Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Battle Ships

The Ultimate Weapon No More: Why Did Battleships Become Obsolete? ( Source- The National Interest / Author- David Axe)

USS Iowa battle ship ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons/ United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- David Axe In many ways, the battleship represented the greatest-ever concentration of naval power in a single vessel. Between World War I and World War II, the big, fast, thickly-armored and heavily-armed warships dominated the world’s oceans. And then, very quickly, the battleship became practically obsolete. Why is a complex question — one that University of Kentucky professor Robert Farley,an occasional War Is Boring contributor, addresses in his new tome The Battleship Book.’ “The world reached ‘peak battleship’ in 1918,” Farley writes, “when 118 dreadnoughts served in 13 different navies.” Combat claimed eight battlewagons during the Great War. “The Second World War was far more deadly.” Sixty-three battleships were in service in 1939 and another two dozen of the giant warships left the slipways before the conflict’s end. Twenty-three sank in co

The Ultimate Weapon: Nuclear Armed Battleships? ( Source- The National Interest / Author- Kyle Mizokami)

USS New Jersey ( Image source- Wikimedia Commons / Author- United States Navy) Source- The National Interest Author- Kyle Mizokami In the early 1980s, four Iowa-class fast battleships originally built during World War II—Iowa, Missouri, New Jersey and Wisconsin—were taken out of mothballs and returned to active duty. Nearly 900 feet long and displacing close to 60,000 tons, the battlewagons could fire a nine-gun broadside sending 18 tons of steel and explosives hurtling towards their targets. The battleships were modernized to include cruise missiles, ship-killing missiles and Phalanx point-defense guns. Returned to the fleet, the ships saw action off the coasts of Lebanon and Iraq. At the end of the Cold War the battleships were retired again. All were slated to become museums. Few knew, however, that returning the battleships to service in the ’80s had been only part of the plan. The second, more ambitious phase was a radical redesign of the massive warships

Is It Time to Bring Back the Battleships? ( Source- The National Interest / Author- Robert Farley)

USS Iowa ( Image source- Wikimedia Commons / Credits- United States Department of Defense) Source- The National Interest Author- Robert Farley Is it time to bring back the battleship?  For decades, naval architects have concentrated on building ships that, by the standards of the World Wars, are remarkably brittle. These ships can deal punishment at much greater ranges than their early 20th century counterparts, but they can’t take a hit. Is it time to reconsider this strategy, and once again build protected ships? This article examines how these trends came about, and what might change in the future. Why We Build Big Ships The label “battleship” emerges from the older “ship of the line” formulation, in the sense that a navy’s largest ships participated in the “line of battle” formation that allowed them to bring their broadsides to bear on an opposing line. After the development of ironclad warships, the “battle ship” diverged from the armored cruiser based o

5 Most Deadly Warships of the 20th Century ( Source- The National Interest / Author- Robert Farley)

USS Iowa Battle ship  ( Image source- Wikimedia Commons / Author- United States Navy by PH1 Jeff Hilton) Source- The National Interest Author- Robert Farley The idea of a ship class, a series of vessels constructed to essentially the same design, is a hallmark of the industrial age of naval warfare.  Prior to the emergence of the industrial age, individual ships represented the craftsmanship of different yards, and the relationship between design and construction allowed specific builders a great deal of latitude.  As the industrial revolution overtook naval architecture, it became easier to create a specific template for the construction of a series of ships that would have effectively the same capabilities, regardless of which shipyard they emerged from or what time they entered service. This article focuses on five of the most lethal classes of warship to sail the seas.  The list concentrates on the first half of the 20th century, a period which saw the two most de