In 1940, a 57,500-ton battleship New Jersey, that dreadnought that once destroyed Japanese warplanes and seared the beaches of Okinawa and Iwo Jima, is back in action. The 39-year-old leviathan is testing her heavy-caliber guns off California. She moves at 15 knots with signal flags fluttering; her decks are cleared to avoid her deadly 16-inch gun blast. Even on the bridge, 35 yards from the nearest gun, Capt. William M. Fogarty risks ruptured eardrums. “Mickey Mouse ears” are mandatory, though seasoned sailors often opt for cotton wads.
A Klaxon blares, the signal for firing. Huge orange flames and mustard-colored smoke burst from the guns, then a thunderous boom. The ship shudders, and loose objects below deck are launched into the air. The starboard guns of the fore and aft turrets have fired, spitting two steel projectiles weighing as much as a Ford sedan into the sky, where they are over before crashing into the ocean and raising glistening fountains.
This made battleships, such as New Jersey, queens of the seas from the late 1860s until World War II, ships that could dish out rapid, heavy firepower. As First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty, Lord John Fisher famously said, “If you are insulted at the dinner table, don’t throw the decanter stopper at the offender. Throw the decanter!” Now, New Jersey stands as the actual embodiment of this philosophy, capable of unleashing devastating firepower.
In the nuclear age, with killer satellites and Trident submarines, there would seem to be little need for battleships. But Congress agreed to President Reagan’s “rearm America” plan, and $325 million was provided to refurbish the New Jersey and start work on her sister ship, the Iowa. The other two Iowa class battleships, the Wisconsin and Missouri, are also slated to return to the fleet at an estimated cost ranging from $1.5 billion to $3.5 billion. The New Jersey recently marked a significant milestone, having been refloated from her West Coast dry dock. The Iowa will be refurbished later this year, still sporting the square bathtub that was installed for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1943 journey to Casablanca and the Teheran Conference. Both offensive and defensive missiles will share these battleships with the original 16-inch guns.
Astonishingly, proponents of the Iowa class battleships have forced the Navy to reverse its decisions to strike the Iowa and Wisconsin from the Naval Vessel Register. Even though both ships are now utterly obsolete, on June 29, 1995, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 17 to 3 to retain the ships in mothballs, based on arguments that the ” Iowa-class battleships are the Navy’s only remaining potential source of around-the-clock accurate, high-volume, heavy fire support.”
The Navy did not restore them to active duty until a memo was signed by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jay Johnson on 21 January 1998, and later by Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton on 12 February 1998. Although officially brought back on 30 December 1997, the question is the relevance of the battleships in modern naval warfare. With over-the-horizon amphibious assaults using MV-22 Ospreys, helicopters, and air-cushioned landing crafts, the 16-inch guns of the Iowa class, which have a maximum reach of 27 miles, are very short.
Modern counterparts to this long barrel include the 5-inch/62-caliber gun on board the destroyer Winston Churchill, DDG-81, which can reach out to 63 nautical miles, and the vertical gun for advanced ships being developed for service by 2008, which will have a reach of approximately 100 nautical miles. Missiles like the Army Tactical Missile System and Tomahawk variants, deployable by cruisers and destroyers post-2000, offer even greater flexibility and range.
The cost of bringing these battleships back into service is very high. Indeed, the total reactivation cost under the Reagan administration’s four-ship fleet build-up was about $1.66 billion. Reactivating only two of these vessels could easily top $1 billion, more than an Aegis destroyer equipped with 90 missiles. Modernizing the battleships with current equipment, manning them with a crew of 1,600 per ship, and assigning them to sea for as long as six months before they become combat-ready could all combine to push the timeline out to 18 months from order to operational.