Suppose a foreign power wanted to play chicken with the US Navy.
If the ship the foreign power was trying to play chicken had a hull as think as the USS Iowa class (BB-61), unless it is a supertanker, the other side would lose.
I am not so sure that builing ships with thicker hulls is a bad idea. It was reported in one of the threads I listed that some of our cruisers have to be retired because the hulls have become razor thin...
But as someone posted on this thread, you would have to deal with 'rust' (as well as barnacles) if you keep 60 year ships in service. I guess some of the World War II era ships will be approaching 80 years since they were launched...
Modern naval combat basically precludes ramming as a viable tactic. A vessel with a hull as thick as the Iowas would simply be taken out long before ramming distance by a swarm of Silkworms or Exocets or Sunburns in pop-up, top down attack mode. These shipkillers are much cheaper than a BB and sometimes are nuclear tipped - which is why the BBs were all retired even though they had recently been overhauled and could have served for many more years; modern naval combat means that they were just horribly outmatched and vulnerable expensive targets.
FYI: https://www.wired.com/2011/08/china-builds-warships/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_22_missile_boat
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-navys-greatest-fear-chinas-killer-missile-swarms-19984
China has built a fleet of these and similar small, fast, disposable capital-ship-killer-missile carrying boats. So far they have 83 of them, each carrying eight shipkillers. Reports are that China intends to eventually build a few *hundred* of them, each with an over-the-horizon datalinked launch capability. Thick hulls are no defense against a 1600 missile swarm that all have multiple modes of attack that end in a top-down attack where a ship’s armor is by necessity the thinnest. The answer to Western-style point defense systems is a saturation attack and the Chinese have definitely figured that one out.