Sb @ 17: The later battleships were gorgeous works of art, but is a 16 inch gun really preferable to even a subsonic cruise missile carrying roughly the same payload? Copying the Russians we are now also developing supersonic cruise missiles – which of course have much longer ranges. Not sure what the naval weapon of choice is these days for shorter range, say ten miles and in. Torpedo, I guess, including the supercritical version (where again we are copying the Russians).