The Case for a 21st-Century Battleship
What makes a battleship a battleship isn't the big guns. It's the thick armor. And armor may soon be more important than ever.
Salvatore Babones [2]
In World War II, the Japanese super-battleships Yamato and Musahi each mounted nine 18.1-inch guns, the largest naval guns ever deployed, but they never sank a single American ship. In a conflict decided by naval aviation, Yamato and Musahi were used mainly as flagships and troop transports. Despite their huge armaments, they were steel dinosaurs from an earlier strategic age.
But how do you sink a steel dinosaur? The answer is: "with difficulty." It took eleven torpedoes and six bombs to sink the Yamato. The Musahi took nineteen torpedoes and seventeen bombs. And at the time they were sunk, both ships were already limping along on patch-up repairs from earlier torpedo strikes. They may have been strategically useless, but the Yamato and Musahi were almost (if not quite) indestructible.
Source URL (retrieved on March 10, 2018):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-case-21st-century-battleship-24804?page=show
