Will they really bring back the battleship?

Great Debates
41

If you stick a battleship and a carrier right next to each other as part of the same fleet, the battleship is going to be more survivable than a carrier. But if they’re part of the same fleet, a patrol boat is going to be more survivable than either. All of the protection, in that case, is coming from the carrier.

On the other hand, if you build two fleets, one with a battleship at its center and the other with a carrier at its center, then the carrier fleet is going to be much safer than the battleship fleet.

42

Looking at Battleship losses in WW2: I am including sinking where the ship was returned to action after salvage.

**Atlantic/Med

Royal Oak*; sunk at her moorings by U-Boat
Barham: U-Boat
Bismarck: Sunk by Naval gunfire having been damaged by aircraft
Scharnhost: Sunk by Duke of York’s gunfire.
Hood:Sunk by gunfire from Bismarck
Tirpitz: Sunk by heavy bombs dropped by Lancaster bombers.
Roma: Sunk by German air launched PGM’s
Conte di Cavour: Sunk by British aircraft at Taranto Harbour;
*Caio Duilio *: sunk by British aircraft, raised and repaired.
Littorio: Sunk by British aircraft, raised and repaired.

Pacific/Far East
Arizona: Sunk by aircraft at Pearl Harbor
*Oklahoma *: Sunk by aircraft at Pearl Harbor
West Virginia: Sunk by aircraft at Pearl Harbor, raised and repaired
California: Sunk by aircraft at Pearl Harbor, raised and repaired
Aashi: Sunk by US Submarine
Hiei: Crippled by Naval gunfire (cruisers no less!) and sunk when under tow after being attacked by land and carrier based aircraft.
Kirishima: Sunk after being crippled by gunfire from Washington

43

Damn Board ate half the post but here are the rest
Prince of Wales: Sunk by land based aircraft off Singapore
Repulse:Sunk by land based aircraft off Singapore
*Fuso: Sunk by USN BB’s at Lyete
Yamashiro: Sunk by USN BB’s at Lyete
Kongo: Sunk by USN Submarine
Musashi: Sunk by air attack from USN carriers
Yamato: Sunk by massed air attack from USN Carrier based aircraft

MISSED in** Atlantic/Med** in above post
Queen Elizabeth: Sunk by Italian frogmen at Alexandria harbour. Raised and repaired.
Valiant: Sunk by Italian frogmen at Alexandria harbour. Raised and repaired.

44

Surprisingly, air attack seems to be the least easy way to kill Battleships. Of the list above, 8 were sunk in harbour by air attack. Two were only partially destroyed by air attack;.
Only the* Musashi* was destroyed by air attack in a fleet engagement. Every other ship sunk by air attack in open Ocean was travelling alone (Roma) or overwhelmed with no nearby friendly airpower (Force Z and Yamato).

Roma was sunk by the precursors of modern AShM’s, and was about as modern as the Iowas are.

On the other hand in the Med and the Pacific, battleships armed with large AAA suits managed to be fairly resistant to air attacks. And, Kamakazis (also basically AShM) struck multiple ships *(Mississippi, Texas, California, Maryland, Missouri, Colorado *and Missouri and did little damage.

Submarines were real killers though.

45

Clearly battleships are vital; how better to defend half a million homeless, a 3rd world healthcare system, is it $20 trillion of real debt? decades of underfunded infrastructure, a society where the political choice is between Wall St and topping up the swamp and national institutions that quite can’t work out if they’re just racist or practice apartheid.

46

All weapons systems are tools. And all tools are designed for a specific task, or set of tasks.

Just as a craftsperson or mechanic chooses what tools to own, based on anticipated functions and costs, so too a nation chooses weapons systems with the same parameters.

Every tool has its reason for being, and its inherent limitations. Because of that, all tool users who deal with more than a single instance of needing tools, will arrange to have a lot of different tools on hand, rather than spending all their money on just one, no matter how powerful it may be. The greatest hammer ever made, wont help you a damn bit if you are confronted by a screw.

All of that, is by way of saying that it MIGHT be a good idea to have ONE OR TWO of a certain kind of warship, but not a whole fleet of them. Battleships in particular were only more or less accidentally still useful after the end of WW1.

A good thing to look at as a part of thinking about this kind of decision, is the lessons that strategists had to learn the hard way about the intersection of massed infantry and tanks. It seemed at first, that having a movable artillery piece who’s crew was impervious to sharpshooters and machine guns, would be the king of the battlefield. But then it was discovered that a tank unaccompanied by infantry, couldn’t defend itself from intelligent attack by small, properly equipped infantry units. On the other hand, if all your army had was small properly equipped infantry units, and your opponent showed up with armored air support of the right kind and mix, you’d lose.

And so on. Military weapons strategists make the best educated guesses they can, as to what scenarios they are likely to have to deal with, and select the “tools” they hope will do the trick. In the event, it’s common for them to be wrong, not because they are all that lousy at guessing, but because the nature of the potential enemies is always in flux.

47

I can think of some that don’t.

48

I should probably be more familiar with them, but as I understand it, it is basically adding more weapons systems onto the seaframe that would have been swapped out in various mission packages. I’m not clear that there’s anything actually being done about the survivability issues (nor am I clear that anything could be done, really). My main takeaway is that the Navy isn’t really serious about adding substantial capability to a small surface combatant. Instead, the Navy will just basically acknowledge that the LCS/frigate is only intended for low-threat environments, and if war breaks out, they will run far far away.

But on a bigger picture, I think the Navy has become fixated or obsessed with building more ships. The idea of suspending LCS/frigate production to see if we are building the right ship seems to be viewed as a crazytown idea in the Navy. I’m not sure I agree with that.

I’m watching very closely on how the Flight III DDG-51s are going to go. It is going to be a very extensive upgrade to the current Flight IIAs, and there’s a chance things could go very wrong on the first few ships, but the advantages are substantial. A tested platform that we know can be built. A much, much better radar. Gobs more power to prepare for directed energy weapons in the next couple decades. Two shipyards that can build the exact same ship to encourage competition and drive down costs.

Plus, I’m totally on board with subs and carriers – even though some of the criticisms people have of the future of carriers are well worth taking seriously.

Actually, that’s the worst possible idea. Generally you need a few of any warship to insure that one can be deployed somewhere in the world at a certain time, with a trained crew and without the ship being in maintenance. The main reason the US has as many carriers as we do is that roughly a third of them are in maintenance at any particular time, and another third are getting the needed training to be ready to deploy next.

This is the reason why the Russians having one carrier is a big joke – it’s pointless to count on it being deployed anywhere when you need it. (Add to this point that the ship sucks, too.)

49

The Navy has in recent years stopped building the Zumwalt and Seawolf vessels, so clearly they ARE willing to abandoin a shipbuilding program if the costs are going off the rails, at least.

50

The Seawolf was truncated like what, 25 years ago? And the Zumwalt is probably a special case in that the program was such a disaster that I’m not sure they had any choice. And they probably should have stopped building the first ship when the problems became so massive, but instead they decided to build a couple more after that.

51

How does that compare to US destroyers taking on Japanese cruisers and battleships so that jeep carriers could escape at Samar?

52

I think the LCS is the jeep carrier in that scenario.

53

Ah. Thanks.

54

Except for various point defense weapons like Phalanx, Goalkeeper, etc… as well as all the various medium and long range AA weapons carried by most ships.

In addition, HE isn’t going to do a whole lot vs a battleship, no matter how much you throw at it- they’re armored against armor-piercing shells, and HE shells or missiles aren’t typically going to do a whole lot.

I mean, a Harpoon missile, just to use a familiar example, isn’t going to penetrate a full foot of armor if it was to hit horizontally. Vertically, it might penetrate the 1.25" of the main deck, but isn’t liable to continue on through the 4" of the second deck, or the additional armor around engineering.

Modern missiles are engineered to take out modern ships, just like battleships were engineered to take out other battleships, and would struggle with the ranges involved in modern warfare. But they’d be hard to kill for much the same reasons.

55

[QUOTE=bump]
In addition, HE isn’t going to do a whole lot vs a battleship, no matter how much you throw at it- they’re armored against armor-piercing shells, and HE shells or missiles aren’t typically going to do a whole lot.

[/QUOTE]

:dubious:. The Fritz X(300 kg HE warhead) caused the* Roma* to blow up and basically ended *Warspite’*s service.

56

The Arizona wasnt ready for combat. The doors werent shut, and a luck hit got a ammo bunker.

Not to mention the Arizona was launched in *1915.
*

57

All that stuff could easily be mounted on a BB.

58

You almost certainly would, in fact. What you would most likely end up with is a scaled up Zumwalt, perhaps with rail gun batteries and a whole shit load of anti-missile/anti-air and other defenses. The trouble is, how much would it really add to a carrier task groups defensive capabilities for the cost? Certainly it would add to it, but would it add enough from a cost to benefit perspective? Or would it be better to just add several additional smaller, cheaper combatants to the mix instead?

In the end, the role of a modern BB is different than in the past. We don’t need a ship with big guns, we need ships that are either specialized into niche roles in a carrier task group or can operate (and be risked) alone or in smaller groups. The role in the task group as defense and support of the carrier doesn’t require such a large capital investment and ship, and you aren’t going to risk something that expensive in an independent command or smaller flotilla. So I’m not seeing the utility for ANY of the roles the USN actually needs to fill right now, when cheaper ships can be built and deployed in larger numbers in a more flexible fashion…and would be able to be risked.

59

That it was caught by surprise is a fair point. But it doesn’t that a dozen battleships were sunk by aircraft in WWII, which is the fundamental point.

I’ve thought for several minutes what you might think this has to do with anything, and I still have no idea.

The average age of Arleigh Burke destroyers is about 17 years old, not 26 as in the Arizona’s case. Does this have some sort of relevance to you?

60

My guess is not sure but I would bet dollars to dimes a battleship can lob shells a LOT longer than a missile ship could throw missiles. In WWII they would shoot for many hours non-stop.

Also, the cost of each battleship shell is something like $30,000/each compared to $3,000,000/missile.

In short, a battleship can stay in the action a lot longer than most any other ship.

As others have noted though there is no good use for them anymore and they are super expensive to operate.

Battleships are best as artillery support for beach landings. If you have a LOT of those to do (like in WWII) then they make sense. They also had the most extensive hospital facilities afloat short of a dedicated hospital ship (which I think we only have one or two of now) and were floating machine shops able to whip up a wide variety of replacement parts on board.

None of that is particularly useful today though to justify such a ship.