Hell, we could do what the Iranian’s did…we could make a really big wooden mock-up of a battleship on a barge and park that off their coast. Then we could watch with amusement while the Iranian Navy tries and fails to sink the wooden mock up (until they put explosives on it for the big finale). 
You know what LCS stands for, right? “Little Crappy Ship.”
They aren’t the future of seapower, that’s for sure.
What do you think of the new “frigate” plans?
A CVN is about the same speed as the BB, or perhaps 5 knots faster at most. And when you are fighting off missiles going over 1,000 KM/H, a few knots doesn’t matter. Speed is way overrated today.
Perhaps you could outline the advanced sonar on USS Nimitz. I’d be interested in any particulars you have.
I think the countermeasures that Nimitz had in 1988 were comparable with that of Iowa in 1988.
Bigger can make you easier to hit as well. The compliment of these ships is virtually the same. And there are no advancements in fire or flooding detection.
You’re just making stuff up.
I disagree, though I’ve heard that joke about the acronym several times. But ok…what do you think the Navy should be building? Or do you think they shouldn’t be building anything? Just curious.
Ok, I’m totally down with that…though I’d go with a Kaiju.
My layman’s understanding is that there are these things called helicopters, that are deployed aboard aircraft carriers, that either launch these things called sonobouys or use dipping sonar to detect submarines.
Maybe they were similar in 1988, but that wasn’t a claim I made. Wikipedia says:
So you’ve got CIWS and Stingers on the Iowas vs …
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Would you really rather be on a BB than a CVN with a volley of torpedoes / a swarm of Russian or Chinese anti-ship missiles inbound? I wouldn’t.
Battleships are an anachronism. They were already outdated back in WWII. The days when two ships would line up against each other and shoot cannonballs back and forth are long gone. And that’s essentially the tactics a battleship is built around.
The modern reality of warfare is that if you can see a target, you can hit a target. And if you can hit a target, you can destroy a target.
Battleships are nothing but a single big target. You’re a lot better off if you take all the weapons you have on a battleship and split them up among a dozen destroyers. Now you have the same offensive power but spread out over twelve targets instead of one. And you can split up twelve destroyers and send them off to cover three different oceans; try doing that with one battleship.
I’ve never once heard of the embarked aviation assets on a carrier refereed to as sonar.
It’s also comparing apples to oranges to take the latest and greatest, most modern capabilities of a carrier today, and compare it to what was on a ship 30 years ago.
I guess we’ll ignore the manning, speed and damage control issues you brought up earlier.
I’ll stay with my earlier assessment. A BB in the fleet today, with the capabilities that would reasonably be put on it, has a better chance of survival than a carrier.
A battleship has three feet of armor, and it’s true that that’s impressive… but a modern aircraft carrier has armor about 1000 miles thick.
You’re repeating your assessment, but not supporting it. Tell me why battleships can withstand ASCMs with very large warheads, or future ASBMs at all.
Even if the hull could survive (which it most likely couldn’t) you’d end up with a floating wreck that would be of no use.
While the idea of brining back battleships is dumb, I have to point out that one of your statements is wrong and one is irrelevant:
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Battleships are *by definition *not slow. A true battleship, is, by definition, a fleet-fast ship. A heavily armored and gunned ship that is slow is a monitor. Iowa-class battleships in particular were remarkably fast and could make 32-35 knots depending on load, as fast as a Nimitz-class carrier. That was faster than other battleships but all were at least around 27-28 knots.
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If your battleship lacks good sensor capability, you can, after all, add that. A battleship is plenty large and spacious enough to find a place for a modern sensor suite.
Your third point, however, is unassailable. A battleship is basically a naval tank; it exists to carry humongous guns, guns bigger than any army can use on land. You COULD outfit a battleship with any number of missile weapons, retrofitting it to carry SM-3s, Harpoons, Tomahawks, anything you like, but why the hell would you? What’s the point when you can mount the same things on a ship a fifth the size, with a tenth the crew?
In the rather specific case of, say, launching an amphibious invasion on a small island or coastal area over which you have total air and naval supremacy it would be rather convenient to have battleships to rake the area with naval gunfire, and indeed the Allies found battleships most useful for killing Germans and Japanese who made the error of being within ten miles of the water, but that’s an awfully specific thing to keep such an expensive thing around for.
spifflog’s claim that abattleship is more survivable than an aircraft carrier is baffling to me. Battleships weren’t safer than carriers in World War II, much less today.
That may arguably be true but it’s irrelevant. Both a battleship and a carrier are huge targets that require a lot of assets to protect them. But a carrier has a reason for being there; it’s a platform you can launch aircraft off of. A battleship has no similar purpose to justify the huge amount of defensive resources it would consume. Any job that a battleship can do can be done by other smaller ships with less cost and less risk.
Not likely to happen.
Consider the possibilities
- Reactive the museum ships. There are 7 of them (not just the 4 IOWA’s) as Museum ships from the WW2 builds. This does not include the Texas which is an old WW1 ship and is constantly in repair just to keep it from sinking.
Considering that the other 3 WW2 ships (NC, Massachusetts, Alabama) have been museum ships since the 1960s, it would take a lot of work to get them even close to fighting shape.
This leaves the 4 IOWA’s as the potential candidates. For 70+ year old ships, they are in surprisingly good shape and would be the best to reactivate and as when they were reactivated before, they had to use parts from the other museum ships.
However, the US is currently in the process of scrapping ALL their remaining 16 inch shells so unless these shells were stopped from scrapping and remanufactured, that is a significant problem.
Then why not replace the guns with some missile launchers. This was actually done in the late 80s with their reactivation with the Tomahawk missiles replacing the 5 inch guns. However, the ships were designed with these 16 inch guns and turrets as the primary weapon so replacing the turrets with some short of missile would in effect change them to a Guided Missile cruiser on a 70 year old hull and would be awkward to say the least.
Something was brought up about their armor. Something that many people forget about these battleships is that they had All or None Armor (AON). The Armor protects the Vidal parts but does not cover the entire ship. Works pretty good against incoming shells from another ship but not so good against missiles or torpedoes that can target the unarmored or lesser armored sections of the ship.
Of course, the whole idea is not to get hit which is why all these electronic and other counter measures are used which certainly could be upgraded.
The next problem is they require a LARGE number of staff, almost as much as the Aircraft carrier. Despite the common thinking that there are huge numbers of people in the Navy, there are actually quite short staffed with the people needed to operate these old ships and would struggle to crew them.
Yes, they can do close to 32 knots (They were designed as 33 knot ships) but in actuality, the best speed they could get was around 32 knots in service and going at that speed would drain their fuel rapidly which is why they generally operated around 20 knots. In a sprint, they could outrun the nuclear powered carriers but the carriers would leave them in their wake in the long haul.
Getting back to the point, if they were reactivated, they would have no shells to fire or they would be a hybrid guided missile carrier.
- What about building new ships ?
One of the problems with building new ships is the foundries that built the 16" guns in the first place are gone and would have to be rebuild (or steal them from the museum ships)
Then there is the problem with no shells available
The next problem is the 12 inch thick armor plate used in the IOWA’s is not made anymore anywhere in the USA. (Not sure about elsewhere in the world).
Thinner thicknesses of armor plate is still being built but then your are essentially getting a guided missile cruiser.
Much more can be read at the excellent battleship vs battleship website
A battleship would be able to survive more hits, from missiles or anything else. The armor isn’t nothing. But that’s just because most modern AShMs aren’t designed to hit battleships. If anyone built a new battleship then their enemies will just build bigger missiles.
The point of a battleship is that it can carry ginormous guns, bigger than any other ship.
Ginormous guns means longer range, which means a battleship could destroy smaller cruisers and such at long range where the cruiser could not respond. Blub blub blub.
Of course those big guns make it a target, so to protect the guns we add a bunch of armor. Now the only thing that can defeat a battleship is another battleship. A battleship always wins against smaller ships, because of those guns.
You had experiments like battlecruisers, which were ships that mounted battleship size guns but without the armor. The idea was they could sink cruisers at long range, and if they went up against a true battleship they’d run away. Didn’t work so well, because the point of a naval battle is that you can’t run away, if you can just run away why are you having the battle in the first place. So you need a ship that can actually fight.
But it turns out that the theory behind battleships–that they can defeat any smaller ship through superior range and armor–is totally false.
Battleships can be sunk by torpedoes and bombs and missiles, which can be delivered by submarines, small boats, and aircraft. If a battleship can lob shells at distances that smaller ships can’t match, a carrier can launch airplanes that can drop bombs and torpedoes and missiles at much longer range that those guns.
Remember that the point of a battleship is to carry those massive cannons to the fight. If the massive cannons are no longer the weapon that wins the battle, why are you carrying them to the fight? If you don’t have the massive guns, you don’t need a battleship. Missiles can be carried by small ships. You’re better off with 10 small ships that carry 100 missiles each than one giant ship that carries 1000 missiles. The missiles don’t need a massive ship to carry them to the battle. They don’t even need a ship, an airplane or a cruise missile will also work.
So a battleship is useless. The weapons it carries aren’t more effective than the weapons carried by other platforms, it is not more survivable than other platforms, it does not fulfill a function that cannot be done better by other types of platforms. So it is obsolete in naval warfare.
Yeah, it may seem like if we could use cheap shells to bombard nearshore enemy positions instead of expensive smart bombs we’d save a lot of money. But you can’t just look at the cost of the munition. You have to look at the total cost of delivering that shell. And that cost includes building, manning, and maintaining a fricking battleship. The bullet might be cheap but the gun might as well be made of solid gold. So much for your savings.
And exactly how many heavily fortified enemy beachheads are we supposed to be amphibiously assaulting in the future? If we’re fighting the Russians or the Chinese, we can’t risk sending a battleship anywhere near detection range. Or are we bombarding irregular shaheeds holed up in caves somewhere? If the point is to put a certain amount of high explosives at a particular spot on the earth’s surface, there are a lot better ways to accomplish that goal that building a gigantic floating palace whose only mission is shore bombardment against enemies that have absolutely no anti-ship capability.
If the enemy are irregulars, then building multibillion dollar warships that are useless for any other purpose other than bombing them if they get withing a couple miles of the coast is ridiculous overkill. If the enemy is a proper military, then the so-called battleship has to be kept far far away from the battle, because it can be hit by the enemy at ranges far greater than the battleship’s guns. The battleship is like a guy who brings a knife to a gunfight. Is the knife completely useless? No, it’s not completely useless. But if you could equip 10 guys with guns for the cost of equipping one guy with a really really really cool knife, which makes the most sense?
Battleships are not suitable for modern warfare. One word - missiles.
Modern anti-ship missiles can already travel at speeds of up to Mach 3, only a few meters above the sea, and maneuver before striking. They have a range of hundreds of miles, they can be land or sea based, and they can carry up to 200-300kg of high explosive.
**They are only going to keep getting better and better. **
Basically, there is no defense against them.
But that applies to any ship, not just BB. I think the useful life of CV’s on the other hand is also limited to the first time someone uses one of these missiles against it.