a thing of sky and sea 🌪️

@PicturesFoIder small talk - I refuse to believe so many people are actually hypnotized by the weather

OK, OK, some are asking me to get back to battleships! Let’s talk about battleships vs carriers. I have written several posts already explaining how battleships were not “obsolete” after WW2 and continued service until after the Gulf War. No Navy admiral would ever claim they are useless…. the question has always been: are they worth the cost compared to other platforms? And the answer to that question has for decades been no. Battleships are more survivable than carriers. They pack a heavier punch. They have a number of other advantages. The battleship’s primary disadvantage is RANGE. The main gun on a battleship can’t shoot as far as an airplane. So if a carrier and a battleship are steaming across the ocean to fight each other, the carrier is going to get hits off first. Except that’s no longer the case thanks to missiles. Carriers also have a much larger reconnaissance range— planes can see further than ships— but modern satellites zero out that advantage. Carriers also have a longer cruising range because they are nuclear-powered, BUT fuel is not the limiting factor…. Because the 5,000+ crew need to eat and the planes need aviation fuel and because they sail with gas-guzzling destroyers, they don’t really have “more cruising range” unless you can replenish them at sea. We can of course replenish them at sea, but the Navy has been underfunding its @MSCSealift fleet, so this is no longer assured. So the hitting range is no longer an advantage (especially with hypersonics aboard with thousands of miles of range), and cruising range isn’t an advantage because of the sorry state of our replenishment fleet. So if carriers don’t have an advantage, then why did we build them and not battleships? Well, battleships are more useful when you are taking the beach, but once the army moves inland, carriers have the advantage. Sure, a tomahawk missile fired from a battleship or destroyer can provide air support from a long distance away, but it takes time for the missile to reach the battlefield. Planes loitering nearby, however, can sweep in fast. They can also change targets easily if ground conditions change. So, with limited funding, the Navy concentrated its budget on being a good joint player. BUT THERE IS ANOTHER REASON THE CARRIER REPLACED THE BATTLESHIP We had absolute dominance of the seas. There just wasn’t a need for ships, any ships, that couldn’t support Army and Air Force missions. There wasn’t a need for gunfire support of amphibious landings either. And Congress wasn’t going to support a naval platform for a naval battle if there weren’t any serious opponents at sea. So what changed? China built a Navy larger than ours. And one focused on warships, not carriers. China doesn’t need great range; they need to project force not across oceans but across nearby seas. And they need to protect their 5,000+ merchant ships (we only have 82 Merchant Marine ships in international service). Our carrier planes only have a few hundred-mile range, so merchant ships can spread out and avoid them. Well, they can avoid them everywhere except choke points where ships must converge. And carriers aren’t good at protecting merchant ships in choke points, as we saw recently when we sent two carriers at one time to protect ships in the Red Sea. Submarines can sink ships approaching choke points, but they can’t protect them from drones and missiles. What can protect ships in choke points are destroyers, but they are small and run out of fuel and missiles quickly. Plus, shooting multi-million-dollar missiles at $20,000 drones is not a winning formula. So that’s why we need battleships now. It’s not because they ever became obsolete… it’s because we haven’t had a serious enemy at sea (the Russian threat was mostly underwater) and we haven’t needed heavy gunfire to protect choke points and amphibious landings since WW2 In 2025 carriers are still important but we need some battleships too.