Mk.24 homing torpedo, dropped by a/c v German subs with some success from 1943, and a version of the same weapon launched by submarines with some success late in the war against Japanese surface escorts, was never countered by Axis decoys. It also had a fairly limited effect due to its limited performance, but the point is that during as well as since WWII the battle of countermeasure/counter-countermeasure has made it difficult to predict the effectiveness of weapons depending on electronics.
So, would a peer have effective countermeasures v the Mk.48’s seeker or influence fuse? That’s certainly impossible to say using unclassified information, but moreover it’s probably impossible to know even with all information known by anyone. It would only be fully known by seeing large scale combat. Same token for US soft kill anti-torpedo systems. Although large USN ships are now beginning to be fitted with hard kill anti-torpedo torpedoes. So, it resembles the issue of ships v AShM. The weapons pose a grave threat, no question. But how actually devastating is very difficult to generalize (as in previous post, against who/what exactly in which particular scenario?) as the decades go by without large scale naval combat to observe real results.
- But here I completely agree. What capability is being gained to put more and new resources into big surface ships there’s a very real chance will prove hopelessly vulnerable to anywhere-near-peer antiship weapons? With carriers there’s a lot to gain, a very flexible and broad long range capability, though a lot to lose. With BB’s there might be slightly less to lose but a whole lot less to gain (again in the real world where it isn’t just reactivating ‘existing’ ships anymore, in any practical sense).
The grave threat to US sea power concentrated on carriers needs to be hedged with systems not vulnerable to AShM/AShBM’s and less vulnerable to submarine torpedoes namely, more capability in US submarines and also in long range a/c (like for example the move to arm B-1’s with the new LRASM long range AShM). Not some new boondoggle of expensive surface ships basically just as vulnerable as carriers but with much more limited offensive capability than carriers.
This is the key point that battleship fans fail to address. There isn’t any useful mission that the BB can do that can’t already be done as well or better and much cheaper by either a carrier or by smaller ships. People talking about the possibility of making a battleship fail to come up with any reasonable role for them, but don’t seem to think this is at all important in justifying a hugely expensive new military system. Yes, they look cool, but what are they actually going to add to the nave beyond looking cool?
What is the purpose of a battleship? Or any other warship? They all are mobile weapons platforms. Which modern weapon system(s) would require a vessel the size of a battleship to transport and deploy it?
The new weapons systems like high powered long range lasers and stuff like rail guns DO actually require a very large power budget, which means they need a very large ship. Assuming you want to have a lot of them on a single platform. That’s the only justification I can see that is realistic at all…and, to me at least it’s not enough of a justification to bring them back (or, more realistically, create a new class).
I’d already been mulling over the reasons I don’t find them practical when others in this thread put it better – the type of conflict in which it would be needed wouldn’t be a world in which I’d want to live. Not necessarily nuclear, but even a long-term conflict in which an armored ship with weapons with medium-term reach (i.e. beyond the horizon but shorter than long-range missiles), in which we expend so much materiel that we need the hypothetical cost savings from guided/boosted shells as well as protection from missile hits means that we’re in some sort of very crappy long term grind.
Another point on survivability vs. heavy anti-ship missiles:
Ships can effectively hide in the gigantic ocean. An opponent must locate the target before they launch any anti-ship cruise or ballistic missiles. AFAIK, we are not yet in the age where Chinese and Russian satellites can track US ships in real-time.
A carrier can be close enough to a target to launch air strikes, while also being far enough away that their location can’t be easily pinpointed. To spot the carrier, an opponent will have to get a ship, sub, or aircraft past all the defensive screens of a carrier battle group.
A battleship, on the other hand, has to be close enough to shore that they can’t hide. Even when they can shoot over the horizon with a rail gun or rocket-assisted projectile, they will betray their location with the first shot. Counter-battery radar can immediately triangulate the location of the battleship, likely with enough precision to target anti-ship missiles.
Maybe the barrels themselves, but the turrets are some of the most heavily armored parts of the ship.
For example, the USS Maryland got hit by a kamikaze carrying a 500 lb bomb on the #3 turret at Okinawa. Turret was still usable afterward.
Battleships are remarkably resilient- multiple battleships were hit multiple times by kamikaze (the closest analogue to ASMs I can think of) without crippling damage, often within the same day. Many got hit by torpedoes with the same results.
The big point is that the problem they were devised to solve is long gone; there’s no reason whatsoever for a ship with those capabilities anymore. Why not build monitors like the British did in WWII for shore bombardment? There’s no need for the whole battleship speed, armor, etc… in that case. And for fighting other ships, it’s almost certainly more effective to have a faster unarmored ship with good point defenses and electronic warfare suites than a big heavily armored ship with really close ranged armaments.
They were obsolete in 1941, but nobody nailed the coffin shut until the war was over.
Most of your points were relevant up to a couple of years ago, the only real objective that the Iowa class could be justified, as is, without going beyond the Reagan mods, would be to interdict those chinese atolls that are under construction.
Depending on how well the Plan is going to fortify them, a BB would be the only class of ships, other than the iLA and Virginia class subs, that could approach them.
Something of note:
With the recent action of the US firing 59 Tomahawk missiles against Syria, I looked on the map and wondered if a Battleship could have shelled that airport?
After looking at the map in a little more detail, the airbase is roughly 50 miles from the coast, so even if the battleship was as close to the coast as possible, it could not even come close to shelling that airport with the maximum gun range of around 20 miles.
