SaxMan wrote:
Cherrybomber13 wrote:
Sax Man,
From what my brother-in-law, who is a retired Navy LCDR, told me, the big problem were the propulsion systems in the battleships. When they were first reactivated, the Navy had to recall WWII and Korean War vets to show them how to operate them.
With respect to your brother-in-law, the issue wasn't the propulsion systems. In the 1980s there were plenty of ships in the US Navy with plants similar to the Iowas.
In fact, the first two ships of the Sacramento-class fast support ships, which were in service as late as 2004 used the propulsion plants from the never-completed 5th Iowa-class ship (Kentucky, BB-66).
Per Paul Stillwell's "Battleship New Jersey: An Illustrated History" a LOT of former BB sailors came out of retirement just to serve on the ships one more time. To the point where the New Jersey's medical staff was dealing with a much higher than usual number of ailments like chronic lower-back pain. The area where they made the biggest contribution was with the 16" and 5" gun systems.
The main reason why the Iowas were taken out of service was that they were incredibly expensive, limited-mission ships. They could only carry 32 Tomahawks for the land-attack role, while Aegis cruisers and destroyers could carry a couple times that many, plus Standards and VL ASROCS for the counter-air and counter-sub missions. And do so with a fraction of the manning requirements.
Their real raison d'être for staying in the fleet, once the Soviet Union collapsed and they weren't going to go toe-to-toe with Kirov-class battlecruisers using anti-ship Tomahawks and Harpoons, was the ability to deliver relatively-precise munitions onto targets during just about every weather scenario imaginable. And do so in a very sustained manner (Malcom Muir's book on the Iowas pointed out that they could deliver many times the tonnage of ordinance that a carrier airwing could over the course of a few hours, within the 25nm range of the 16" guns).
When the Iowas left service DARPA was moving forward with a conceptual 100nm range 11" subcaliber sabot shell that would be GPS-guided. Really neat stuff, except for the fact that GPS systems could also be tacked onto Mk.84 bombs ... giving B-52s, and later B-1s and B-2s the ability to fulfill the same exact mission, with much greater precision, over much larger ranges. Such as the ones experienced in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.