Article Summary: Battleships Won’t Return—Destroyers Already Took Their Throne
-Calls to revive U.S. battleships resurface now and then—most recently via President Trump—but nostalgia collides with physics, economics, and modern warfare.
Iowa-Class Battleship Secondary Guns Aboard USS Iowa. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
DDG(X) U.S. Navy. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-Today’s fight is decided hundreds of miles away by sensors, networks, and missiles launched from flexible vertical launch cells, not 16-inch guns.
-Recommissioning Iowa-class hulls would be ruinously costly, manpower-heavy, and tactically vulnerable.
-Purpose-built destroyers and future DDG(X) cruisers concentrate power with big radars, deep magazines, and room for lasers and hypersonics—delivering massed effects at range without lugging obsolete armor.
-The “apex predator” has evolved: destroyers (and cruisers-in-all-but-name) now do what battleships once promised, only better.
Battleships Are Not Making a Comeback—Long live the Destroyer
In a recent speech, United States President Donald Trump seemed to imply it might be time for the US Navy to bring battleships back into service. While invoking some practical arguments—the lower cost of shells compared to missiles, the robustness of thick steel armor—he was not shy of explaining the role of aesthetics:
“I used to watch [the film series] Victory at Sea … When I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers along side of ’em … they were 20 deep and in strait line and there was nothing gonna stop them.”
He concluded, “Those ships they don’t make ’em that way anymore, but you look at it and your [defense] secretary likes it and I’m sort of open to it.”
Navies Adapt to the Times
Indeed, militaries sometimes adopt weapons—or retain old ones—because they feel impressive independent of their actual cost-efficiency. After all, outside of combat, the aesthetics of military power can seem indistinguishable from military power itself to the casual observer.
Admittedly, the Navy’s newly upgraded ‘muffin top’ destroyers are not as aesthetically pleasing as the battleship of yesterday. But therein lies the problem—battleships were designed to leverage the most advanced naval warfare technologies available at the turn of the 20th century—not the 21st.
That’s not to say that large warships will broadly go away. They may, in fact, grow in popularity due to the efficiencies of packing numerous offensive and defensive missiles and powerful radars onto one big ship. But traditional battleships built around big gun armaments aren’t—and won’t—bar a dramatic revolution in gun technology.
What are Battleships, Exactly?
While the media often assume that any large warship is a battleship (or ‘BB’ in US Navy coding), the term specifically refers to a ship type introduced in the 1890s, characterized by heavy steel armor and large-caliber guns in multiple turrets for its primary armament. These were designed to be apex predators able to outgun any individual adversary head-to-head.
Battleships dominated the calculus of maritime power between rival states for the following half-century, marking arguably the first modern arms race recognized as such. Correspondingly, in 1922, one of the first major global arms control treaties was signed.
USS Iowa Battleship Guns. Image Credit: National Security Journal.
However, while battleships remained powerful playing pieces during World War II, their primacy was decisively ended by the maturation of aircraft carriers, which could launch dozens of warplanes capable of hunting and destroying ships, submarines, or land targets hundreds of miles away—or defending against enemy warplanes capable of the same.
Construction of new battleships ceased almost immediately post World War II—the last launched was HMS Vanguard, completed in 1946. Their heavy armor and guns diminished even further in relevance with the evolution of anti-ship missiles, which have a longer range and hit hard enough to negatively tilt the cost-benefit tradeoffs of heavy armor. Missile defense became a better use of tonnage than steel plates.
Only four US Iowa-class fast battleships—Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey, and Wisconsin—fluctuated in and out of service through the Cold War, used as shore-bombardment platforms (i.e., monitors in naval parlance), striking targets in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, and finally Iraq in 1991.
For their final recommissioning in the 1980s, the BBs had some smaller guns removed to enable refitting with offensive missile launchers (48 Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles), modern short-range air defense systems, and RQ-2 Pioneer drones, which served as gunnery spotters to improve accuracy. But by 1992, the Navy’s remaining BBs were decommissioned for good.
Is it Time to Recommission Iowa-class Battleships?
All four completed Iowa-class battleships survive as museum ships—and Trump’s comment implied sympathy for recommissioning them. However, resurrecting the Iowa-class ships is unlikely to be as cost-effective as building new, modern warships.
That’s because cutting into a ship’s hull, installing and integrating new systems, and then welding it all back together is really expensive! So, will all the hardware and electrical infrastructure that will require modification to incorporate into a 1940s-era hull, along with some 1980s-era analog systems and an antiquated propulsion system?
A recent visit by NSJs’s editor, Harry J. Kazianis, highlighted the reality that these World War II-vintage warships are not in great condition for service 80 years after their commissioning.
Iowa-Class Battleship USS Iowa Looking Really Old. Image Credit: Harry J. Kazianis/National Security Journal.
Yes, a refurbished battleship could potentially carry numerous missiles or larger hypersonic weapons than are currently possible. But it would also present a highly visible and attractive target—more so than other large modern warships. Heavy armor wouldn’t prevent crippling from modern anti-ship missiles.
And the battleship’s big guns would need to be removed, or they would remain solely to bombard coastal targets of adversaries lacking effective coastal anti-ship defenses, such as those China and Russia specialize in.
The resulting vessel would also incur immense operating costs due to high fuel consumption, a very large crew, and outdated components.
Meanwhile, the US shipbuilding industry is struggling to deliver ships on time, let alone expand its fleet size, due to massive deficits in production capacity. There is no sensible reason to commit large human, financial, and industrial resources to resurrecting retired warships based on aesthetics and nostalgia.
Trying—and Failing—to Bring Back Powerful Naval Guns
Rather than Iowas, what if we were to design a “21st century battleship” from scratch? Granted, it would have missile armament, but a purist definition would nonetheless mandate powerful, large-caliber guns as primary weapons.
Undeniably, battleship ‘rifles’ are impressive, lobbing shells peaking at 16″ or 18″ diameter to ranges exceeding 20 miles. (Though, granted a few historic exceptions, effective naval combat range was more typically under 12 miles.)
Iowa-Class Battleship Guns 16-Inch, USS Iowa. Image Credit: National Security Journal.
However, massive guns aren’t as impressive as missiles, which by the 21st century routinely have ranges exceeding 100 miles—and some even exceeding 1,000 miles. Of course, missiles are guided, vastly increasing hit probability at long range. That’s why modern US Navy warships primarily rely on missiles, retaining just one 5″ gun for close defense and shore bombardment.
Arming With the Big Guns
However, some argue, can’t we develop longer-range naval guns with today’s technology? Perhaps those could sustain effective attacks at higher firing rates more cost-efficiently than multi-million-dollar missiles.
This has been tried. One approach involves combining rocket-boosted shells with modern propellant and barrel-design technologies. A 2000s-era analysis concluded a battleship’s 16″ shells could be boosted to 40 miles range.
The 155-millimeter Advanced Gun Systems on the Zumwalt class stealth destroyer managed to achieve 95.5 miles range, but required the use of expensive guided shells intended as land attack weapons.
(July 28, 2022) U.S. Navy Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyer USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) sails in formation during Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) 2022, July 28. Twenty-six nations, 38 ships, three submarines, more than 30 unmanned systems, approximately 170 aircraft and 25,000 personnel are participating in RIMPAC from June 29 to Aug. 4 in and around the Hawaiian Islands and Southern California. The world’s largest international maritime exercise, RIMPAC provides a unique training opportunity while fostering and sustaining cooperative relationships among participants critical to ensuring the safety of sea lanes and security on the world’s oceans. RIMPAC 2022 is the 28th exercise in the series that began in 1971. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Aleksandr Freutel)
Railguns offer an alternative approach, utilizing electromagnetic currents to propel a projectile at extremely high speeds over long distances. Such rounds would be challenging to intercept and hit with tremendous kinetic energy. However, a rail gun also requires a tremendous amount of electrical energy. Perhaps a hypothetical nuclear-powered neo-battleship could make it work.
However, US Navy research for both approaches was ultimately canceled. Advanced Gun Systems built for Zumwalts were literally ripped from their decks to be replaced by hypersonic missiles because AGS ammunition proved too expensive per shot. And while a railgun achieved a 110-mile shot in a test, researchers struggled to cope with the electrical requirements and the tremendous wear and tear each shot transmitted to the gun barrels.
We haven’t heard the last of rail guns as China and Japan continue to research them. However, in 2025, they are not an available solution, much as Transformers 2 might imply otherwise.
So, rather than bending ourselves into pretzels trying to reinvent old weapons for today’s missions, it’s better to ask, “What is the best way to achieve that mission with today’s technology?”
The answer is a lot less cool-looking than a triple-barreled 16″ gun turret: matrices of flat square lids visible on warship decks resembling buttons on a keypad. These are vertical launch systems (VLSs), capable of carrying diverse missiles that can home in on ships, aircraft, space satellites, or ground targets potentially hundreds of miles away. One VLS cell can also carry four short-range air defense missiles.
These remain the most space-efficient way to flexibly cram long-distance firepower inside a warship. And while more expensive than shells, missiles are far more likely to hit their target, and can engage enemies over much greater, safer distances– including target types battleship rounds never could.
Destroyers and Cruisers are the New Battleships
Ship classifications often evolve in meaning over time. A naval ‘destroyer’ was originally short-hand for ‘torpedo boat destroyers’—agile, medium-sized warships intended to protect battleships from smaller, faster torpedo boats.
But over a century later, the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will soon be the largest and most powerful surface combat ships of the most powerful navy on the planet. These Burkes, and China’s growing fleet of Type 055s, have 96 and 112 missile cells respectively—two or three times as many as in the destroyers of other countries.
They’re new apex predators of surface warfare, much as battleships were formerly intended to be—but also far more versatile, with equipment supporting anti-submarine warfare, large-area air and ballistic missile defense, and electronic warfare.
The Burke’s eventual successor, developed by the Navy’s DDG(X) program, is expected to displace 50% more, carry larger payloads, and generate more electricity. That electricity, in turn, will enable larger, more powerful radars and jammers, as well as possibly high-energy lasers capable of destroying incoming missiles from a safer, longer distance at a cost-effective rate.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Delbert D. Black (DDG 119) participates in a photo exercise alongside the U.S. Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Navy during Operation NANOOK (OP NANOOK), Aug. 18, 2024. OP NANOOK is the Canadian Armed Forces’ annual series of Arctic exercises designed to enhance defense capabilities, ensure the security of northern regions, and improve interoperability with Allied forces. Black participated in the operation alongside the U.S. Coast Guard and Canadian and Danish Allies to bolster Arctic readiness and fulfill each nation’s defense commitments. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Rylin Paul)
DDG(X) will debut in the early 2030s, but don’t hold your breath, given glacial progress building much smaller frigates.
However, whenever DDG(X) arrives, there may be a case to designate them as cruisers rather than destroyers due to their high displacement. As militaries are often willing to bend naming conventions to secure political support, perhaps “battleships” too will return in some very different form.
About the Author: Defense Expert Sebastian Roblin
Sebastien Roblin writes on the technical, historical, and political aspects of international security and conflict for publications including The National Interest, NBC News, Forbes.com, and War is Boring. He holds a Master’s degree from Georgetown University and served with the Peace Corps in China. Roblin is also a National Security Journal Contributing Editor.
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