Heck, if that one fighter can win a world war alone, it's worth it!
E.g. One WW2 battleship could defeat every ship on Earth combined as of ~1830. (and it probably cost more than all of them too).
But, this is an amusing observation.
E.g. One WW2 battleship could defeat every ship on Earth combined as of ~1830. (and it probably cost more than all of them too).
But, this is an amusing observation.
What you need in a big war against a worthy adversary is the ability to quickly innovate and iterate on designs, and having a single design that try to do everything is about the worst option available for that.
In a war against an adversary that isn't worthy, you can use whatever and you will still win.
It's hard to say for sure, but in a way it seems that the Hood and the Prince of Wales actually stood a much better chance of causing serious damage to the Bismarck than the Ark Royal did, even if that's not how events happened to play out. (And in fact damage from the Prince of Wales's guns did help to slow the Bismarck down and force it to attempt to go to port to refuel.)
Battleships sided aircraft carriers for two reasons: one was to thicken their inner defense ring a little, and the other was because battleships alone, without a friendly air wing to keep the other side's strike aircraft away, were doomed.
Only because neither the US nor the Japanese had carriers in those engagements. The writing was on the wall when the Brits crippled the Italian gunship fleet with a single obsolete aircraft carrier in 1940.
20% better at 3x the cost is usually a bad bargain in a battlefield increasingly dominated by dispersion strategies and that was what eventually killed the Battleships, they were to expensive for convoy duty and too slow and vulnerable to torpedo and air attacks for the line of battle fighting that actually happened doing WWII.
That's what you might think with a certain naive look at WWII. All indications are that in any modern conflict between countries with the capability to manufacture this kind of hardware, it'll be all over before there's time to design or build anything. You win with what you have when the war breaks out, or you lose. Assuming you're lucky enough for it to not go nuclear, since any country like that can also build lots of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, and they pretty much all have already.
WW2 battleships proved their worth as late as the 1990s when nothing else could deliver the shore bombardment capability.
While the Phalanx CIWS is inarguably impressive in specification and testing, the thing about the US military is that, whenever we get into a fight, we're always 150% ready - for the last war. It takes us a while to figure out what we're doing in the current one, and it costs us. I see no reason to imagine this pattern shouldn't hold in a new war against an opponent equipped with Moskits.
Think of the problem:
- At Mach 3, the missile is flying at roughly the same speed as the unguided bullets the thing is firing. If it's additionally doing evasive maneuvers it's going to be pretty hard to hit.. (though I guess at Mach 3 it's not going to do very much acrobatics, but perhaps even a little bit is enough to make the CIWS miss?)
- Mach 3 is close to a km per second, and I guess the realistic range for a 20 mm cannon isn't that much, lets say 4 km for the sake of argument. And below, say, 1 km it probably doesn't matter if you keep firing at it or not, it's likely to hit you out of sheer inertia even if you hit it. So that gives you around 3s time to fire and adjust the aim. Not very much..
I have seen some mentions of a move toward missile-based defense, which would probably be a more effective option, but most of the same considerations apply - each missile might be much more likely than an individual CIWS round to score a kill, but many fewer missiles can be carried, and the launchers still need time to reload once they exhaust their magazines.
This is also, incidentally, the real reason why DEWs and hypervelocity kinetic weapons - lasers and railguns - are such a matter of interest in the naval research establishment at the moment. They're justified as being a more cost-effective means of dealing with low-level threats, but this is America - the last time our military services had reasonably to worry about being short of funds was no more recent than the mid-1930s, and nobody since has given any meaningful fraction of a damn about the cost per shot of naval weapons - and frugality would militate against the very considerable R&D cost of new systems without new capabilities, in any case.
A much more plausible reason why these new systems receive such interest is because they might eventually offer a solution to the currently insoluble problem of how to defend against a mass attack with supersonic AShMs. You don't see that discussed much in public, because no one with a stake wants to suggest that our enormously expensive carriers no longer offer the power and prestige that merits the cost of keeping them active, but nothing else makes as much sense.
The US's four Iowa-class battleships were quite useful, mostly for shore bombardment. They required a huge crew, 2,700 for WWII, Korea), and, after some modernization, 1,800 in the 1980s and 1990s. It's the crew size that led to their retirement. Each turret needed 90-110 people.
There was naval interest in building some "bombardment ships" intended for shore bombardment of countries that didn't have a significant capability for shooting back. But that went nowhere, since most of the US's enemies in recent decades have been too far inland.
The Japanese government was afraid to send the Yamato into battle, but that had nothing to do with money (after all, its sister ship was deployed at the 2nd battle of Leyte Gulf). The problem was they'd used it as a centerpiece in their war propaganda, and they thought losing it would be a PR disaster that outweighed any possible utility in battle.
A handful. Nowhere near enough. The Battle of Midway wiped out the bulk of them. The Zero rapidly became obsolete, too.
This also stands for a single class of ship, as BBs are expensive, and provide only limited power projection capabilities. As it turned out not superweapons, but decent stuff in insane amounts won the war.
What would actually happen if you sent a US battleship against a age of sail fleet commanded by competent people would be that the battleship would spend all of it's fuel trying to find something to shoot at while civilian shipping kept getting sunk, and then end up destroyed by saboteurs when returning to port for refueling. And that's the dream scenario in the real world you never see that kind of a technology gap persist for long.
It would take a lot of ships, but it could be defeated.