On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:41:22 -0800, Bruce in alaska
wrote:

In article ,
Vic Smith wrote:

Battleships are dodo's of the Navy, for the same reason that Aircraft
Carriers will become dodo's in the near future. You need Air and
Undersea Superiority around the ships to keep them safe and if you lose
that, your not going to have the ships left floating. Yes they were a
great Gun Platform, but if you don't have Air and Undersea Superiority
in the seas within the Gun Range of the Targets, the enemy will sink
your ship, PERIOD. Carriers have, and maintain that Air and Undersea
Superiority, via a moving envelop out 300-400 miles, with their combined
Fleet, and THEY NEVER get closer than that to the Targets... with
Battleships you need to be within 20 miles of the Target, and one
Harpoon Missile can ruin your whole week. The Argentineans & the Brits
found this out in the Falklands War. No Air and Undersea Superiority,
and you have lot of dead ships, and one Nuke Sub, blew the Argentine
Cruiser away, with one torpedo.

As I said before, BB's can't be compared to destroyers, nor can they
be compared to cruisers. Not disagreeing with your main point, as
I've said I felt like a sitting duck on my surface ship, so-called
air/undersea "superiority" notwithstanding.
But what ships a Navy uses gets into geo-politics and the world at
large. That's why carriers have been useful in recent wars, and why
the BB Iowa(?) was used in the Gulf War.
Not much worry about the Iraqi and Taliban air forces and submarine
fleets, though I'm sure the normal Soviet era defenses are still being
kept by our fleets.
Battleships are gone because they are just too expensive for
delivering explosives compared to what you get via airmail.
NOTHING is defensible against nuke ICBM's, with MIRVS and all the
other flavors, and that's why MAD worked so well.
I'm no expert on this, but if you want to really get involved go to
sci.military.naval. I'm sure you will find proponents of keeping BB's
in the fleet even now, and they'll have lucid tactical and strategic
arguments for it.
But my understanding is they are gone mainly because of dollars per
pound of explosive delivery.
Interestingly, as recently as 2005, it looks like Ted Kennedy and John
McCain were both advocating for battleships.
http://www.globalpolitician.com/2635-foreign-policy-us

--Vic