Quora Answer: Will Battleships Ever become Relevant in Naval Warfare Again?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Will battleships ever become relevant again in naval warfare?”

If you are referring to battleships in the sense of the pinnacle of their evolution during World War II, and not a linguistic shift, where the term is used to refer to another war ship, then it is highly unlikely.  There are two reasons.

The first is not that battleships are tactically obsolete.  This is a myth.  Battleships outlived the torpedo bombers and dive bombers, which were specifically used to kill battleships.  A battleship, modernised with a modern anti-air system and with its complement of missiles, but anti-surface and anti-submarine, is a formidable opponent.  Battleships are a cost-effective way to bombard targets more than 20 nautical miles away, out of the range of most effective land-based artillery systems.  It is a mobile artillery platform that can strike with impunity.

The armour of battleships, even when compared to modern surface combatants, gives it a tremendous advantage in any surface engagement.  There are no guns on modern vessels that can penetrate that armour.  Anti-ship missiles are needed for the job.  A battleship is likely to survive the first salvo from any modern surface craft.  Within range of its guns, no modern vessel is likely to survive a first salvo from a battleship.  If the guns are in range, so are all its missiles and torpedoes.

The problem here is that battleships require a huge complement of crew to run.  Due to their size and complexity of their systems, battleships are manpower intensive.  This is a logistics issue in an age where modern militaries are trying to be less manpower intensive.  This large crew complement also requires a large logistics train to ensure that they are fed and clothed, which makes deployments very expensive.

Secondly, due to the amount of hardened steel used in their construction, a battleship is very expensive to build, and difficult to maintain.  The same hardness of the steel that makes the armour resilient also makes it difficult to maintain and fix.  These are not modular armour builds.  You cannot simply cut off a portion, when it is resistant to cutting once set.  This means the cost of building enough battleships to create a viable surface deterrent is prohibitively expensive.  In contrast, aircraft carriers, while expensive, are not so heavily armoured and armed, because they are meant to be standoff platforms to launch aircraft.  They are not meant to be used in a proverbial knife fight at sea.  The chances of losing an aircraft carrier is considerably less than that of losing a battleship.

Because of the tremendous manpower considerations and cost of deployment, losing a battleship is expensive, both militarily, economically, and politically.  Imagine an American administration losing a battleship in an engagement, perhaps by shore-based anti-ship batteries while in littoral waters, due to transit.  Imagine a catastrophic explosion with massive loss of life.  Which administration could survive the backlash of losing a billion-dollar system with the loss of two thousand lives?  Perhaps there would be advancements in materials design, developments in naval warfare, or an implementation of an advanced ship AI that makes it all viable again.  That is all unlikely in the near future.