Photo courtesy of the US Navy
- US President Donald Trump said he’s thinking about bringing back US Navy battleships.
- Battleships were heavily armored, gun-wielding ships that dominated naval fights for decades.
- Aircraft carriers, naval aviation, and missiles made battleships increasingly unnecessary.
US President Donald Trump suggested that he’s considering bringing back US Navy battleships, vessels that were retired decades ago.
Battleships were heavily armed naval powerhouses built to slug it out with other warships. During the World Wars, they dominated the seas, but by the end of the Cold War, these once mighty warships were all but obsolete.
Speaking at a high-profile summit with top US military leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia on Tuesday morning, Trump said battleships are on the table.
“It’s something we’re actually considering,” he said, “the concept of battleship, nice six-inch side, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. Starts melting as the missile’s about two miles away. No, those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore.”
Large, heavily armored battleships, brimming with powerful deck guns, were the apex of naval power for much of the 20th century when gun battles dominated naval fights. Each 16-inch gun could fire a round that weighed around 2,000 pounds. They continued to prove useful for decades after, with some later classes even carrying missiles. They brought tremendous firepower to a fight, but their time came to an end in the early 1990s, when the last of the Navy’s battleships was decommissioned.
While talking about the strengths of the battleship, Trump referenced the retired first-in-class USS Iowa (BB-61), which is currently a museum in Los Angeles, as well as the 1954 World War II naval warfare documentary “Victory at Sea.”
“I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them, and man, nothing was gonna stop them,” he said. “Some people would say, ‘No, that’s old technology,’ I don’t know, I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns.”
Trump said that bullets are less expensive than missiles. Battleships like the Iowa-class stopped being built in the 1940s and were all retired after the first Gulf War, the last time that the heavy guns of any US battleship were fired in anger.
Battleships became obsolete as aircraft carriers, submarines, and missiles proved deadlier and more capable at long range, while their substantial costs and crews made them inefficient. Furthermore, modern naval strategy didn’t have a role for big-gun warships the way it did in the past.
The eight remaining US battleships are all now museum ships located around the country.
In potential future combat scenarios, like a war with China, American military officials and planners expect that naval forces would be under heavy missile fire while facing new surface and undersea threats. They say that having a range of countermeasures for missiles and drones is key to survivability. The battleship, at least in its original design, isn’t well-suited for that kind of combat.
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