another thing to keep in mind is that as good as the phalanx is...from what i've read, it can locate and neutralize 20 incoming missiles, all the Iranians have to do is launch 21 missiles.
CIWS ain't
near that good... it wouldn't take anywhere
near 20 missiles to saturate defense of a sincle ship.
The aircraft carriers have more than one Phalanx gun. Several, also the support ships, subs and planes.
They'll need all that and more, should they ever go up against a nation with a 1st class navy/air force.
A surface vessel usually cannot detect something quick enough with the radar they use. It is or was originally made for higher flying airplanes. If they had the Doplar radar plane up, it could have detected it once launched.
and a carrier with E-2 orbiting its escorts & radiating is hollering,
"here I am, a target!" for a 1st class airforce/navy.
Something else I found out. Back in the 80's when they activated the battleships, one of the reasons for their reactivation was their 16" armor.
Iowas don't have armor that thick except on tiny conning tower space & turret faces; belt is internal & a max of 12" or so, though it is inclined and has an inch or so of decapping STS outboard.
An Exocet would have only scratched the paint on these ships.
It would have done more than that. The Brits experimented with Seaslug and a concrete warhead in the 60s... no problem going through armor. And you don't need to go through a lot of main armor to
mission-kill a battleship; the Bismarck was reduced to a wreck with very few belt penetrations. Also... back in the 80s (30 years ago!) when Iowas were reactivated, the Russians had missiles FAR more potent than the Exocet, which is a relatively small SSM... and the missiles they/Chinese have now, are much more potent than what was avail then.
No conventional weapon currently in operation anywhere in the world can penetrate the old battleships hulls.
A few sunburns would handily scupper an Iowa, I think.
Only reason they deactivated them is they are old technology and take a couple thousand sailors to operate them. A modern cruiser only takes a couple hundred. I think they should reactivate them, upgrade as much as possible and use them to help protect the aircraft carriers.
Start a thread; I can make a pretty good case that they're terrible for the task you envision.
Alabama, Massachusetts, and North Carolina are museums, as are the 4 big ones, but are kept in good condition and could be bought back from the respective states and reactivated if ever needed. ... Thus if the navy so needed could call back up the 7 from Museums and reactivate them.
Not a prayer of that happening, and it would be huge boondoggle/waste of money. We don't need 1938 technology.
North Carolina and Washington were the same size as the Alabama but had somewhat different guns...
They had identical main/secondary batteries. Iowas had 16/50s instead of 16/45s.
The 4 largest had their electronics upgraded and 4 5" battery guns (two on each side) were made into cruise missile launchers giving them a 1500 mile hit range.
you'd do better to take a modern commercial ship, load it up with electronics and VLS farm... far more missiles, much lower operating costs.
The big 16" guns could pound beachheads
near-worthless for the $ today - there are better ways of
'pounding a beach'.... and besides, there's no reprise of Tarawa/Iwo Jima planned anytime soon. Fighting the last good war...
The reason for their retirement was the $58 million a year operating cost.
it would be higher now, for dubious return.
