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Originally Posted by Cohaagen
As for the Iowas, they're magnificent ships, but utterly superfluous and in fact a drain on a naval budget that could have better spent the money on the real American area of expertise - carriers. A number of the WWI-vintage US dreadnoughts were horrible coal-fired relics that were painfully slow, had poor acceleration and suffered from vibration problems. Even so, the refits made good use of them, and all performed bombardment duties admirably. Despite the constant lauding, the Iowas had totally unillustrious battle careers, unless you count America's regular post-'45 pygmy-bashing adventures  . Even then, a monitor could have done those jobs just as well...the Royal Navy kept the 15"-gunned HMS Lord Roberts until 1965.
The cost of war-stock shells is the least of it - I wonder what the monthly cost of fuel and maintainence for one 50,000 ton battleship (plus food and pay for over 2,000 crew) is, and how it stacks up against B52 or B58 strikes.
As for the old chestnut about Mighty Mo' and her sisters striking sheer icy cold numbing terror into the hearts of inscrutable Commie gooks everywhere (I'm paraphrasing here)...I have heard reasonably big guns too, and they all sound enormous. Even Rarden sounds like a field gun when going overhead.
Besides, I would have thought that the obvious thing that frightened the Viet Cong was dying, regardless of circumstances. |
I vote for the Iowa's.
Cohaagen, first off the Iowa's have proved themselves every time they were called upon, and their performance in ODS was outstanding also. As far as Vietnam goes, the New Jersey only spent a short time there, but yet her performance and impact was outstanding, just look at what she accomplished while on her Vietnam tour. The original plan was to reactivate all four Iowa's, but that later got squashed. The north vietnemese cited the New Jersey as a road block to the paris peace talks. And afterwards in an unwise move the New Jersey was sent back home. Very political war though.
Gen. Leonard Chapman said about the BB in nam, "Thousands of American lives were saved." , and also the Marines calculated that 80 percent of 1,067 U.S. planes lost in Vietnam could have been saved had battleships fought the entire war.
You had also said that that the Iowas have had "unilustrious battle careers" which is totally untrue. You just need to do some more research.
It is no "fact" that the Iowa's were a "Drain" on naval budgets. That is politics talking. To answer your question of how much it costs for beans bullets, oil and pay, 71 Million O&M (with pay raises, inflation, modernization and some other things taken into account maybe 80 Million) per year. That is relatively inexpensive as far as Ship O&M goes. As to manning, if they would quit making cuts we would have the people. Many a ships have horrible watch rotations, but because some pencil pusher knows best, thats the way it is.
The Iowa's don't cost enough, that is the problem. Carrier O&M is 460+ Million Dollars a year. With Litton, Raytheon, GD, etc involved in many pork barrel projects, and cost plus fee nightmares it is the mainstream to be anti battleship. In the 80's it was proven that a SAG saves a tremendous ammount of operational costs over a CVBG (refer to above O&M costs), and also that they take pressure off of the carriers. Our SECNAV is a former top Dog out of northrop gruman, so if you think special interests aren't involved than you need a wake up call. We need a mix of systems and history is repeating itself. The word back in the day was we only need battleships, not carriers, now it is the reverse. We need a mix of systems.
There are many issues that the average joe does not see, nor can even comprehend. Maintenance defferment is what did in a certain ship that had a boiler explosion. "we have to get underway, we'll wait to fix it", captains time, or admirals time is another maintenence killer. Then there is the "we dont have the money, but go over to the carrier, they get anything they want"
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Darpa projects, ScramJet, and other battleship projects that were in development would cost less than other traditional ammo. Cost less is a cuss word nowadays. The Battleships would bring on call 24/7 fire support to the table along with many other capabilities. AEGIS cannot as of now be mounted on a battleship due to blast pressures, what happens if that ship is attaced? why not build it better, the Iowa's are Whore's for technological development, and are great platforms for testing new things, which they showed in the 80's. For the past 16 years there has been no effort, or should I say a dispicable effort to fill the NSFS gap, mostly due to politics, fear of competition from the BB's, and it is really sad. Take a look back to lebanon, we lost planes from the JFK and "Sara". EUCOM opposed bringing the Battleship to the crisis, along with the carrier admirals. SECNAV John Lehman stormed into Reagans office and asked why wasn't the New Jersey sent in the first place? Reagans answer was that the carrier admirals said they could handle it. Barracks were then bombed, so then the New Jersey was sent out amidst all this political opposition, showed up and kicked some @$$. After that the batteries fired no more and the targets silenced, even a top commander was wiped out. After all this the BDA (battle damage assesment) was postponed, delayed and anything they did to hide the New Jersey's Success, they did. So then John F. Lehman Jr (SECNAV) went and conducted his own inquiry and mum was the word. Those are the types of dirty politics involved and it is a shame. Thank God we had a SecDef, and SecNav who saw past all the BS. Nowadays, the cloud is back. PL104-106, a mesure meant to support our military, meant nothing to those bums that wanted nothing more than the Iowa's stricken from the naval vessel register
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