You can helicopter shells and propellant onto the deck, then take them below for storage — as loading the guns from their magazines already happens.

VLS requires that you reload missile by missile at the place they’re fired from the top, which requires you have crane access to each VLS cell. You could replace the many non-reloadable tubes with fewer, reloadable tubes connected via loaders to magazines… but we’re starting down the path to re-inventing guns.

Helicopters don't have that much range - certainly way less then a ship does. So either you're close enough to a land base they can make the trip, or you're operating from another munitions ship - it's all the same problem.

And again, you're paying for all of this in the form of far slower firing guns with less range and precision.

Helicopters can operate off supply ships, 100km back from the conflict area and ferry munitions to your battleship that’s standing only 20km back. You can also use airdrops from cargo planes, delivery by small boats, or dropping back to meet the supply ship directly. None of those methods resupply VLS cells.

We’re also not debating a return to old guns — but to a modern version using autoloaders and shells equipped with guidance and range extension, to around 100km using modern techniques. Using barrages of all barrels, it’s closer to firing off waves of ~45 missiles at targets 100km away (9 guns, 5 rounds per minute burst).

The real difference is a battleship carries 1200 rounds instead of 120 VLS cells — and can replenish those rounds at sea. We gain that increased storage and endurance for decreased burst capacity, but remain over 45/min; excluding the VLS cells (which a modern battleship would also have).

The problem is 100km back just isn't very far, when missiles like the Ukranian Neptune have a range currently of 200km, and extended range variants in the works that push that to 1,000km.

That's a non-NATO, "country at war" system. Within NATO inventory you have the Tomahawk that dates to the 80s and has a range of 1,350km conservatively.

So if you needed to fulfill a long-duration shore bombardment mission against a non-peer opponent...sure, there's advantages to being able to loiter and reload.

But it seems abundantly clear that versus any peer or near-peer opponent, the closer to their coastline you get then the further in-land they can launch anti-ship missiles from - which they are heavily incentivized to do, and where the sky is also just getting more and more dangerous - i.e. a ship within 100km of a shoreline is starting to be in the range of medium weight drones, or autonomous surface vessels (which might deploy drones - as the Ukranians have been doing).

In your example, the issue isn't that the ship doing the shooting is in range: it's that the resupply ship is also in range and a better target.

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!