I beg to differ.  Someone starts popping off nine 16" guns in my direction, I might get lucky.

Someone plants an AGM-114 right where I am, I don't need luck, I need Jesus, Mohammed, the Ahura Mazda, Ishvara, Odin, and/or a healthy dose of enthusiastic ancestors, depending on my faith.

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During WW II the Italian battleship Roma was sunk by a wire guided missile.  Battleships are very expensive and you can't put heavy armor everywhere aboardship.

ETA:  Watervliet Arsenal still has the machinery to produce 16" guns.  Mothballed, they have the machines turned on once a month just to keep them in ready status.

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Big and slow in an age of stealth and speed - Is someone looking for a perfect new trillion dollar boondoggle/shipbuilding subsidy?

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Nuclear subs full of cruise missiles make way, way more sense.

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No.

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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.

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Because thishttp://idata.over-blog.com/4/22/09/08/USA/Entreprises-US/Ratheon/RIM-162-ESSM/RIM-162-Evolved_Sea_Sparrow_missile_USS_Carl_Vinson_-CVN_70.jpg





And this


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/Phalanx_CIWS_-_ID_070521-N-5067K-092.jpg


are today's armor.
 

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No.



Modern warfare isn't done with naval cannon. It's done with cruise missiles that do pop-up maneuvers at terminal and drop down on the the thin 2-3" thick top decks with a few thousand pounds of high explosive in a missile 25 feet long weighing hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds moving at hundreds of miles an hour. One modern missile would destroy a battleship stem to stern ... and throw the mechanical computers used to plot those guns out of calibration.

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No.

Modern warfare isn't done with naval cannon. It's done with cruise missiles that do pop-up maneuvers at terminal and drop down on the the thin 2-3" thick top decks with a few thousand pounds of high explosive in a missile 25 feet long weighing hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds moving at hundreds of miles an hour. One modern missile would destroy a battleship stem to stern ... and throw the mechanical computers used to plot those guns out of calibration.

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No.

Modern warfare isn't done with naval cannon. It's done with cruise missiles that do pop-up maneuvers at terminal and drop down on the the thin 2-3" thick top decks with a few thousand pounds of high explosive in a missile 25 feet long weighing hundreds and sometimes thousands of pounds moving at hundreds of miles an hour. One modern missile would destroy a battleship stem to stern ... and throw the mechanical computers used to plot those guns out of calibration.

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No.

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In the age of missiles something big and slow doesn't do you much. When was the last time two navies even opened up on each other with cannons? WWII would be my guess.

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In the age of missiles something big and slow doesn't do you much. When was the last time two navies even opened up on each other with cannons? WWII would be my guess.

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In the age of missiles something big and slow doesn't do you much. When was the last time two navies even opened up on each other with cannons? WWII would be my guess.

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More like Dubya Dubya One.  Arfcom, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there were ANY battleship-to-battleship encounters in WWII.  It was all aircraft vs. ships.

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More like Dubya Dubya One.  Arfcom, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there were ANY battleship-to-battleship encounters in WWII.  It was all aircraft vs. ships.

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There were multiple battleship versus battleship encounters in World War II.

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In the age of missiles something big and slow doesn't do you much. When was the last time two navies even opened up on each other with cannons? WWII would be my guess.

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10 harpoons couldnt sink Uss Guam a 19k ton amphibus assault ship.

Do you know what it takes ? Yamato took 19 bomb and 17 torpedos. Musashi took similar punishment. Kirishimi took 22 16 inch shellscand 42 five inch hits. Bismark took 400 hits of various calibers. Tirpiz took 3 12k lb tall boys.

It takes alot to sink a large modern warship. A couple of missles will wound it but not sink it.

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10 harpoons couldnt sink Uss Guam a 19k ton amphibus assault ship.

Do you know what it takes ? Yamato took 19 bomb and 17 torpedos. Musashi took similar punishment. Kirishimi took 22 16 inch shellscand 42 five inch hits. Bismark took 400 hits of various calibers. Tirpiz took 3 12k lb tall boys.

It takes alot to sink a large modern warship. A couple of missles will wound it but not sink it.

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I don't think they should bring back battleships, per se, but a much more robust zumwalt that included bigger guns, more automation, and a smaller crew would be sweet. We have limited sustained bombardment capabilities in the Navy these days. I'd like to see a 1000lb class warhead and some cool new range extending tech. Cruise missiles are great, but they are also very expensive one use only tech. Guns can pound away for days on end. Few things more demoralizing to an enemy than near-constant shelling

Also, the super zum would be more able to take hits. It's all cool to say "it can do x, y, and z so it doesn't get hit!", but in war, shit happens and your shit will always get hit. It's inevitable. So yeah, give it great defenses, but also give it good old fashioned armor, and lots of it. Especially since we will soon be in an era in which swarms of drones will likely use smallish weapons. If you're going to be survivable, you gotta be able to take hits.

As far as subs go, they don't magically make surface ships obsolete. Not until they have working super cvitating torpedoes anyway...

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Serious question: why did the Argies have such (relative) success with their Exocets during the Falklands?  Did the Brits put so much faith in their air defense capabilities that they decided not to armor their ships?