The Best Point in the Great 2025 Battleship Battle

heavy metal floats

As the regulars know, my love of the naval gun is unmatched. Not just the ones we should have had.

That is why I’ve enjoyed the tempest of the last few weeks about “bringing back battleships” that I fully credit to our friend John Konrad, with a little help recently from President Trump.

As for me, in the end I am trending towards a rather cold analysis of the situation. We are well past the point of reactivating the IOWA Class BB for a whole host of reasons. I won’t summarize them here, they are too numerous.

I also don’t think we can build new ones, even if there were the money and will to so so. To be blunt, we would first have to build a foundry to make the barrels. Nothing in industry has this ability to create them. Sure, it could be done, but when you put the cost/benefit up on the white board and balance that off Executive Branch and Legislative Branch support, it fades like an early morning summer fog.

I would be game for doing an interim step, but I’m afraid that it will wind up like the CG(X) debacle. We do have the old MK-71 design that could at least bring the 8” naval gun back. I could see modifying whatever the DDG(X) hull winds up being to have a run of CAG-3 class double-ended 8” gun guided missile heavy cruisers. Wouldn’t be cheap, but it would bring the gun…but…and here is the fine point.

One of the best serious responses to the latest battleship discussion is by our friend James Holmes over at The National Interest.

In it he brought up a point that applies to all of the warships navies are producing today. From the Falklands Island War to the warships hit in the waters of the Middle East in the last few decades, we’ve all seen it. There is something that battleships, cruisers, and other warships of previous generations—never very far removed in years from war at sea experience—considered essential in any warship, be it wooden are steel: armor.

In the process of praising battleships, Trump singled out something eerie in US fleet design. Aircraft carriers are encased in thick armor, but no surface combatant in the fleet boasts the hulking, battleship-like construction necessary to absorb punishment from enemy missile- and gunfire. Destroyer, cruiser, and littoral-combat-ship hulls are lightly armored in the extreme. Some, as Trump observed, are built entirely of aluminum. Absent that passive form of defense—the resiliency to take a hit and fight on—surface combatants depend on active defenses such as guided missiles and a meager arsenal of guns. They have to prevent taking a hit because they may not survive one.

This being the case, a wisecrack from Winston Churchill rings even truer for the US Navy today than it did in his day at the Admiralty, over a century ago. Churchill contended that it was commonplace for the untutored to liken duels between ironclad ships to duels between armored medieval knights. Knights had ample protection from swords and lances, as well as the ability to mete out punishment using them. Offense and defense were in balance. But Churchill maintained that it was a fallacy to think of a 20th-century naval battle “as if it were two men in armor striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two eggshells striking each other with hammers.” Even in Churchill’s time, the balance at sea had come to favor offense—lopsidedly.

And those were armored ships built with protection as well as firepower and speed in mind. Modern surface combatants fall well short of the standard for capital ships set by sea-power sage Alfred Thayer Mahan around the same time Churchill proffered his jest. Quoth Mahan, “The backbone and real power of any navy are the vessels which, by due proportion of defensive and offensive powers, are capable of taking and giving hard knocks.” To live up to the Mahanian standard, in other words, capital ships must be able to withstand as well as dish out damage in high-seas battles against peer ships-of-the-line. Battleship design assumed—realistically, given the nature of warfare—that capital ships would take hits in action and must have built-in resiliency so they could keep up the fight.

Mahan and Churchill would find contemporary US fleet design—featuring no genuine capital ships—eerie. Things are haunting by their absence.

He’s spot on. We’ve traded robustness for affordability. Battlemindedness for efficiency.

Everyone has. As the Moskva showed in the Black Sea a few years ago, even the greatest of ships have become one-hit-not-so-wonders.

All that being said, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. The U.S. Navy as maintained an autistic-like focus on survivability and damage control more than most other nations. That is in a large part driving the changes to the FREMM design based CONSTELLATION Class FFG.

So, we’ve got that going for us.