U.S. Navy Iowa-Class Battleships: Could They Really Make a Comeback?

Over at Popular Mechanics, Kyle Mizokami reports on a video clip (see below) posted by Ryan Szimanski, curator of the USS New Jersey Museum and Memorial, Camden, New Jersey. Last spring, New Jersey spent nearly twelve weeks drydocked in Philadelphia, undergoing $10 million worth of hull repairs, maintenance, and painting. Doubtless, it sorely needed the upkeep. Water and metal are natural enemies—and the dreadnought was last out of the water over three decades ago.

Water has been on the offensive against New Jersey’s hull for a long time. Good to fight back against the elements. 

Szimanski’s video is worth your time if you’re an enthusiast for historic warships. It’s tongue in cheek, and filmed underneath New Jersey’s keel while up on the blocks. He riffs on the Taylor Kitsch movie Battleship (2012). (Spoilers follow.) Battleship is a romp—I recommend it—but there’s no question it is farfetched to the point of whimsy. Some moviegoers may find it impossible to suspend disbelief to the extent necessary to enjoy it. In fact, many did find it impossible. Critics pilloried the flick on Rotten Tomatoes, for whatever that’s worth, while audiences rendered a verdict best interpreted as tepidly upbeat.

The film is fanciful not just because it recounts a naval war against aliens, but because the moviemakers have U.S. and Japanese guided-missile destroyer crews of the present day team up to reactivate the battleship Missouri—now a museum ship at Pearl Harbor—to outduel the otherworldly invaders. Bear in mind, this is an eight-decade-old ship. It has rested in retirement since 1992. Mizokami states that the Iowa-class museum ships are kept in “immaculate condition,” implying they could be brought back to life in relatively short order.

If so, several timelines are possible.

First, the Hollywood timeline. In Battleship it basically takes an afternoon to reactivate Missouri. Old salts who served in battlewagons and live on Oahu show up aboard the ship to help. Apparently, the veterans have somehow kept their skills up to date, without practice working with their gear, during the intervening decades. (This does not happen. Trust me.) The combined crew fires up the steam propulsion plant, activates the sensor and communications suite, and loads the 16” guns.

And off they go to do battle in the waters around Hawaii.

Riiiiight. That’s a sound premise. A museum ship idled for decades, without maintenance by skilled specialists, is definitely in sound mechanical condition to put to sea. It’s already fueled. And armed. And simple enough to operate that a cadre of newcomers, joined by oldtimers who haven’t taken a battleship to sea since the early 1990s, can master or relearn the controls fast enough to steam into high-intensity combat. Szimanski pours scorn on the whole concept, and it’s hard to gainsay his mockery.

Again: you have to have substantial tolerance for disbelief to go along on this joyride.

Second, either Mizokami or his Popular Mechanics editors do Szimanski a disservice, running his article under a subtitle proclaiming that he “says it would just take 60 days [to] get the USS New Jersey back into fighting shape.” That’s the attention-grabber. But it misleads. Reading down into the text reveals a more accurate portrayal of his views, to wit: “the lead curator of the Battleship USS New Jersey Museum, Ryan Szimanski, ran through a thought experiment regarding whether or not the Navy—with a budget of $10 million and a 60 day deadline—could get USS New Jersey into fighting shape.” His answer: No. And rightly so. If it took almost three months and $10 million just to refurbish and paint the hull, it’s laughable to think shipyard workers could do all of that and reactivate the propulsion plant, sensors, command and control, and weapons on board this 58,000-ton warship in just two months and with that same pittance to spend. And that leaves aside the sums needed to refuel, reprovision, and rearm the ship.

Making New Jersey a fighting ship once again would demand expenditures orders of magnitude beyond $10 million.

So a quick, cheap refit is implausible. Which leads Szimanski and Mizokami into a third, far more intriguing foray into imagination. If you can’t restore a battleship to service in an afternoon, or sixty days, could you accomplish it in a year given substantial resources? Maybe. The two commentators seem to think New Jersey and her sister ships could stand out to seaward once again, perhaps as floating, unpowered gun barges towed into place off some foreign shore to fire dummy rounds in an amphibious operation. (Dummy rounds because all battleship gun projectiles were disarmed of their explosives long ago. It would be infeasible to rearm them within a year since the navy no longer maintains these antiquarian explosives in its inventory, and is unlikely to construct the manufacturing infrastructure necessary to turn out such niche munitions in that timeframe. Or at all.)

And they think a year could be a plausible timeline.

Well, I suppose anything is possible if you throw limitless resources at a problem. But consider. It took more like two years to rejuvenate a battleship in the 1980s, back when the Iowa class was “only” about forty years old, back when a sizable reserve of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam battleship veterans remained among the quick to supply their expertise, and back when the U.S. Navy was a beneficiary of taxpayer largesse sufficient to build an (almost) 600-ship navy—more than twice today’s fleet inventory. Color me verrrry skeptical that even such a partial outcome would be attainable under today’s circumstances, which are straitened by contrast. Here’s why:

Politics. Our thought experiment suggests that recommissioning New Jersey within a year would consume colossal resources while promising minimal return on the investment. An unpowered barge bristling with heavy firepower—even if such a thing were feasible—would be underwhelming in domestic political terms. It would be nice to have, but no better. Try putting such a cost-benefit proposition to budgeteers in Congress, the incumbent administration, and the taxpayers at a time when defense budgets are dwindling in real terms, with the tally of U.S. Navy warships likewise in decline. In today’s zero-sum budgetary environment, what would the navy have to forego to purchase a pale facsimile of a dreadnought of yore? Would it be a frontline Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, a mainstay of the battle fleet? An amphibious transport, or two?

It’s tough to imagine that any responsible decisionmaker inside the Beltway would countenance eating opportunity costs of such proportions.

Training. Where would a navy already strapped for recruits find 1,600 sailors, the 1980s-era crew complement (and about half the World War II crew) to operate New Jersey within a year of resolving to bring her back? Battleships were outliers in many respects, even when they rejoined the fleet in the 1980s. Don’t get me wrong. Those ships were of superlative design, even apart from their most famous features, stout armor and heavy artillery. For instance, redundancy is a virtue in any ship of war. Having a spare of everything—engines, pumps, you name it—is of inestimable value, as is the ability to reroute steam, vital fluids, or electrical power around damage. The Iowa class abounded in redundancy. Hence their staying power in a fight.

There is much the contemporary U.S. Navy could stand to rediscover from the naval architecture of the age of the dreadnought.

That being said, it was hard enough to find skilled engineers to steam a 1940s-vintage plant even during Cold War days, when steam propulsion remained commonplace. Steam is in steep decline in today’s navy. In fact, it’s seemingly on the way out except for nuclear propulsion plants. (In essence a nuclear plant is a steam plant in which—rather than an oil-fired boiler—a different type of box generates the heat to convert water to steam to run turbines and auxiliary equipment.) Any proposition that the U.S. Navy could regenerate the training pipeline for a near-forgotten technology within a year, producing the hundreds of steam engineers needed to operate the Iowa class, strains credulity past the breaking point.

The same goes for 16-inch gunnery, another impressive capability from yesteryear that has no place in today’s fleet. No one staffs for misfit technology.

Engineering operations. The New Jersey curator seems to believe his floating gun barge would be a going concern, even without a working engineering plant. But the steam plant doesn’t just provide the motive force to propel the hull through the water. It spins the eight turbine generators that supply electrical power to run everything else on board the vessel, including sensors, communications, guns, and any missiles installed during a refit. If a battleship program didn’t restore the plant to operation, in other words, it would have restored little else needed to fight the ship.

Matériel. Battleships were hard ships to keep running, even during the late Cold War when they remained youthful relative to today’s elderly vessels. Crews ended up scavenging museum battleships for parts because the supply system no longer stocked them for obvious reasons. For example, Wisconsin sailors refitting their vessel in Pascagoula, Mississippi, in 1987-1988, ransacked the USS Alabama Museum in nearby Mobile, Alabama, for spare parts. In these days of 3D printing, I guess it would be possible to turn out spare parts—again, if the nation were prepared to sluice resources into a neo-battleship program. But again, what would be the opportunity cost of battleships for a navy that already can’t put ships through depot maintenance periods on time and on budget?

No political impetus, no skilled specialists, no realistic operational scheme, and no material support. Our one-year thought experiment doesn’t quite end up in Hollywood territory in terms of plausibility. But close.

Let the battleships lie.

About the Author: Dr. James Holmes 

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.