To the poster suggestng continual upgrades to iowa battleship class. A ship designed and built in WW2 is now 70 years old. How much stress and age can a hull take? Even supertankers and comparable cargo ships are retired after a few decades at most. The stresses of the ocean on a hull are tremendous and the ship becomes unsafe to sail after so many years on high seas.
Also, the Iowas were the very last of the steam powered sailing ships. Nowadays everything is gas turbine. When they reactivated those ships in the 80s, they had to convince quite few guys to come out of retirement to train the new support staff and sailors to run/repair these systems.
I'm a battleship fan myself but eventually these ships just have to quit at some point.
The ship is old, but they have been sitting idle most of that time. That is quite different than sailing the seas. They are in fantastic shape, mechanically.
As far as the ship's engines go, there are plenty of people around that know how to operate them. That's no problem at all. In fact, Navy ships with identical powerplants were only retired in about 2004 or so...the Sacremento class fast combat support ships were built (and used for 40 years, btw) used powerplants from the unfinished Iowa class BB's Kentucky and Illinois. So those engines were at sea within the last decade. Also, the carrier Kitty Hawk was just decommissioned in 2009, also steam powered. The knowledge base is still there, for sure.
But again, I wasn't advocating for the Iowas' return now, just questioning the NEED for such ships as the Zumwalt....and if there was truly a need for them, why have we gone over 20 years with NOTHING that could even come close to what an Iowa could do in 1991, much less what one that had been gradually upgraded over time could do by now.
They are gross wastes of money, IMO.