Quoted:
Good grief.  Fully read the linked article OP.

Can you imagine the costs involved in all that nonsense?  I suspect it might end up a respectable fraction of the total GDP.


But let's ignore that for a moment, in fact, let's ignore a whole bunch of stuff, and think on a little thought experiment, with numbers admittedly yanked out of my behind, because there's really no baseline in reality to get really good figures from.

Let's pretend that someone, somewhere, comes up with a revolutionary design for a modern battleship.  This thing's got armor, active and passive defense systems, a good new gun system for naval gunfire support, good missile capacity, and the tech and electronic warfare suites needed to employ those missiles for everything possible, BMD, ASW, AAD, ASuW, land attack, everything.  Let's figure this thing, which you know is going to have be pretty darn expensive, manages to do everything, and is equivalent to, oh, let's say 12 DDGs.  That's right, this thing can handle the job of a dozen DDGs, and somehow, through some magic of accounting, let's say it actually manages to only cost what 6 DDGs would.

So, there we go, we got us a battleship.

Now, how many do we need?  

Ya gotta figure we'll be needing one on each coast, right?  So there's 2.  And we're probably gonna need one in the Med or the Persian Gulf area, and there's the Indian Ocean, so there's another 2.  And we're probably gonna want at least one more for unknown contingencies, so let's make it 5 in total.  5 battleships in operation at any one time.  Now, since ships don't have warp drive, we gotta account for travel times to wherever each ship is to be deployed, and we also have to figure in the maintenance and refit schedules, along with periodic complete overhauls, so we're really gonna need 3 of these for each one we want deployed, so we're probably gonna need 15 of these battleships.  

So there we go, we've got 15 battleships, with 5 deployed at any given time.  Which is great until we need to address some emergency, or if we get into a fight with someone and lose one---because losing one wouldn't be like losing a DDG---remember, we've got far fewer of these things.

But for the cost of that, we could have 90 DDGs (which you might note is 28 more than we actually have,) which can be deployed and used in a much more flexible fashion.

So no, it is not time to bring back the battleships, even if all we look at is cost and flexibility, and ignore all the other stuff which has been hashed out here before by the actual naval personnel on this board with far more experience and knowledge than I, some of whom will probably poke some holes in what I just wrote as well.