Naval command task force world of warships11/13/2023 ![]() ![]() To look to the future, the Navy should look to the past: The technological advances that are putting carriers at risk could pave the way for the resurrection, albeit in a more efficient, lethal, and different form, of the battleship. Nonetheless, the Navy plans to spend billions of dollars on a new super carrier and is testing expensive new missile systems to defend its carrier battle groups. Today, advances in information technology, coupled with the diffusion of advanced military technology, threaten to make aircraft carriers–and their crews of thousands–increasingly vulnerable to attack. ![]() Although the so-called battlewagons managed to hang on for nearly 50 years after the war, following the Gulf War the battleships were decommissioned, apparently for good. Carriers could now launch strikes several hundred miles from their targets, while battleships could hurl their shells but a few miles. Rapid advances in aviation technology had transformed the carrier from a ship that provided aircraft to scout the enemy fleet and provide gunfire adjustment for the battleships into a strike platform in its own right. By the early days of World War II, the aircraft carrier displaced the battleship as the naval fleet’s capital ship. The advent of the airplane and the modern submarine would soon consign the battleship to the same fate as the wooden sailing ships of the line that preceded it. In some respects, that review represented the high-water mark of the battleship. ![]() ![]() At the heart of that power were the Royal Navy’s battleships, row upon row of them. The review represented the greatest concentration of naval power the world had ever seen. On June 26, 1897, Great Britain’s Royal Navy conducted a review in honor of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee. ![]()
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