You’re holding a double standard, eg, a carrier can’t engage from outside the 1000km+ of modern anti ship missiles either.
But that 200km is exactly my point: 120km back from the line of contact means that to hit it with 200km missiles, you’re within 80km of the contact line and the guns of my battleship for counter fire.
If I can force you to fire off your 1000km+ missiles at every transport ship that could potentially carry artillery shells or even dozens at my battleship to defeat its air defenses and sink it, then I’m accomplishing my goal of depleting your better weapons ahead of my main thrust. And surviving even minutes in a good firing position means raining down hundreds of 500kg+ glide bombs from the main guns.
A battleship is better than a carrier for “I’m going to sit here at 100km from the enemy and trade fire until they’re forced to go hard and overwhelm me”.
But the competition isn't carrier-based aviation, it's VLS cells on other platforms.
If you have more of them, then your ships can engage from further ranges meaning they can shoot sooner and faster while dealing with less incoming threats in response.
Because to defeat those incoming missiles you're going to need your own - which is what the Navy does now.
It's a comparative benefit problem: what's the floating gun platform doing thats worth the purchase price compared to just having more VLS cells which can do air defense, land attack, anti-missile defense and ballistic missile defense? Buying the gun platform is coming at the expense of that. If you can find more money to also have a gun platform, why not just buy more missiles?
The practical adversary the US Navy is facing is China which has large numbers of hypersonic ground launched anti-ship weapons. The fight never gets to shore bombardment, because either you deal with those threats or your ships get killed.
The problem is you're presuming that the adversary has a relatively few long range missiles - but the problem is, you have relatively much fewer ships then anyone has missiles. Killing the munitions ship is one option, killing the battleship - particularly at $15 billion a piece - also just takes the threat off the board. And you can do it before it possibly even gets in range.
Yes — I never argued against VLS cells, but against exclusively VLS cells. I agree with you they’re necessary, including in modern battleships for air defense.
What I’m arguing is that the threat generated by that bombardment capability — against islands in the ASEAN sea, against ports in China, etc — is necessary to force the kind of engagement you want. China has around 1300 medium range ballistic missiles, which is what we’re discussing.
Forcing China to overwhelm your single battleship (and support group, comparing BSG to CSG), depletes around 10-25% of their MRBMs, depending on their ability to penetrate your defenses. If they don’t make that choice, you obliterate the target and move on to the next one because you have 1200 glide bombs and the ability to resupply underway (similar to landing bombs on a carrier).
I don’t think we’re going to agree, but I appreciate you taking the time to give thoughtful criticism!
But that 200km is exactly my point: 120km back from the line of contact means that to hit it with 200km missiles, you’re within 80km of the contact line and the guns of my battleship for counter fire.
If I can force you to fire off your 1000km+ missiles at every transport ship that could potentially carry artillery shells or even dozens at my battleship to defeat its air defenses and sink it, then I’m accomplishing my goal of depleting your better weapons ahead of my main thrust. And surviving even minutes in a good firing position means raining down hundreds of 500kg+ glide bombs from the main guns.
A battleship is better than a carrier for “I’m going to sit here at 100km from the enemy and trade fire until they’re forced to go hard and overwhelm me”.