March/April 2021 17THE
BADASS
BATTLE-
SHIPS
HALL OF
FAME
HMS DREADNOUGHT
The Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought,
the first truly modern battleship,
combined a single main gun battery,
steam-turbine propulsion, and
heavy armor into the most powerful
warship of its time. The world’s first
steam turbines gave her a top speed
of 25 knots, and a main battery of 10
12-inch guns and 27 smaller 12-
pounders made her the most deadly
warship afloat.USS IOWA
The four Iowa-class fast
battleships—Iowa, New Jersey,
Missouri, and Wisconsin—were
designed to quickly travel across
the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and
fight World War II in the enemy’s
backyard. They were the only
battleships fitted with a nuclear
weapon: the W19 artillery shell, with
an explosive yield equivalent to the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima.YAMATO
The Imperial Japanese Navy
warships Yamato and Musashi were
the largest battleships ever built.
The battlewagons, designed to make
Japan the leading battleship power
in the world, were each equipped
with nine 18-inch guns and displaced
a whopping 72,000 tons fully loaded.
Aircraft-delivered torpedoes and
bombs sunk both ships in the closing
TO months of World War II.
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the battleship. Battleships left shipyards for good
in 1944, and despite occasional returns to service,
the class is considered obsolete.
The last battleships built for the U.S. Navy, the
Iowa class, had a powerful battery of nine 16-inch
Mark 7 guns, but could only hit targets a maxi-
mum distance of 23.6 miles. The Iowa was also,
with the exception of a pair of seaplanes, compara-
tively blind and incapable of locating enemy ships
at ranges greater than the horizon. An aircraft car-
rier could fan out its airplanes hundreds of miles
in all directions searching for an enemy battle
f leet. Once that was identified, it could then send
its planes out to attack from the air in a devastat-
ing strike.
The Navy could base the SLRC on a new class of
battleships. (Let’s call it the Montana class, after
the class of battleships that were planned, but
never built.) Instead of the big, beefy battleships
of old, the Montana class might well be stealthy,
like the Zumwalt-class ships, retracting the gun
barrels within the ship’s deck when not in use. A
heavy belt of armor probably wouldn’t be neces-
sary, as the Montana wouldn’t engage in the sort
of titanic ship-vs.-ship battleship duels of the early
20th century. Alternatively, the Navy could choose
to put the guns on cheaper commercial hulls, like
the Mercy-class hospital ships.
A Montana-class ship might carry four SLRCcannons in two turrets of two cannons each. It
could carry Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles and
Phalanx close-in weapon systems for self-defense,
but would otherwise rely on cruiser and destroyer
escorts—and sheer distance—for protection.
Although the ship would want to reserve as much
internal volume as possible for cannon ammuni-
tion, the Navy could find the room for a few missile
silos, each carr ying a Tomahawk land attack cruise
missile. That might allow the Montana class to
conduct missile and gun attacks at the same time,
complicating the enemy’s defense plan.
The irony of a new type of battleship is that the
very weapon—big guns—that made it obsolete in
the face of aircraft could put it back at the top of the
heap again. In 1943, a battleship could only strike
targets at a maximum range of 20 nautical miles,
while the carrier could strike at up to 872 miles.
Now, a battleship could reach up to 1,000 nautical
miles while the F-35C, the seagoing version of the
Joint Strike Fighter, has a combat radius between
630 and 740 miles.
Could the battleship once again become a major
surface warship? If the SLRC actually works, it’s
possible. If the first test shot in 2023 is success-
ful, it will be the Pentagon’s advantage to examine
alternate deployment scenarios. And if not? Well,
no one counted on the battleship returning to ser-
vice anyway.