By the way, everytime you say "recommission battleships" some Navy guy suddenly needs to clean out the front of his pants. And not in a bad way. You want to know why?
The battleships are 10 percent faster than the still-conceptual DD(X). They each bring to bear 12 5-inch and nine 16-inch guns -- capable, with new munitions, of firing accurately to nearly 100 miles. The two battleships can also carry nearly twice as many cruise missiles as all the DD(X) hulls combined. All that firepower is available for $2 billion -- the cost of one DD(X).
During the first Gulf War, the Navy brought the USS Missouri out of mothballs and put her back in service, albiet with modern upgrades. At that time, Navy recruiting offices were swarmed with retired and inactive Navy personnel stating that they would be more than willing to re-enter the service IF and ONLY IF they were put on board a battleship.
The whole reason battleships were decommissioned to begin with is because they're expensive. Ain't no lie about that. It's a floating fortress, the meanest, toughest, nastiest thing on all the Seven Seas. A carrier group obviously has more firepower, but that's made up of dozens of ships. One battleship will beat any other thing that floats every damn time, and the USA had the cream of the crop. If we put nuke engines in them and refloated them, they'd STILL be the cream of the crop. Replace the old targeting systems, upgrade their powerplant, and we would have a ship that no country on this planet would want to tangle with.
I say bring 'em back.
No comments:
Post a Comment