Comments by "Bk Jeong" (@bkjeong4302) on "The Drydock - Episode 317 (Part 1)" video.

41:33 The big problem facing the battleship in modern warfare, and in WWII for that matter, isn’t survivability. It’s lack of offensive capability (due to limited range) and the fact it thus ends up being a capital ship mostly or entirely pigeonholed into supporting roles where any tactical value it has fails to justify the strategic expenditure. The big way to solve this would be to abandon the main battery entirely and replace it with something that has the range to pose a viable threat to the enemy, but then that’s no longer a battleship; it’s a Kirov.
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@theawickward2255 given that the Iowas only went after a training ship and two destroyers at Hailstone, that was a destroyer’s job. That’s without getting into how pointless if not counterproductive their involvement in that operation was. And the thing is those navies were only deterred due to their ignorance; what’s stopping a peer navy from just ignoring an Iowa and attacking whatever it wants even with an Iowa in the area simply by staying out of range of its main guns?
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@b-17gflyingfortress6 It would be better to do that and not even bother with Iowa, but if people demanded you waste resources on a ship that was strategically obsolete from the start, that would have been the least bad option.
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@theawickward2255 The Iowas never really got to use their main guns to do anything other than a destroyer’s or monitor’s job. They weren’t viable capital ships, not due to design but due to being built after the writing was already on the wall. Now, if you ditched the 16” guns and assorted systems entirely and added even more anti-ship missiles with the freed-up space and tonnage, that might actually be fucking terrifying.
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@theawickward2255 1. So send two or three destroyers. Keep in mind they sent in Iowa AND New Jersey plus multiple cruisers and destroyers when the cruisers and destroyers by themselves were already far in excess of what was necessary to overpower those three ships. 2. a) Situational advantage. b) Not if they attack the convoy with weapons that an Iowa’s main battery is completely useless against, like aircraft/missiles/submarines. And yes an Iowa can shoot down aircraft, so can plenty of other, more sensible warships. c) that’s a point in favour of the army rather than the Iowas, since they can do the same thing even without the Iowas. d) see b).
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@theawickward2255 It’s not a matter of “send destroyers or send Iowas”, the latter was massively overkill even if you wanted to have the material advantage over the enemy forces. Cruisers exist, as does simply outnumbering the enemy with bigger destroyers like the Fletchers.
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