Key Points and Summary – After a day aboard USS Iowa, it’s easy to feel the pull of nostalgia—and the argument that a modernized Iowa-class could anchor Pacific power.
-It shouldn’t. Even with new sensors and hypersonic missiles, a 58,000-ton battleship is a colossal target for Chinese or Russian kill chains designed to find and destroy big ships fast.
Those Iowa-Class Guns. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
-Reactivation would require immense refits, huge crews, and constant tanker and tender support—money better spent on stealthier submarines, more DDG Flight IIIs, frigates, and unmanned platforms.
-Armor and 16-inch guns made sense once. In the age of precision missiles and drones, the Iowas are history’s triumphs, not tomorrow’s tools.
-BONUS – All in-text photos are from National Security Journal’s recent visits to both the USS New Jersey and USS Iowa.
A Day On USS Iowa—And Why Bringing the Iowa-Class Battleships Back Would Be a Mistake
Standing on the deck of USS Iowa in August, you can feel the country that built her: the weight of the turrets, the geometry of armor and rivets, the confidence of a ship that once outran storms and outshot enemies. It’s no surprise that some argue we should reactivate the Iowa-class, bolt on long-range missiles—even hypersonics—and send them to stare down China in the Pacific. The romance is powerful. The logic is not.
What the deck makes obvious is age. Systems built for analog war. Spaces sized for crews the Navy no longer has. A silhouette that could be spotted from orbit. The very traits that made the Iowas superb in World War II and useful again in the 1980s now make them liabilities. In a battlespace dominated by networked sensors, precision weapons, and autonomous scouts, a giant gunship is the wrong bet.
What It Would Take To Sail An Iowa-Class Battleship Again
Discussion of reactivation often overlooks the challenging aspects. Bringing an Iowa-class ship back would demand far more than fresh paint and a few deck launchers.
Hull, Power, and Plant. Re-certifying an elderly, oil-fired steam plant for combat operations is not a maintenance action; it’s a rebuild.
USS Iowa and Old Systems. Image by Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
Modern fleets are designed around gas turbines, integrated power systems, and electrical margins sized for big radars and electronic warfare. An Iowa’s engineering spaces were never meant to power phased-array sensors, lasers, or modern ECM at high duty cycles.
Sensors and Combat Systems. To survive under modern salvos, a capital ship needs a contemporary radar, computing backbone, and layered hard-kill/soft-kill defenses. The Iowas were never built with vertical launch cells; grafting a large VLS “farm” into a 1940s hull would be invasive, risky, and staggeringly expensive. Strap-on canisters don’t create the magazine depth or fire control you need to stand in against massed missiles.
Crew and Habitability. Battleships eat sailors. An Iowa’s wartime crews ran to 1,500–1,800. Even with automation, you’d still need hundreds more sailors than a destroyer—plus technicians to preserve low observable coatings, if you tried any, and to tend sensors the hull wasn’t designed to host. The Navy’s manning problem is real; solving it by re-crewing a museum ship is the wrong fix.
Logistics Footprint. Big hulls require substantial logistics, including fuel, ammunition (who will manufacture new 16-inch gun ammunition?), spares, tenders, and tugs. Every gallon burned to move 58,000 tons is a gallon not fueling destroyers, frigates, or aircraft. In a Pacific campaign where distances are the adversary’s ally, that matters.
Every dollar and sailor poured into an Iowa is a dollar and sailor not building and manning ships that fit today’s war.
Inside USS Iowa Image by Harry J. Kazianis.
“But Hypersonics!”—Why New Missiles Don’t Fix Old Problems
Proponents counter that modern missiles change everything: put hypersonics and long-range antiship weapons on an Iowa and you have a terror ship. Missiles certainly change the offense. They don’t change the geometry of being targeted.
A battleship’s survival problem is threefold:
Signature. A ship as large as an Iowa broadcasts its presence across radar, infrared, and visual bands. Even if you dampen the returns, you cannot hide a mountain in the ocean. In an era of satellites, over-the-horizon radars, long-endurance drones, and distributed maritime sensors, large signatures are tracked, shared, and struck.
Kill Chains. China and Russia have built layered “find-fix-finish” chains designed to destroy large surface ships: space and shore-based sensors cue bombers, submarines, and missile regiments; land-based antiship ballistic and cruise missiles attack from multiple axes; sea-skimming and high-diver profiles saturate defenses. The bigger the target, the better those chains perform.
Defense Capacity. Modern survival is about depth: big radars, fast computing, long-reach interceptors, close-in weapons, electronic deception, and decoys—plus the magazine to do it again minutes later. Designing that depth into a 1940s hull is a billion-dollar proposition with hard physical limits. And even then, defending a slow, huge vessel against multi-axis salvos remains a losing trade.
USS New Jersey Big Guns National Security Journal Photo Taken on 8/2/2025.
Hypersonics on the roof don’t solve the fact that you are an easy thing to find and a high-value thing to kill.
Armor Isn’t a Force Field
Battleship romantics often invoke armor: “But the belt is 12 inches and the deck is thick!” Armor helped against shells and early bombs. Modern antiship weapons are engineered precisely to negate static protection.
Warhead Design. Contemporary missiles use tailored, high-energy warheads with delayed fusing, explosively formed penetrators, and shaped charges meant to cut through steel and erupt inside the vitals.
Attack Geometry. High-diving profiles target the deck and internal compartments rather than the side belt. Even “survived” hits can cascade into mission kills: lost sensors, burned wiring runs, flooded compartments. The question isn’t whether the hull stays afloat; it’s whether the ship can still fight.
Multiple Shots. Adversaries plan for saturation—dozens of missiles arriving from mixed altitudes and bearings. No amount of steel turns that storm into drizzle. The only winning move is not being targeted effectively in the first place, which is the job of stealth, dispersion, deception, and smaller signatures.
USS New Jersey July 2025. Image Credit: National Security Journal.
Armor is admirable. It is not a solution to twenty-first-century kill chains.
Guns, Shore Fire, And The “Presence” Argument
A second argument for Iowa-class battleships is naval gunfire: 16-inch shells still move dirt like nothing else afloat. That’s true—and largely irrelevant to the wars we must plan for. Against a defended coastline bristling with mobile missiles, long-range rockets, and guided artillery, a battleship must stand far offshore, beyond the envelope of even its extended-range shells, or accept attrition. If you must hit land targets at range, precision missiles from submarines and destroyers, or aircraft-delivered weapons, are safer and more flexible.
As for “presence,” few symbols communicate power like a battleship in a harbor. But presence is a peacetime virtue. In war, visibility without survivability is a liability. There are better ways to signal resolve than tying up thousands of sailors and billions of dollars in a ship the enemy can scout from space.
The 1980s Iowa-Class Refit Isn’t a Template
The 1980s reactivation of Iowa-class was successful because the problem had changed. The Navy wanted to surge visible firepower, Tomahawk salvos, and shore-battering guns into a contest where Soviet maritime reconnaissance was lethal but fragmented, and where the U.S. held wide margin in at-sea air defenses. Even then, the battleships sailed within an architecture of carriers, Aegis cruisers, and submarines that gave them cover. Today’s reconnaissance-strike complex is faster, more persistent, and more coherent. What worked in 1986 would be target practice in 2025.
Opportunity Cost: What We Should Buy Instead
Every modern navy lives under constraints. The choice isn’t “battleship or nothing”—it’s “battleship or everything else we need more.” For the dollars and sailors a single Iowa would absorb, you could accelerate assets that actually solve Pacific problems:
Attack Submarines. The hardest thing for an adversary to kill is the boat they can’t find. Submarines threaten shipping, surface action groups, and ports without advertising where they are.
Flight III Destroyers And New Frigates. Modern air-and-missile defense ships bring the sensors and VLS depth to shrug off salvos and throw complex fires of their own.
Unmanned Surface And Undersea Vehicles. Cheap, numerous, attritable scouts and shooters make the adversary’s targeting problem harder while preserving human crews for missions that demand them.
Land-Based Maritime Strike Networks. Dispersed missile batteries—tied to resilient sensors—complicate an opponent’s calculus and bleed less if hit.
Fuel, Spares, and Munitions. Wars are won by logistics. A funded magazine of modern missiles, and the tankers to feed the force, beat any museum-grade steel.
Each of these investments bends the fight toward dispersion, deception, and resilience—everything a giant battleship is not.
The Human Factor: Training, Safety, and Culture
Reactivating an Iowa wouldn’t only be money. It would be a culture shift the Navy doesn’t need. Qualifying new generations in high-pressure steam plants, rebuilding big-gun gunnery skills, and rediscovering damage-control choreography unique to a ship of that size—all while the fleet is already straining to train aviators, submariners, and surface warfare officers for new tech and new concepts—would dilute attention where it’s most needed.
There’s also safety. The Iowa-class served honorably, but big guns and old engineering plants are unforgiving. You can mitigate risks with training and maintenance. You cannot erase them. Betting lives on nostalgia is not leadership.
“But What If We Keep Them Offshore?”
Another proposed compromise is to keep a battleship far outside hostile envelopes and use it as a stand-off missile barge. That defeats the purpose of sailing a battleship. If you want a magazine at sea, build more hulls with VLS in forms designed for modern sensors and defenses—perhaps low-crew “arsenal ships” that can be risked without political paralysis. Don’t spend fortunes to tow a vintage silhouette into the missile age.
What My Day On Iowa Really Proved
Walking through Iowa’s plotting rooms and passageways, you see something essential: margin—in power, space, and strength. That’s why the Iowas could shoulder 1980s missiles and sensors decades after commissioning. But margin isn’t magic; it’s context. The world has moved from the physics of steel and shells to the physics of signatures and networks. The Iowa shows what a confident nation can build. It also shows how fast the logic of war evolves.
Honoring that ship means learning her lesson properly: build with growth in mind, adapt smartly, and retire platforms when the environment makes their core strengths liabilities.
The Better Tribute to Iowa-Class: A Future Fleet That Can Survive
If the goal is to deter and, if necessary, win in the Pacific, the answer isn’t to resurrect icons. It’s to field survivable, distributable combat power: submarines that disappear, surface ships that fight as nodes in resilient webs, aircraft that sense and strike with low signatures, and unmanned swarms that force the enemy to waste time and missiles on cheap targets. It’s to invest in deception and decoys as seriously as missiles. It’s to harden logistics so a single tanker kill doesn’t unravel a whole plan.
The battleship’s true heir isn’t a refurbished hull. It’s a fleet that reflects the same national will—and spends it wisely.
Legacy, Not Return for Iowa-Class
The Iowa-Class deserve reverence. They closed the Pacific War, held lines in Korea, came back as missile ships in the Cold War’s last act, and fired in anger one final time in the Gulf. Their legacy is not an argument to sail them again. It’s an argument to think like the people who built them: ruthless about the mission, honest about technology, unsentimental about tradeoffs.
Reactivating a battleship would be a victory for memory and a defeat for strategy. The Pacific will be decided by who can see first, shoot first, survive the reply—and do it again tomorrow. That isn’t a job for teak and armor. It’s a job for the ships and sailors of a future fleet we can afford, field, and keep alive under fire.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) is Editor-In-Chief and President of National Security Journal. He was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
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