The battleship is dead. Long live the battleship.
Paradoxical statement? Naw.
What I mean is from the Civil war beginnings of the "ironsides", to the top-of (and end-of) the line Iowa and Yamato-class boats sunk, scrapped, mothballed, or serving as museums, they represented a pinnacle of human technical achievement.
When military dominance depended on eyeballin' your enemy and then flat-out physically pound their a**es to death with 2,000 lb "dumb" munitions, they made sense.
And their gaudy, thundering, awesome destructive capability was needed to do the job -- the more/bigger, the better.
Not glorifying war nor making any statement about "geo-politics" .. just recognizing their impact on human existence and stretching our minds/science to build them ... forever.
Technology .. nukes, radar, satellites, precision over-the-horizon strike power, faster, smaller but more capable, less exensive boats .. obsoleted them.
US Navy decommissioned the last two .. Iowa and Wisconsin .. almost 20 years ago now.
(source:
Nov 2005 Washington Pos - Navy's last 2 battleships to be decommissioned)
Gone but not forgotten. Never to return.
Eight minutes that does a pretty good job of laying it out .. with words and pictures.