Are Battleships Obsolete - What you need to know: Alfred Thayer Mahan describes the capital ship - the core of any battle fleet - as a ship capable of punishing and exploiting peer naval forces. Although today's surface combatants deliver more aggressive strikes, the innate ability to punch is something that is lacking in today's light armored warships.
Warships have secrets. As insiders debate how to replenish the US Navy's fleet, sentimentalists plead for the return of the Iowa-class dreadnoughts. The idea of bringing back WWII veterans also seems silly. We can equip the old 1914 USS Texas with super weapons to destroy the Soviet Navy, or resurrect the sunken Imperial Japanese Navy Yamato super battleship for space service, or send the USS Missouri into battle in case of an alien threat. we are not talking about keeping it ready. Hawaiian Islands. Such suggestions are not just a whim.
Are Battleships Obsolete
Battleships built for the conflict with Japan in World War II were actually re-commissioned for the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War. He returned to the field for the last time in 1988. The Iowa class remained mothballed for nearly three decades after Korea (except for the USS New Jersey, which briefly returned to service during the Vietnam War). That's about how long fighters have been retired since the Cold War. History shows that they may come back one more time. Thus removed from their past life, it is highly doubtful that the operational return on investment will cover the costs, effort and human capital required to bring them back to life.
Should President Trump Bring Back The Battleship? — The Navalist
Numbers are deceiving. In 1988, it cost the US Navy $1.7 billion to commission four battleships during the Reagan Navy buildup. That's $878 million per hull in 2017. That figure suggests the Navy could upgrade two ships with firepower for the cost of one Earl Burke-class destroyer. A copy of Burke's latest model will set taxpayers back $1.9 billion, according to congressional budget figures. Two for the price of one: low, low price! Or better yet, the Navy could get two battleships for the cost of three littoral battleships—modern gunboats. Seems like a good deal all around.
But enormous practical difficulties work against reproducing horrors on the cheap, despite these superficially convincing numbers. First, the ships no longer belong to the US Navy. They are museums. New Jersey and Missouri were removed from the Navy list in the 1990s. Engineers were temporarily granted "reactivation" status in Iowa and Wisconsin, meaning they could hypothetically return to duty. But in 2006, they also hit the roller coaster. Of course, the US government can bring them back in times of national emergency, but dealing with the legal complications takes time and money in peacetime.
Second, chronological age is important. A common saying among battleship enthusiasts is that the Iowa is like a little old lady's car, an old car with low mileage on the odometer. A used car dealer praises its longevity and assures buyers of high mileage. It also makes intuitive sense. My old ship, the USS Wisconsin, accumulated fourteen years of steam time despite deployments to World War II, Korea, and Desert Storm. While the U.S. Navy expects fifty years of service life from aircraft carriers and forty years from cruisers and destroyers, retrofitted battleships look set to last for decades.
And it's true: the tough hulls of battleships can withstand the rigors of sea service. But what is their inner workings? The mechanical age tells only part of the story. If the Iowa class remained in continuous service with regular maintenance and upkeep, they could steam for decades. After all, the WWII USS Lexington served until 1991, the same year Iowa was retired. But they did not receive such treatment during the decades they spent sleeping. As a result, it was difficult to maintain battleships a quarter of a century ago. Sailors still had to remove spare parts from old warships. Machinists, welders, and ship fitters continued to replace parts that failed since the 1930s or 1940s.
Warships Are Evolving, But They Won't Go Away
The problem worsened over the next quarter century and more than a decade after the Navy stopped protecting ships and their interiors. Solving this problem is very expensive. There is an old joke among boaters that a boat is a hole in which the owner of the water throws money. A warship represents a huge hole in the water and eats up huge amounts of taxpayer dollars. If the US Navy can reactivate the Iowa for the Pittens, the cost of operating and maintaining them could be prohibitive. That's why they were closed in the 1990s, and time has done nothing to soften this unfortunate controversy.
Third, what about the big guns of the Iowa-class sport navy, capable of firing projectiles the equivalent of a VW bug over twenty miles? These are the unique weapons of warships and have no equal in today's fleet. Greater firepower could justify the cost of re-commissioning and maintenance of the ships. But firearms wear out after being fired. For decades, no one made replacement barrels for the 16-inch 50-caliber guns, and the spare parts inventory was scrapped or consigned to museums. This deficiency limits the warship's combat capabilities.
Apparently there is no safe ammunition to fire the battleship's big guns. We used vintage 16-inch rounds from the 1950s and powder in the 1980s and 1990s. Such missiles that still exist are 60 years old, and the US Navy is seeking to demilitarize and destroy them. Preparing to produce barrels and ammunition in small batches is a non-starter for defense companies. The Navy recently scrapped the advanced gun turrets on the destroyer USS Zumwalt because the cost had exceeded $800,000. It was simply an act of ordering some weapons for three classes of ships. Ammunition was simply not cheap. Modern Iowa is in a similar situation, if not more so.
Finally, it is unclear where the US Navy will find the human experience to operate the 16-inch gun turrets or the M-type Babcock and Wilcox boilers. No one has been trained in these systems since 1991, meaning the professionals who use and maintain them are, ahem, old and senior. As navies turn to electric drives, gas turbines and diesel engines to power their ships, steam engineers are in short supply. Older amphibious helicopter docks (LHDs) are steam-powered, but this fleet is also slowly being phased out as their steam-powered forebears are phased out as newer gas turbine-powered LHDs are added to the fleet.
Not Really A Cruiser, Not Really A Battleship, But Never A Battlecruiser: The Story Of The Us Navy's Alaska Class
Steam is not dead, but it is a technology of the past - like 16-inch guns. Technicians are scarce and dwindling, and battleship crews are in high demand. I'm among the youngest sailors ever to operate weapons and propulsion systems, and trust me, folks: you don't want the US Navy to take me back for twenty-six years in engineering and weapons. That is, teach young people how to operate old appliances themselves. In short, rebuilding human capital is as difficult as rebuilding the physical dimension after a long time. Human factors - all by themselves - can be a showcase for warship reactivation.
Battleships still have much to contribute to fleet design, just not as much as active surface combatants. Alfred Thayer Mahan describes the core of any battle fleet as a ship capable of seeking and using punitive measures against the navy. Although today's surface combatants deliver more aggressive strikes, the innate ability to punch is something that is lacking in today's light armored warships. Naval architects could do worse than delve into warship history and design philosophy to rediscover what it means to build a true capital ship. The US Navy would be good for their research.
James Holmes is a professor of strategy at the Naval War College and co-author of Red Star in the Pacific. The opinions expressed here are his alone. Project B was tested in July 1921 in the Chesapeake Bay. Aircraft of the First Brigade sank a captured German destroyer and then an armored light cruiser. Next in line was the German battleship Ostfriesland, which was considered "unsinkable" due to its wide division. After a day of 230- and 600-pound bombs being dropped by Navy, Marine, and Army aircraft, the battleship was left with a list of five degrees to port, three feet high. As it turned out, Ostfriesland was not sunk from the air.
The next day, five Martin NBS-1 bombers dropped 1,100-pound bombs on each German battleship, scoring three more hits and causing the ship to sink. NBS-1 bombers returned with new battleship-killing bombs. Three of the six bomb hits were powerful enough to tear through the hull plates. Ostfriesland returned twenty-two minutes after the attack
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