Love these kinds of discussions. thanks for posting. It makes sense that battleships just wouldnt be worth the effort in a modern conflict. But to take it a step further I could argue that when the shooting starts in an all out conflict, the same reasons battleships arent coming back will also be a big wake up call for the modern day aircraft carrier. big, slow, expensive, man power heavy, vulnerable to cheap anti ship missles are the same reasons the BB idea wont work. It would take only one lucky shot to get through the ageis umbrella to render a CAG out of operation. And i believe it’s more likely that in a massive missle swarm attack a lot more than one would get through. So, while everbody still wants one (india, china etc....) they are so valuable that you really cant afford to lose one in combat. In a china/taiwan shootout we’d have to park our’s east of taiwan and spend all of our resources just to protect them. Because its not like we can spit a new one out like we could back in 1945.
If i were designing a navy of the future (and woe to the nation that allowed me this job) rather than bringing back battleships, I would take the zumwalt concept even further and develop fleets of dozens of tiny low profile platforms that were modular depending on the mission. youd have a mix of ships and some would be loaded with various drones, some with missle pods (air or sea or land), amphib landing modules, command module etc...and the modules could be changed out depending on the event and or the mix needed for the next mission.
I’m by no means an expert so there may be better ideas already in the works nor am i probably the first person to come up with this type of concept but I just see the modern carrier as a brdige between the battleship days of old and whatever the future holds.
This kind of discussion shows the best of FReepers’ collective knowledge.