Battleships Are the Worst Possible Choice for Fighting Aliens

Transformers, the concept, is the defining ontological challenge of our time. Clue, the film, is a definitive text of the American avant-garde. So the problem is not, as various troglodytes might claim, a toy-based movie in the abstract. No, Battleship, out this weekend, conjures very specific—and almost certainly intractable—species of suck.

First, the Hasbro board game: Free of murder mysteries or sentient convertibles, Battleship is a deadly dull exercise in skill-lessness, a remedial lesson in Cartesian geometry barely, scornfully masquerading as entertainment. Director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights) would have gotten more plot (and deeper characterization, obviously) out of Guess Who? For several generations now of waylaid youth, the sole lesson a game of Battleship could possibly impart is historiographical: Invented in 1943, the game grants its namesake playing piece—the battleship—four spaces (i.e., hit points). The aircraft carrier gets five.

Thus, the second and fatal objection to the Battleship conceit. If we think that an alien invasion—by definition, attack from above—can be thwarted with battleships, the human race is doomed to quick, and deserved, extinction. One can’t help but think that Berg and Universal Pictures made a simple linguistic error: battles are thrilling; ships are awesome; but battleships are icons of hubris, waste, and hidebound failure of imagination. When the aliens actually come, don’t expect the most ineffectual weapon system of all time to help.

Consider the record:

Upon completion in 1906, the first modern battleship, the Royal Navy’s HMS Dreadnought, was said to render all previous capital ships obsolete. And with its steam propulsion, “all big-gun” (12-inch) battery, and 21-knot speed, indeed it did. Like kleenex or realtors, “dreadnought” became a genericized brand name, and the world’s sea powers—led by Britain and Germany, but with such regional sideshows as Argentina v. Brazil v. Chile —embarked on a decade-long naval arms race. Admirals under all flags were overtaken by wet dreams of massive fleet actions let by dreadnoughts lobbing huge shells at each other from beyond the horizon.

But dreadnoughts were expensive, extravagantly so. They nonetheless remained traditional surface ships, meaning millions of dollars, tons of raw material, years of industrial output, and hundreds of men were exceedingly vulnerable to the dumb luck of a single well-placed torpedo. Now, out-of-control arms races—even ruinously expensive ones based on weapons too materially, strategically, or morally dear to risk in battle—needn’t end in inevitable disaster. Such is the logic of nuclear deterrence, which has held for six decades. The tragic absurdism of the pre-1914 battleship race is that the iron behemoths were powerful and disruptive enough to help spark global war, but not enough to help win (or shorten) it.

And so for nearly the entire First World War, the bulk of the British battle fleet stayed parked in its base at Scapa Flow, staring down Imperial Germany’s High Seas Fleet parked at Kiel. On May 31, 1916, they finally sallied out of port for the Battle of Jutland, a singularly indecisive clash marked by the weapon system’s trademark risk aversion. As always, it was smarter to save your own battleship than to try to sink the other guy’s. Soaking up millions that might have been spent on planes or tanks (or U-boats and blockade-runners), the Kaiser’s beloved battleships were ultimately sunk by their own crews—scuttled to prevent the British from taking possession of the fleet under the Treaty of Versailles.

By the end of World War I, battleships were so clearly seen as destabilizing white elephants that they occasioned the first real international arms-reduction and -limitation agreement. The Washington Naval Treaty (1922) established a ten-year moratorium on building capital ships (i.e., battleships and battlecruisers, which were slightly faster and lighter), limited their maximum displacement to 35,000 tons, and capped the total tonnage of signatory navies at a fixed ratio of 5:5:3:1.75:1.75 for the U.S.:U.K.:Japan:Italy:France. (America and the British Empire were allowed 525,000 tons each.)

The Washington regime held, more or less, until the mid-1930s. Led by Nazi Germany, whose own boats were limited to a paltry 10,000 tons by Versailles, the decade’s rearmament sparked something of a second battleship race. But with naval aviation infinitely more mature, the next war would see battleships become something even more pitiful than weapons of deadlock—namely, sites of ignominy.

It was not really their fault that eight U.S. battleships were in port for the Pearl Harbor attack (1941) while all three of the Pacific Fleet’s valuable aircraft carriers were at sea for exercises. But America’s lucky break—and the fact that Japan’s raid was carried out via long-distance air strike—nicely demonstrated which way capital ships were trending: Carriers wielding planes, not battleships tossing artillery, were the future.

In the U.S. Navy, the latter generally faded from the scene with a degree of gracefulness, transitioning to supporting roles as gargantuan carrier escorts and shore-bombardment craft. Elsewhere, battleships made for the exits as soap operatically as the Dreadnought entered, with the unseemly tendency to go down in pissing contests that held little impact for the greater war, beyond demonstrating the futility of it all.

In May 1941, the British public was scandalized over the demise of the battlecruiser HMS Hood; long the Royal Navy’s flagship, it was sunk by a single shell, some 15 minutes after engaging the new German battleship Bismark. Churchill famously put out the call to Sink the Bismark; carrier-borne bombers got her two days later.

Later that year, the freshly commissioned British battleship HMS Prince of Wales, which was at the scene of the Hood sinking, went down with the battlecruiser HMS Repulse off the coast of Malaya. Japan’s attack, carried out a few days after Pearl Harbor, was the first time air power alone had sunk capital ships in the open sea.

The problem was basic: Under attack by torpedoes or aerial bombs, isolated battleships (or battlecruisers) were slow, shiny, sitting ducks, and by 1943 only the United States could really field a fleet large and diverse enough to make them worthwhile as weapons. At the same time, however, a lesser power looking to make a statement with its declining industrial capacity could garner more superlative bang for its buck with a single huge battleship than a few destroyers, or dozens of submarines, or hundreds of gunboats. The battleship is, at heart, the vessel of fatalism.

Thus, at a displacement of 50,000 tons, the Bismark started WWII as the so-called “Nazi Supership”, and her class remains the heaviest capital ships ever put to sea in Europe. By 1942, Japan’s two Yamato-class boats (five were planned, one was converted to a carrier) were displacing close to 70,000 tons—still the largest battleships ever built. National icons, both the Yamato and the Musashi were held back, WWI-style, from much serious action until 1944. The latter didn’t make it past October. The former was sunk by U.S. carrier aircraft in April 1945, after having used its huge 18-inch artillery against an enemy vessel a grand total of once (during the Battle of Leyte Gulf). As last-gasp weapons, the kamikaze were significantly more effective.

On September 2, 1945, the Iowa-class battleship USS Missouri was given the privilege of accepting the surrender in Tokyo Bay. But its kind was nearly as vanquished as the Japanese. By 1960, essentially all battleships were dead—many going out in blazes of other weapons’ glory, as target practice (notably, of the nuclear-test variety). The U.S. briefly resurrected one of the Iowa ships in the late 1960s, to sit safely offshore and hurl unconscionable quantities of metal at Vietnam. For reasons inexplicable, Ronald Reagan, America’s first sci-fi president, again de-mothballed all four Iowa sisters in the 1980s. The Missouri and Wisconsin fired a few shells and cruise missiles during Desert Storm; these were the last acts of the battleship. Even in an age of CGI miracles and principled incoherence, one does wonder how Berg’s flick could possibly paint its eponymous hero in anything like a heroic light. But don’t let your curiosity get the better of you! For some reason, Battleship premiered weeks ago outside the U.S., and so its Wikipedia plot summary is fully filled in. Spoiler alert:

Believing that a larger invasion might be imminent, the scientist acquires a radio which Samantha uses to warn Alex. He had planned to destroy the array with his ship, but since John Paul Jones has been destroyed, the survivors are forced to return to base and acquire the only available naval vessel, the battleship USS Missouri. Although a museum ship, Alex and his crew are able to reactivate Missouri with the aid of the retired veterans preserving her. The battleship engages the alien ship and destroys its barrier but ends up with only one high-explosive shell remaining. Alex uses it to fire on the array, but before the defenseless Missouri can be attacked one more time, fighters from the RIMPAC fleet (which scrambled to attack as soon as the barrier fell) arrive and eliminate the alien ship. The NASA array explodes, destroying the aliens and their equipment.

Once the world’s costliest, scariest terror weapon, reduced to special-ed moral victor: a 2-D thinker graded on a curve and saved, yet again, by carrier-launched craft from above. If nothing else, then, Berg’s Battleship will be a work of unflinching realism.

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