Retirement

Ok, here's a quiz. You are at war. It's a big war, some of it at sea. What's the most powerful thing the enemy can throw at you on the water?

If you thought of a battleship, you are like the vast majority of people. We've got images in our minds of these big ships with their thunderous cannons that take shells weighing as much as cars and throw them 25 miles into enemy ships and onto enemy territory. Battleships are a sight to behold. Trust me, I've been on and in one, and you can't see one up close and be unmoved by it's ferocious power. Everything about them is larger than life. The gun turrets alone are like cylindrical cities, extending six stories below the deck and manned by hundreds of people each.

Truth is though, the battleship is now completely out of date. Here's an interesting fact: there are no battleships in the US Navy. None. The last one was retired in 2006. The age of the battleship has at last come to a close. But it was a long time coming.

Many military historians say that the battleship was already obsolete at the beginning of WWII, and if not then, certainly by the end of that war. Others say that the battleship was never really of any value, except perhaps PR value. Of all the wars that have been fought on the seas, there has been only one decisive steel battleship conflict, the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, wherein the Japanese destroyed most of the Russian fleet. Everything else has been, for the most part, posturing and show of force.

The United States kept battleships on the books throughout the Cold War just in case their mighty firepower might be needed, but by then the 800-lb gorilla in the room was painfully and belatedly obvious: modern warfare at sea is all about aircraft carriers and their escorts, something collectively called "Aircraft Carrier Battlegroups".

This strategy was developed during WWII in the South Pacific. You have one big fat ship that carries your aircraft to any location on Earth, and embed it inside a ring of small and very fast destroyers and cruisers for protection. Initially it was thought that these configurations would engage each other directly on the water, but this happened only rarely, basically during the battles of Coral Sea and Midway in 1942. It was quickly determined that most of the fighting between these massive forces would occur in the air. Basically the modern battlegroup is a mobile airport that exists to send airplanes out to fight each other in the skies, the ships never even catching a glimpse of one another.

But the battleship lives on in memory and legend. There are preserved examples here and there, the USS North Carolina near Cape Fear, and the USS Missouri (the ship that hosted the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay) at Pearl Harbor to name two.

And then there is the USS Arizona, sitting on the bottom of Pearl Harbor directly in front of the Missouri. The US pacific battleships were anchored in harbor that fateful December 7th, but the carriers were out to sea. It has been said many times that if the US carriers were in Pearl Harbor that day, there would have been no war in the South Pacific because the US Navy could not have recovered from such a loss.

When I think about it, I can't help but conclude that the carriers were out learning their new roles as the masters of the sea.