The Iowa-Class Was the Best Battleship Class Ever Built, and the Numbers Make the Case – Arguments about the greatest battleship class ever built usually drown in tonnage and armor tables. The cleaner test is the record: what the ships cost, what they did, how long their country kept finding reasons to send them back to sea. By that test, one class stands alone. The four Iowa-class battleships fought across five decades and five conflicts, were retired and resurrected three separate times, ended their careers launching cruise missiles from hulls laid down in the 1940s, and survive today as four museums. No battleship class in any navy’s history comes close, and the United States is now, remarkably, building ‘battleships’ again.
The Numbers That Start the Argument
Congress ordered six, and the Navy completed four: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri, and Wisconsin, with Illinois and Kentucky canceled as the war ended.
Each ran 887 feet and about 58,000 tons full load, drove 212,000 shaft horsepower, and made 33 knots, the fastest battleships ever built by anyone.
The price came to about $125 million per ship, according to an official Navy design history, versus roughly $100 million, according to the actuals commonly cited, wartime dollars either way. The armament never changed at its core: nine 16-inch/50 Mark 7 guns throwing 2,700-pound shells more than 20 miles. What changed was everything around them.
Five Decades, Five Wars
The lead ship, commissioned in February 1943, carried President Roosevelt across the Atlantic and fought through the Marshalls, the Marianas, and Okinawa; her sister Missouri hosted Japan’s surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.
Korea brought all four back for gunfire support, with Iowa serving as Seventh Fleet flagship in 1952. New Jersey went alone to Vietnam, bombarding the coast from September 1968 to April 1969.
The 1980s reactivations produced the strangest warships of the Cold War, and Desert Storm closed the account: on the war’s opening night, January 17, 1991, Missouri and Wisconsin stood among the nine ships that fired 52 Tomahawks into Iraq, and between them the two battleships put 52 cruise missiles and more than a thousand 16-inch shells into the campaign, Wisconsin firing the last battleship salvo in world history.
The Class That Refused to Retire
No warships were ever retired so often. Decommissioned in the late 1940s, they returned for Korea. Parked again in 1958, New Jersey came back for Vietnam. Mothballed once more, all four returned under the Reagan buildup, rebuilt with 32 Tomahawks, 16 Harpoons, and Phalanx defenses bolted alongside the original guns, at a cost the GAO later tallied at $1.7 billion for the quartet.
Iowa-Class 16-Inch Gun August 2025 19FortyFive Image. Taken by Harry J. Kazianis.
The pattern was so pronounced that one analysis calls it an addiction: three generations of admirals swore off the battleships, and three crises brought them back.
The record carries its grief too, soberly: a turret explosion aboard Iowa in April 1989 killed 47 sailors, the class’s worst day in half a century of service.
The Case for Best Ever
Stack the claims and see what you get, and I think you will agree, these were surely the best battleships ever.
Fastest battleships ever built. The only battleships to serve are armed with cruise missiles, in the missile age, and fire them in anger. Zero ships lost across five decades. A combat span, 1943 to 1991, that no capital ship class of any nation approaches.
In the great paper duels, American radar fire control and rate of fire led many analysts to score even the Yamato matchup for the American gunnery system the Iowas carried.
The counterargument exists, and this site has made it: the hulls are museums now, corrosion is winning, and a fifth comeback is not coming.
Yet the advocates have never quite surrendered, and for decades the ships were preserved on the naval register precisely because Congress kept asking whether the fleet could replace their gunfire. The Navy tried to retire them three times.
The verb matters. Tried.
The Battleship Is Being Built Again
The strongest closing evidence arrived in this decade: the Navy’s budget now carries the Trump-class battleship, the ‘sort of’ first American capital gunships ordered since 1940, a program whose entire premise is that the Iowas’ combination of armor, magazine depth, and presence was worth resurrecting a fourth time in new steel.
Whatever that program becomes, the four originals it honors are still afloat: Iowa at Los Angeles, where the Pacific Battleship Center announced an America 250 partnership in March 2026 for the country’s 250th anniversary, New Jersey at Camden, Wisconsin at Norfolk, and Missouri at Pearl Harbor, moored a few hundred yards from the wreck of the Arizona, with the surrender deck where the Second World War ended open to visitors seven days a week.
About the Author: Harry J. Kazianis
Harry J. Kazianis (@Grecianformula) was the former Senior Director of National Security Affairs at the Center for the National Interest (CFTNI), a foreign policy think tank founded by Richard Nixon based in Washington, DC. Harry has over a decade of experience in think tanks and national security publishing. His ideas have been published in the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and many other outlets worldwide. He has held positions at CSIS, the Heritage Foundation, the University of Nottingham, and several other institutions related to national security research and studies. He is the former Executive Editor of the National Interest and the Diplomat. He holds a Master’s degree focusing on international affairs from Harvard University.
