Key Points and Summary – The recurring fantasy of reactivating the Iowa-class battleships is a “nostalgic delusion.”
-The 80-year-old warships are “logistical fossils” unsuited for modern war. With their massive radar signatures, they would be floating targets for Chinese hypersonic missiles.
USS New Jersey Big Guns National Security Journal Photo Taken on 8/2/2025.
-The astronomical cost of restarting production for their 16-inch guns and modernizing their ancient steam engines would be a “multi-billion-dollar trip down memory lane.”
-Clinging to these ghosts of the past distracts from building the networked, stealthy fleet the U.S. actually needs.
Reactivating the Iowa-Class Battleships Is Not Strategy—It’s Sentimental Delusion
There’s a certain kind of person – usually retired brass with a Cold War pedigree, a hyper-online miltech influencer, or a voice amid the usual peanut gallery of defense nostalgists – who just won’t let go of a fantasy.
“Bring back the battleships,” they say.
And not just any battleships: They mean the USS Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin – ships eight decades old, mothballed for a generation, and last deployed in anger during Operation Desert Storm.
The Iowa-Class Comeback: 2025 Edition
Somehow, in 2025, this tired idea is making the rounds again.
Dress up the battleships with vertical launch system (VLS) cells, throw on a few modern radars, and you’ve got instant naval gunfire support for Marines, or a floating fortress for Indo-Pacific deterrence. The idea is in fact seductive. It harkens back to mythic steel and thunderous guns.
It is a throwback to a time when American naval power was not questioned. But seductive does not mean smart. The truth, plain and uncomfortable, is this: Bringing back the Iowa-class battleships isn’t just an operational dead end – it’s a nostalgic delusion that distracts from what maritime power demands today.
A Bad Idea That Won’t Go Away
Let’s begin with what should be blindingly obvious: These ships are nothing more than ghosts from a long-gone moment in U.S. naval history.
Commissioned in the 1940s, the Iowa-class battleships were built for an entirely different era of warfare—an era where naval supremacy was measured by tonnage, armor, and the size of your main battery. Their 16-inch/50 caliber Mark 7 guns can fire 2,700-pound shells farther than 20 miles. Each turret weighs nearly 1,900 tons. These were magnificent weapons for their time.
But today? Those guns are logistical fossils. The Navy no longer manufactures 16-inch shells. Existing stockpiles are dwindling and unstable. Restarting production would cost billions of always-scarce defense dollars. Designing new guided 16-inch projectiles would take years and require building entirely new industrial infrastructure. Meanwhile, precision-guided rockets, loitering munitions, and naval cruise missiles already deliver greater accuracy and reach without the same signatures, recoil, opportunity costs, or political baggage.
Next, consider the hull itself. Each Iowa-class battleship displaces more than 57,000 tons fully loaded, with a massive radar signature that would light up the sensors of every Chinese satellite and over-the-horizon radar from Hainan to the Ryukyus. These ships were not built to hide.
They were built to take punishment, throw it back tenfold, and keep on sailing. That’s romantic. It’s also irrelevant. In a modern battlespace overseen by anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) systems, no amount of armor will save a ship from a hypersonic missile or a coordinated saturation attack of long-range anti-ship weapons. The DF-21D and DF-26 – China’s so-called carrier killer munitions – were not designed to destroy 1940s-era armor, but they’ll do the job. These missiles are terminally guided, precision-strike systems designed to destroy any large surface combatant, no matter how thick the belt armor. Slap modern sensors and VLS launchers on an Iowa, and all you get is a floating target worth more to the enemy as a propaganda victory than to the U.S. as a tactical asset.
Even if you somehow modernized one – say, with AN/SPY-6(V)1 radar, Aegis combat systems, and dozens of Mk 41 VLS cells – you’d still have to contend with a propulsion system that burns black oil and runs on steam turbines older than most of the Navy’s active duty captains. Replacing the engines would be a herculean task. You’d have to gut the ship from keel to stacks, reinforce the hull to manage the stresses of newer propulsion systems, and rebuild internal networks that were never designed for today’s data-centric warfare. That alone could easily eclipse the cost of building a new flotilla of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers or a fleet of unmanned surface vessels designed for a Pacific kill chain. This would not be just a waste of money, but a strategically consequential act of self-sabotage.
Iowa-Class Battleships Belong as a Museum
But the deeper problem isn’t technical – it’s conceptual. The call to bring back battleships reflects a desperate clinging to visible power: big guns, big ships, big silhouettes. It’s rooted in a psychological need to see American might as something material, cinematic, and ironclad. That may have made sense in the Pacific War or during the early Cold War. But in 2025, power isn’t about what looms largest on the horizon—it’s about what connects fastest, strikes first, and remains hidden. The future of maritime dominance isn’t about slugging matches. It’s about sensor fusion, kill webs, artificial intelligence-enabled targeting, manned-unmanned teaming, and distributed lethality. It’s about plugging into the broader Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance architecture that turns every platform into one node in a kill chain. You don’t get that by bolting fire-control upgrades onto an analog hulk from 1943.
And what of the Marines? Proponents of an Iowa-class revival often cite the need for credible naval gunfire support. They’re right that there is a problem – but they’re dead wrong about the solution. The Zumwalt-class, which was supposed to provide an answer with its Advanced Gun System and Long Range Land Attack Projectile, collapsed into a procurement debacle. The Arleigh Burkes have only 5-inch guns. And while HIMARS can now be fired from amphibious platforms, range and volume remain real issues. But reactivating a battleship to plug this gap is the equivalent of buying a steam locomotive because Amtrak’s procurement is a mess. What’s actually needed is a new generation of unmanned or lightly crewed fire support ships, launching precision-guided munitions from afar, cued by drones and satellites, with flexible basing across the island chains of the Western Pacific. The future isn’t firepower on steel. It’s firepower on demand – modular, networked, and scalable.
Battleships Should Remain in the History Books
The Iowa-class battleships are icons. They deserve their place in museums and memorials. They should be visited, studied, and admired. But they should never again be crewed for combat. Their time has passed, and pretending otherwise is a distraction from the hard work of building the fleet the U.S. needs for the battlespace of the 21st century.
China in 2025 is not Japan in 1944. Its maritime strategy is not battleship-centric; it is missile-centric, AI-enabled, and focused on eroding American dominance through asymmetric pressure and attrition, not climactic fleet engagements. The idea that a recommissioned Missouri could anchor deterrence in the Taiwan Strait is not just militarily naïve – it’s an insult to the intelligence of any serious strategist.
More importantly, reviving the Iowas would consume time, capital, and personnel the U.S. simply doesn’t have. It would signal to allies and adversaries alike that the country is not serious about adapting to the demands of a new strategic environment. It would signal a pathological nostalgia – a morbid obsession with reengineering relics instead of innovating for lethality and survivability in contested waters. And in an era when recruitment is down, shipbuilding is behind schedule, and budgets are tightening, the last thing the U.S. can afford is a multi-billion-dollar trip down memory lane.
Iowa-Class Battleship Comeback In 4 Words: It Will Never Happen
There is a larger lesson here. Great powers don’t stay great by rerunning old scripts. They adapt. They innovate. They let go of legacies when those legacies become liabilities.
The age of the battleship ended not with a bang but with a shrug—when precision firepower, submarines, and carrier airpower proved that armor and guns were no longer the coin of the realm.
That logic hasn’t changed. It has only intensified. Don’t try to bring back battleships. Instead, get back strategic clarity.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for National Security Journal.
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tom bops
December 22, 2025 at 7:13 pm
you were saying…