Did Carriers Make Battleships Obsolete?

In this episode we're about carriers and battleships.

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The views and opinions expressed in this video are those of the content creator only and may not reflect the views and opinions of the Battleship New Jersey Museum & Memorial, the Home Port Alliance for the USS New Jersey, Inc., its staff, crew, or others. The research presented herein represents the most up-to-date scholarship available to us at the time of filming, but our understanding of the past is constantly evolving. This video is made for entertainment purposes only.

[xaero]

"...while working on my 1:1 Scale battleship..." he always finds a way to rub it in lol

[Stang]

As a former carrier sailor, I agree with your assessment. These two classes of ships have very different roles and capabilities that are compliementary to each other.

[jamesklee]

Echoing what a lot of other commenters are saying here: more so than a particular vessel type, I think the fact that destructive capacity _far_ outpaces our ability to engineer armor to withstand it did the battleship in. In my opinion carriers just happened to be (and still are) in a better position to deliver said destruction at longer ranges that surface fleets couldn't respond to.

Missile and kill-chain advancements might change all that, if those two things get to the point where the vastness of the oceans no longer provide carriers the protection they currently enjoy. I think we might see a shift towards spreading out the destructive power amongst several (slightly) less expensive vessels rather than allowing it to remain so heavily concentrated in a few fabulously expensive carriers.

[Emu]

Pre-watch: i thought it was ballistic/guided missile subs that made battleships obsolete by providing long range accurate fires, and survivablity for lower logistics and personnel costs and SSNs for anti-ship ops for similar reasons. Carriers offer a lot of capabilities, but on their own (no airwing or escorts) they are exceedingly vulnerable, and have high operational costs.

[bobwitkowski]

The battleships represents another aspect of Naval warfare that should not have been overlooked. Furthermore, I believe that we should have continued the battleship program paired with the aircraft carrier and submarine programs. We should have kept the entire South Carolina class, the Sodack 2 class, and finished off the entire Iowa class battleships. Also, we had developed our own 18 inch guns those would have gone well on the Montana class battleships and continued to develop larger battleships with even bigger guns. In continuation, we should have continued with the CB program the Alaska class and kept the captured German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. We could have kept on modernizing them. With the Enterprise CVN-65 proving the value of nuclear propulsion our battleships could have swapped out their petroleum based propulsion with that of nuclear propulsion. With their overall aerodynamic lines backed up with the kind of propulsion that they were crying for they would have been true hotrods. The BBs and CBs would represent one powerful tool on our tool belt. Think about it what kind of difference would 17 BBs and 5 CBs made at the Vietnam War plus any further BBs and CBs made after the Montana class and the Alaska had been completed and let's not forget the Prinze Eugen. All of North Vietnam would be in range of those 18 inch guns of the sisters Montana.
Bat divs with even bigger more powerful and faster battleships would one powerful tool in our tool belt.

[Anon-]

Meanwhile a lurking SSN: I'm about to end this big girl's career!

[jimcat]

Point one: Ryan, you are the only YouTuber whose ads I won't fast forward through. Even if I don't buy Magic Spoon cereal, I enjoy watching you pitch it. Also, I love you doing the commercial in the fire control center and talking about your "One to one scale model ship". No one could do this the way you do!

Point two: I don't agree with your central thesis that aircraft carriers are not the strongest projectors of war power in today's naval theaters. But damn, you did an amazing job of backing up your point of view on the subject! I won't deny that you have some good facts on your side, but I think that other facts point to the supremacy of aircraft carriers and air power over surface warships.

[philiphumphrey]

From a British point of view, the Royal Navy lost 5 fleet carriers during the war, three to submarines (Courageous, Ark Royal, Eagle), one to battleships (Glorious) and one to aircraft (Hermes). Britain also lost 5 battleships/battlecruisers, Royal Oak and Barham to submarines, Hood to battleships and Prince of Wales and Repulse to land based aircraft. To me that suggests that neither carriers nor battleships were dominant, and both were vulnerable to a variety of threats (especially submarines). Sometimes it was a combination, for example Bismarck was disabled at long range by carrier aircraft, but was finished off at close range by battleships and cruisers.

[KirunoTheWise]

You make a compelling point that I have felt lately that when you have peer forces possessing intensely scary AA missile weapon platforms, carriers are not going to be keeping their air groups around for very long unless mass stealth attacks are used to destroy air defenses. Barring absurd numbers of anti-ship missiles, a Battleship can just sit itself in a spot and blast anything in range apart.

[shellymcmurrie]

Though I know very little about ships (so take this for what it's worth) I have thought for some years that since battleships can be so large, that with modern technology and all that space for weapons stations from GPMGs to the main turrets, that a battleship could defend itself from aerial attack at least as well as an anti-air ship, and from asymmetric surface raiders simply by dint of being able to detect and eliminate them from so far away as to make the attempt not worth trying. Then they are armoured against all but the guns of ships that are like them, and they have the space on board to support all manner of specialist roles. On top of all of that, they have the space for BVR anti-ship missiles, and whatever systems might be available to counter-act those. Finally, they have them huge turret guns, which are (by all accounts) apocalyptic if they're shooting at you - guns that fire shells that can do some of the jobs (not all of the jobs but certainly some) of different sorts of missiles within their effective range, for less money/longer on station. (The longer on station bit is a guess; while not small, the ammunition for a 15" gun may take up less space or be easier to store than a large missile, so more could be carried?)

Overall, I have long thought that there isn't an aircraft carrier in the world that would be unhappy being sent to do its job with such a battleship there to protect it, and both ships would be protected by all the smaller vessels that usually attend capital ships. What the battleship could bring is mobile anti-ship firepower, enhance the anti-air "bubble" protecting the flotilla and the firepower to support land engagements within the reach of its guns.

TL:DR I think battleships as part of a combined ship-type mission would be just as if not more relevant now than they were before we incorrectly called them obsolete. But then I really do know almost nothing about ships! For all I know, a heavy smaller vessel (cruiser/frigate/destroyer?) may be able to fill a battleship-shaped hole for less money per-hull. The key things battleships bring (at least to me) are their space on board for all manner of systems, their armour, and those huge turret guns. For them to be truly obsolete, those big guns would need to be legitimately obsolete - like a 12 pdr "Napoleon" cannon on land is obsolete - of course you don't want to be hit by one, but no modern military would think to use them anymore because by today's standards, they're not very good. I guess the question for me is that, with modern fire controls, are there weapons systems out there that do what a battleship turret can do, for around the same money, with the same supply of ammunition (for the effect they wreak) on board?

Maybe I just like battleships and I'm still salty they were decommissioned!

[crazyguy]

I believe that the roll of controlling a conflict zone itself became obsolete. It's the old knight and gunpowder scenario of arms vs armor, the weapons we have nowadays have no comparable physical defense, if you get hit you're done. A battleship may be heavily armored, but you take a modern torpedo that can home and detonate a 700lb warhead directly underneath a battleships keel and you now have at the very least a mission kill, from something the battleship had no counter for. Take the same cost and 1/3rd the required crew, deploy 2 Arleigh Burkes, 1 gets hit by the torpedo and sinks, the other sinks the sub and it can then still control a much larger area, and engage a greater variety of threats, with the VLS cells than a gun armed ship could ever dream of. It pains me to say it but I believe the battleship had no place in naval combat anymore. Acting as a show of force and shore bombardment against a non-peer adversary, that's where they still shine, but massed drone boats, underwater infiltration and readily available missiles are fast making that roll impractical too.

[robertmartinu]

The question is: can a battleship still take a hit? From a cruise missile likely yes. But from a drone swarm carrying Quicksink-like bombs? What fraction of the price to procure and operate the battleship do I need to pay to remove it? You're not much better off then the carrier, but the latter has a CAP to soften the blow.

Disposable, smart & high impact weapon systems are the current wildcard in those considerations.

[jayss]

If history and wars have taught us one thing is that time and time again it’s the grunt on the ground that wins real wars. It’s not aircraft or ships, it’s the individual grunt fighting it out going door to door or trench to trench. Everything else fights in a supporting role.

So the real question we should be asking is which supports the soldiers on the ground better long term. That’s the real question.

[ravenbarsrepairs]

Aircraft carriers have a much longer range to deliver destruction equal to that of a battleship. Post WWII, battleships were relegated mostly to shore bombardment roles. Battleships work great in that role early in an invasion(such as D-day), but once land forces get more than a dozen miles inland, their relatively useless. Aircraft carriers can do the shore bombardment in a lesser role(more precisely targeted) due to lesser available munitions per plane, and as well take those munitions much further ashore than a battleship could hope to reach.

[lawrenceberg]

Great topic for discussion. Warfare evolves. The attack on PH was argued to be the tipping point between the age of dreadnoughts and age of naval aviation. The bottom line was that a bunch of elderly battleships were sunk/destroyed or heavily damaged. Most were repaired and put back in service. PH and then Midway were examples of projecting power - long range aircraft swooping in to destroty slow, heavy targets. The Soviets learned during the Bay of Pigs in the 1960s that submarines were not adequate by themselves to project naval power.

The modern US Navy is still geared around the concept of projecting power. We really have no platforms providng naval off shore gunfire support. 5" 54 guns will not soften hardened coastal targets. Dropping B61 bombs will also make beach landings harder. One interesting aspect is the cost of shooting 16 inch shells (assuming modernized; modern powder etc) would be much cheaper than an array of high tech missiles.

Good argument to build a modern battle ship (gas turbine or nuclear powered). Too bad the US has forgotten how to forge gun barrels.

[totsm]

This is a such a great video explaining how historians are re-examining the long held obsolescence of battleships. Given the big manpower needs of the Iowa class and similar battleships, what are some realistic ways a navy could still man a big gun battleship, but with fewer sailors?

[Helperbot-]

i havent thought about it this way before, thanks for the viewpoint.

[captainfactoid]

My pre-watch answer? There are three roles for battleships. Projection of power, acting in the primary anti warship capability of a fleet, and shore/land bombardment. Sometime in WW2 the carriers overtook them as the power projectors and best anti warship capability of a fleet. In shore bombardment it’s a tradeoff. Airplanes are better due to precision, weight of explosive payload, versatility, and range. Battleships have a much higher volume of fire and can fire into a heavily defended target.

[StacheMan]

IMO, WWII only rendered the battleship obsolescent, they didn't became obsolete as a means of controlling the seas the moment carrier aircraft became, as a standard, all weather and night capable. Sure, large caliber artillery probably still has some uses in the naval context, but those guns are only a threat out to perhaps a couple dozen nautical miles while missiles can reach out hundreds and aircraft farther still and BBs just don't have the survivability to stay on station in the face of the weapons that will be pointed their way. Sure, a foot of armor can shrug off any modern naval gun or anti-shipping missile... But those weapons could still wipe out enough radars and datalinks to mission kill it. But building a foundry able to make that armor takes far longer than designing a new missile to penetrate it. But and a 21' keel breaker torpedo or two would send the likes of an Iowa to the bottom just as easily as they would an Arleigh Burke or a Nimitz.

[nonamespore]

Before watching the video, my answer would be a “no, aircraft carriers did not render the battleship obsolete, but you’d not want to build as many battleships as carriers.” This answer also assumes equally capable naval powers expecting war against each other which is not at all what the geopolitical landscape looked like the moment US shipbuilding capacity started spamming hulls into the water in WWII.

With WWII tech, a force which invests mostly into carriers but gets a couple of fast battleships could soundly beat an equal force that invests that battleship capitol into additional carriers by running a CAP-heavy defensive airwing and shooting down enemy strikes, eventually giving the battleships freedom to operate.

Multiple inventions in a short period of time in late WWII, once adequately developed in the Cold War, would render the battleship obsolete by essentially buffing the other ship classes at the time much more. Guided torpedoes, better underwater streamlining, longer underwater ranges, and eventually nuclear power made submarines much deadlier; high speed jets gave carriers harder to shoot down air wings, and missile combat gave the escorting cruisers and destroyers long-range mission-killing anti-ship weapons, as well as further improving the striking power and distance of the submarine and the carrier-launched jet aircraft.

You could argue the battleship is still relevant in the shore bombardment role then, but then you gotta ask “why do you need this much armor?, ” and maybe even “why do I need this many big guns, and why do they have to be so big?, ” and essentially create anything from a Baltimore to a Deutschland to a Courageous to an Alaska instead. I guess you could try to argue “what mops up once the missiles are all expended?, ” which could be an interesting question depending on hit rates, number of ships mission-killed, and would definitely render the battleship a dead concept by the invention of VLS at the latest.

But technologically I still suspect it’s the 50s and all other ship classes improving more than battleships, and geopolitically it’s the 40s where there’s a large naval power imbalance between enemies that never quite goes away.