USS Wisconsin, en route to Earle, NJ Navy yard for stripping and ammo offloading. We happened to offload some ammo through the barrels on the way.
Posted on 04/15/2005 2:27:55 AM PDT by Zero Sum
"There is no weapon system in the world that comes even close to the visible symbol of enormous power represented by the battleship." -- Retired Gen. P.X. Kelly, USMC
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Those words of the former Marine commandant resonate with me. In 1969, gunfire from the battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) saved my rifle platoon in Vietnam. During her six months in-theater, the USS New Jersey's 16-inch guns were credited with saving more than 1,000 Marines' lives. The North Vietnamese so feared the ship that they cited her as a roadblock to the Paris peace talks. Our leaders, as they did so often in that war, made the wrong choice and sent her home. Now, 36 years later, Washington is poised to make another battleship blunder.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
Excellent point. If you want to project significant ground forces anywhere and keep them supplied for an extended period, you have to use ships. And if you don't have a Navy to protect those ships, you cannot project that power.
You're right. The Baltimores were heavy cruisers. I served aboard USS Chicago (CG-11), which was converted from a Baltimore class hull (When it was a Baltimore class cruiser, it was CA-136).
The Admirals who opposed Billy Mitchell had all sorts of reasonable-sounding arguments, too. Rumsfeld is at least trying to get the military ready to fight the wars of the future.
Yes, speed. An Iowa class BB can make 32 knots and cruise at over 20 knots. They were designed to keep up with fast carriers. Until the advent of nukes they were the among fastest, longest ranged ships in the world. Come to think of it, nukes or not, they still are!
What Col. North may not realize is that the USN no longer has the manpower to to crew these monsters. It takes at least 1200 sailors, bare minimum. You can crew 3-4 Aegis class cruisers with that.
Also there are some really cool things in the pipeline that make battleships look like the dinosaurs they are.
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/07/return-of-dreadnought-nearly-hundred.html
Mitchell's theories were only proved correct when it became possible to field enough aircraft on target to swamp the target's defenses. Sinking ships with carrier planes, strategic bombing and vertical envelopment only worked because the technology evolved to produce planes in enormous quantities, the means to get them where they were needed, and to supply them in the field. Wihthout a navy to secure the sea lanes to obtain and move materials, none of it would have happened.
Those events happened despite the submarine and the airplane, or have we forgotten the Battle of the Atlantic or the fact the US Navy sunk 60% of the Japanese merchant fleet, effectively shutting down Japanese industry?
Air power is a great thing, but it doesn't get every job done.
Today's ships are much more capable of extended operations and with underway replenishment (UNREP) it is possible to keep a ship at sea indefinately. That capability, by the way, also requires surface ships to move the cargoes and protect them.
Also, I want to remind people that the ageof the great carrier on carrier battles lasted little more than two and half years, from Pearl Harbor to the battle of the Phillipine sea (1941-1944). The last major carrier vs carrier battle had empty Japanese carriers being used as bait at Leyte Gulf.
Thanks Bud, my bad...
The Iowa Class Battleship is the ultimat projection of power.. yes, the Air Craft Carrier has replaced it as the pre-eminant ship.. but nothing puts the fear of God into anyone like a full broadside from the 16"ers.
And nothing turns pitch black night into brightest day than the same thing.
Yes, the days of battleships dogging it out against each other on the open ocean died during WWII, but there is a reason every time we go to war, the Iowa classes keep getting called back out.
USS Wisconsin, en route to Earle, NJ Navy yard for stripping and ammo offloading. We happened to offload some ammo through the barrels on the way.
With it's airwing, a carrier can certainly protect itself better than a battleship depending on nothing more than CIWS. Battleships would require escorts as well.
Carriers cannot defend themselves adequately against submarines, again requiring escorts. A BB can screen a carrier from modern torpedoes, taking several hits which would severely hamper a carrier's ability to operate (not necessarily sink it -- it's not easy to sink carriers with torpedoes nowadays).
And who will screen the battleship, which has no ASW capabilities at all? The same assets that screen the carrier - destroyers with helicopters and our own submarines. In addition, the carrier will carry its own ASW helicopters and support centers to coordinate them. The battleship will not.
Carriers can engage in gunfire duels with much better effect than today's escorts armed with 5" or 76mm guns.
Assuming you meant battleships, the last surface gunfire dual on the high seas predates the last amphibious assault of a defended beach. If anything on the surface comes close enough to a carrier to shoot at it, then something went seriously wrong.
Battleships have almost the same range as a carrier air wing thanks to Tomahawk missiles.
You can say the same about destroyers, frigates, and submarines. All newer platforms, more flexible, and less expensive to run than battleships.
The ships still complement each other rather nicely, I think, although whether the Iowas will ever be reactivated again is an open question.
I'm sorry, but I believe battleships are a relic from several wars ago, and have no place in the modern navy.
I's also like to point out thatwhen I was a Squid, there was a little something called REFORGER, which were xercises designed to simulate getting men and equipment across the Atlantic in the event the Soviets poured through Fulda Gap.
Many of the troops (in fact almost all of them) were moved by plane. The tanks, trucks, supplies, engineer equipment, and three-thousand other things too heavy for a plane, were moved by sea. The point of the execises was to move the boots, beans and bullets through a North Atlantic that would be swamped with upwards of 300 Soviet sunbmarines.
You can't do any of that without surface ships.
My Step-Father was stationed on the Wisconsin briefly in the early 90s.... Still have video made and edited by crew at the time of her launching tomohawks and full on broadsiding during the first Gulf War.... All of course to the background music of AC/DC's THUNDERSTRUCK.
For all the arguments against the battleship, I for one am dog against them being scrapped.... Frankly I'd like to see a new class designed and built from the ground up. Yes, there is little doubt that in a huge multinational world conflict where shipping lanes etc are being fought over, the battleship is past its time... However knowing that other than perhaps China, there is no eminent threat around the globe for that sort of situation, the Battleship Provided the ultimate "MUSCLE".
When despot dictator from some third world country walks out on his balcony and sees an Iowa Class Cruising off his coast, a remote drone flying over his head will help that boat put a "SLUG" in his livingroom up to 20 miles inland and there's not a damn thing he can do about it... It puts your "mind" right damn quickly.
I never want to see the US Navy get to the point that some little despot literally could "wear em out" like Argentina nearly did over the Faulklin's with britain. We are THE naval power, and POWER militarily is just as much about politics as is about blowing stuff up. NOTHING, and I do mean NOTHING has the power of an Iowa Class.
I was an AO2 aboard the Enterprise, Midway and Eisenhower in my 8 years in the Navy. I worked on f-14's, A-6's and S-3's. Trust me, if there were enough planes, or missiles in the air, F-14's and CIWS would not have gotten them all. An F-14 is capable of attack six targets at a time, with Phoenix missiles, which have gone away for good.
And ASW is bitch. It's harder to defend against submarines that it is aircraft.
CIWS is only good out to 1.5 or so nautical miles.
Aegis is capable of tracking upwards of 200 targets at a time, but the typical Aegis-equipped ship can only attack 92 of them, not counting the time taken for reloading. Nor does it take into account that several ships might defend against the same target.
In the scenarios we trained for, it was not unusual to have the "enemy" launch enough ordinance to swamp those defenses.
The battleships were designed and deployed long ago as strategic platforms. Gun boat dipolats. The nuclear era gave us a new and powerful strategic tool. The era of gunboat dipolmacy is over. Smaller tactical vessles although vunerable, certainly accomplish the our Naval Maritime Mission's. Present and future.
I beg to differ, Cmdr.
There is a place for a ship sporting heavy caliber guns. Whether or not this has to be a battleship, is open for debate. It's only because we still have battleships that they've even been part of the discussion.
It has nothing to do with gunboat diplomacy, it's all about having a capability that no one else has, or which might be a better solution to a particular problem.
Marines and soldiers reuiring heavy, accurate fire support, at a moment's notice is a problem, even if we haven't hit a hostile beach since Inchon. Aircraft and helicopters are great, but they cannot go and do everything.
Cut pork and social engineering programs instead, and fund defense appropriately!
The wars of the future will not involve moving large numbers of American soldiers overseas. They will be fought more along the lines of drilling a laser-beam sized hole through the offending mullah's head from an orbiting weapons platform, or taking out his ground forces with drone aircraft equipped with neutron bombs. When required, occupation of enemy territory will be managed by the forces of nations friendly to the US located near the conflict zone - i.e., (hypothetically) using Indian troops with US air and space support to subdue and occupy a hostile Pakistan. Transporting US forces overseas for Iraq/Afghanistan style occupations will come to be seen as a high-risk, unsustainable tactic.
I still say America's next major war is going to be fought right here in the US, as our enemies continue the attempt to use 9/11-style asymmetrical warfare against us. Mohammed Atta's example was just too tempting to the villains of the world, who dream of achieving that level of success with so little cost.
Hmmm...and 140,000 grunts in Iraq would beg to differ...So would the guys trudging through the Stone Age in Afghanistan..
The only war fought completely by hi-tech means was Bosnia, and we only won that by depriving the Serbs of flush toilets and television. We did not get anyone on the ground to trade shots with anyone.
You don;t win wars by targeting one guy -- you win them by destroying his weapons, his armies and his means to continue armed struggle. In short, you annihiliate him. And you can't do that with robots, laser beams or laptop computers -- you do it with overwhelming firepower and by holding his territory.
Those things require Navies, massive Armies and the means to keep them in the field long enough to do the job. Push-button warfare is a joke that will never be realized.
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