Ollie is living in the past. A portion of a carrier air wing can put more tonnage on target with more accuracy than both battleships can.
Like I mentioned there's this sort of weenish emotional fascination with 16" shells; people don't realize how much more accurate and how much of a bigger boom (if you want) aircraft-dropped bombs are.
This subject comes up a couple times a month in the USEnet naval newsgroup and gets shot down every time.
Actually, no, it can't. The planes have to allow each other to attack, which lowers the amount of ordinance they can deliver compared to a battleship. It would take a battleship between 9 and 20 minutes, depending on how many barrels were firing, to deliver 210 tons of ordinance. A Nimitz class carrier would take 12 hours.
With advances in targeting, munitions delivered from the air are more accurate than in the past, but many of the same advances can and have been applied to weapons systems on battleships.
In addition, as North pointed out, the planes can't work under all weather conditions. The ships can. The proposed 5" round that North mentions cannot be as effective against reinforced structures as the 16" round, which in its AP form is designed to cut through 20" of reinforced concrete (IIRC -- am I right on this, Junior?). The issue is not as cut and dried as some posters here would portray it.
For instance, I would say both posted examples of battleships being sunk in the past are not applicable to today. The Bismark was hunted down by combined forces including battleships, an unfortunate battle cruiser, cruisers, and an aircraft carrier. They all combined to kill it, which only goes to show that any ship can be overwhelmed. Yamato (and it's sister ship, Musashi), were sunk by planes bearing weapons designed to kill a battleship.
Care to name the modern weapon designed to pierce the kind of armor carried by battleships? There aren't any, because a weapon that would pierce armor would cut right through a modern destroyer without exploding. The weapons that crippled all the examples of destroyers and frigates posted here would bounce off a battleship's armor. And attempting to place an armor-piercing head on a missle without completely redesigning it would -- to use a technical term -- throw it out of whack.
On the other hand, Junior (a Navy man himself), makes a good point about manning requirements. But that same problem, including the need for escorts, also applies to the Navy's carriers. A battleship's compliment is in the range of 1,500 to 2,000 men, with the lower number more applicable to the last configurations of the Iowa class. A modern carrier's compliment is in the area of 5,000.
I believe many of the technological problems involved -- the sixty year old bits of the battleships -- can be largely overcome, but that will also require money.
So, as I said, I don't think it's cut and dried. It's worthy of additional study.
The concept of a Dreadnought type ship dominating the seas are over. But there is still a place for a well armored weapons platform, loaded with todays mordern weapons along with a large gun or 2 for bombbardments, shells are cheaper then cruise missles.