I think you would have a lot to overcome trying to put Battleships back in the mix,still I like the idea of having the big guys around.

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/it-time-bring-back-the-battleships-13734

They keep pulling them into service, so there must still be a use. It would be better to keep them modern than keep updating after the need arises.
As drones get more and more common, and presumably smaller, maybe we'll see a new ship combining, more of a "Battlecarrier"? Tougher, wouldn't need as much of an escort, more mobile than a full carrier, could contribute to a fight directly instead of just by air.
With modern missiles and cannons, how far inland could a ship have influence these days? Without launching any bombers or drones, nothing that could be shot down. How much of North Korea could we cover with a fleet of ships instead of aircraft?

Always thought with the missile warfare the battleships evolved into the Boomer submarines.

Submarines are scary and hidden, battleships and aircraft carriers are intimidating and in your face.
Showing my ignorance I'm sure, but how hard is it to reload missiles in a sub vs supply runs to a ship? The inventory of a large ship would be larger too.
I'm biased though, I love ships.
We visited the Alabama a few years ago. Simply massive.

WOW -- I heard the shells were the size of an old Volkswagon.

WC

Weight-wise, yes. More than a VW Beetle's weight, actually

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armament_of_the_Iowa-class_battleship


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Beetle
Curb weight of a 1966 Beetle: "Curb weight 800�840 kg (1,760�1,850 lb)[8]"

Found 3 16" shells on the sea bed from a sunken ammunition supply boat, we called in the navy clearance divers and they blew them up the water spout went a couple of hundred feet in the air, they shells were in about 18 to 20 meters of water.
The shells were at least as big as me or so it seemed under water

The old battleships might still have a place with longer-range kinetic energy railguns. Add advanced shipborne cruise missiles and it would be a potent force.

The LCS was a great idea poorly executed. A Plug-n-Play ship. If you were to add a decent sized aft deck to battleship so that it could be used as a forward base of operations for special forces, that would only make it more versatile.

We can do so much with carriers, but they are quite vulnerable to 'ship-killer' missiles.

Well, we should keep them modernized, and when the aliens attack just strap some engines on them and let them fly. (Space Battleship Yamato reference btw, not that crappy Battleship movie).

The concept of a battleship, maximum firepower per ton, could still have a use today. Anybody remember the Arsenal Ship concept the US Navy toyed with a while back? Something like that. In terms of putting the Iowa class back in service with upgraded weapons, I don't think it would be feasible. Armor designed to shrug off hits from large diameter high caliber rounds fired from over the horizon is just added displacement, weight, and complexity. Nowadays, it would just make such a ship more vulnerable in terms of limiting top speed (and I doubt you could squeeze bigger boilers into the engine rooms) and limiting overall range. You'd also be hard pressed to be able to retrofit the existing turrets, fire control directors, radars, and support equipment for railguns, not to mention added electrical capacity would be extremely difficult. Best thing would be to build an entirely new class of ship, keep up, designed to carry a ridiculous number of VLS tubes, and maybe railguns. Maybe.

The problem with battleships is the task of protecting them.

A carrier is hard enough to protect, a battleship + a carrier is an even bigger chore and dilutes the resources of the group.

In recent times most people seem to have accepted that naval battles will be fought in littoral waters, that means mines, mobile mines, and sneaky diesel electric submarines which can routinely penetrate carrier groups and take shots at the high value targets on the inside without much risk to themselves.

So while battleships definitely have a lot of utility left in them as far as a combat platform, they also create a lot of problems as far as protecting them from attack is concerned.

They also require enormous crews and logistic support which is an annual expense that only increases - most navies are trying to reduce crew expenses.

Exactly. Vulnerability to the submarine threat and maintenance/personnel expense are what makes battleships a rather dubious (but assuredly very costly) investment; the same goes, in principle, for the carrier (but at least the carrier's air fleet has a longer range). If all that you want is a seaborne artillery platform a cruiser will do (the logic behind the Zumwalts is sound, it's the execution that's somewhat lacking).

The idea to combine a lot of sensors, weapons and other energy-hungry systems into one heavy ship doesn't seem more clever than spreading these resources into three or four separate ships, each of which can survive and go off somewhere on their own...

+1

This pretty much sums up my thoughts as well on the viability of a BB in today's military world.

Also, BBs were universally slower than carriers while not being all that much smaller. Target is almost as big but less likely to evade.




The Jedi Master

But they'd have one asset that none of our other surface ships do - the ability to SURVIVE hits by mines, torpedos, anti-ship missiles, etc, and continue to fight. A small boat full of explosives simply sitting next to the Cole did enough damage that it couldn't even move under its own power. Kamikazes hitting BBs did nothing but wipe out quad 40mm mounts, and that was from burning avgas.

How many surface vessels can keep up with a carrier at flank speed? Even if they can, I imagine fuel consumption goes through the ceiling.

I'd imagine a BB with the #2 & #3 turrets removed, with #2 replaced by an enormous VLS cell and #3 removed to clear the deck abaft the superstructure for flight ops. Keep the TLAMs, Sea Sparrows, and CIWS. While we most likely won't be conducting shore bombardment to prep for an amphibious landing or engaging in over-the-horizon battles with other capital ships, the ability to place an extremely heavy amount of fire on a target, even with only 3 16" guns left, at up to 50 miles with subcaliber rounds, could come in very handy. A few salvos of 16" shells would put more HE on target than the entire basic load for a Zumwalt's 155mm popgun.

I think you are seriously underestimating the destructive power of modern torpedoes and anti-ship missiles. Even if a single torpedo hit might not directly sink a battleship (it still has a good chance of doing so) it will assuredly be a mission kill. Likewise anti-ship missiles (they get as large as school buses). There's still no reliable counter-missile asset (and if there were, you could mount it on a smaller ship just as well).
BBs are protected ONLY (and sometimes rather marginally) against artillery. But artillery is no longer the relevant threat.

The Cole... I think it fell victim to insufficient alertness. Maybe bigger armor would have protected it, but then again you can't armor the entire fleet; terrorists would then simply pick other ships that are more vulnerable, like supply ships (and they might arguably do more harm to a flotilla's overall combat capability that way).

An American Oliver Hazard Perry class Frigate, smaller than anything currently in the Navy's inventory aside from LCS's, took two hits from Iraqi Exocet missiles. The crew was able to save the ship, and she returned to combat within three years, and deployed several more times before she was decommissioned.

Another Perry-class frigate ran over an Iranian sea mine. The crew saved the ship, and she was just decommissioned very recently.

The size of the bomb used to attack the USS Cole was about the same size as the warhead of conventional submarine-launched torpedoes.

Yes, it put them out of service, but typical American naval doctrine doesn't support the idea of solo operations the vast majority of the time- unless you're an attack sub.

I'm at work and can't find all the links now, but read up about all the old Spruance-class destroyers that were sunk as targets after they were decommissioned, and how many missiles/ gun rounds/ bombs/ torpedoes it took to sink them.

Torpedo bulges, voids, composite materials in the hull and superstructure, and improved internal layouts and more advanced damage control methods make modern ships a lot more survivable. I agree with Ssnake that more steel isn't necessarily going to make a ship more survivable. Especially when that extra steel costs top speed, maneuverability, and range.

As for escort vessels keeping up with a carrier, if they're really, really in a hurry to get someplace, the rest of the fleet can be topped up from the carrier's own fuel stores, and are on a very regular basis. Of course, the real solution to that problem would be to start building CGN's (nuclear powered cruisers) again, but I think it'll be a cold day downstairs before that happens.

Yes, but it was an above surface detonation. Underwater detonations first create a shockwave to lift the ship from the keel up, and then the center of the ship falls into the gas bubble of the detonation whereas bow and stern still have buoyancy. It's this double buckling that does the damage, not a hole in the ship's hull (although that can still be effective, if it's a large compartment behind, like the engine room).


Even more so, why put all the eggs into the proverbial single basket of a battleship?
Once that the enemy achieves a mission kill on that single point of failure you have taken out pretty much every component - be it sensor or effector - concentrated on that single vessel. It seems much more sensible to distribute it all over a larger number of smaller ships which may individually be more vulnerable but are substantially cheaper to build and to man and which give you more flexibility as far as regional coverage and dry dock times are concerned. How many battleships do you think you'll need? One for every carrier group? Or only four, so you can sustain one operation involving one BB while one is in dock, one is performing training, and one is in transit or supporting a smaller/short operation?


I'm with you, but those shipbuilding techniques can be applied to smaller ships just as well.

CGN, that is the answer.


The Ohio class SSBN replacement is supposed to displace about 20k ton, so we should design a 15k-20k ton nuclear cruiser that could use the same basic propulsion system as the new SSBN in order to share costs between the SSBN / CGN.

Armed with ~200 VLS, twin 8" guns (or rail guns if that pans out) and appropriate anti-sub and anti-missile systems for self protection.