I remember being bemused when I received my first orders to sea duty back in 1988, when I was a student at the surface-warfare school in Newport, Rhode Island. Me? Serving on board a World War II-era Iowa-class battleship? USS Wisconsin, the last of the Iowa-class breed, was being refitted and returned to service down in Pascagoula, Mississippi, after decades in mothballs. The ship’s last active service had been shore bombardment during the Korean War, over thirty years earlier. 

Several memories stand out, including serving as a gunnery officer performing naval gunfire support in the Persian Gulf in 1990-1991. 

The first day I stepped aboard, around this time in 1988, the battleship did not look like a warship. It was an industrial site shrouded in cables and pipes of all kinds. Bringing an old ship back to life and keeping it seaworthy is hard. The ship’s leadership used to boast about how young the battleships were. After all, they had lived brief, steaming lives during World War II and the Korean War. New Jersey returned to duty during the Vietnam War, but even that was only for a brief spell. 

But chronological age matters, not just mechanical age. Matériel like piping systems decays over time even while sitting idle. Moreover, spare parts were hard to come by in the 1980s-1990s since the vessels had been laid up so long. No maritime manufacturer had any incentive to stock spare parts for ships that presumably would never return to action. The U.S. Navy had kept things like ammunition and replacement gun barrels in storage just in case the battleships were ever recommissioned, but more mundane items were scarce in the extreme. On occasion, we even ended up scavenging for parts on board USS Alabama, a South Dakota-class museum ship in Mobile Bay. 

I am not trying to ravage the battlewagons’ legacy, by the way, not in the slightest. That was a great experience alongside great shipmates. Just pointing out that those decades in mothballs took their toll. Once, while anchored off the weapons station at Yorktown, Virginia, when I was serving as an engineering officer, we discovered the hard way that our “evaporators,” which converted seawater into freshwater for the boilers and the crew’s use, were defective upon leaving the shipyard. They were sluicing saltwater into the propulsion plant. 

You. Do. Not. Want. Saltwater. In. A. Boiler. It ruins them. 

Metal, heat, water, and salt do not mingle well. Corrosion kills, and thus keeping water pure is an obsession in steamship engineering departments. Salt was making its way into the boilers, so the engineers on watch isolated the problem but had to shut down all but one of eight boilers while taking on ammunition. And then guess what happened? A line feeding fuel to the one steaming boiler ruptured, spraying fuel on the hot boiler front where it could have ignited and caused a major conflagration. So the crew had to man fire parties overnight in case something really bad happened. 

Fire is very dangerous on a ship. A ship of war is a metal box packed with explosives and flammables such as fuel, lubricants, and paint, and it goes where a foe—hello, Iran and the Houthis—might try raining munitions on it. That’s why the first thing a new crewmember reporting aboard ship—officer or enlisted—is required to do is qualify in basic firefighting and damage control. Even USS Gerald R. Ford, America’s newest and premier aircraft carrier, recently rediscovered the perils of shipboard fire. Ford suffered a fire in its laundry spaces severe enough that the flattop had to withdraw from an active combat theater to undergo makeshift repairs. 

So keeping those old ships combat-ready was a trial, but here’s the counterpoint. They were ruggedly built in the extreme. In April 1989, the battleship Iowa suffered a gun-turret explosion that claimed the lives of 47 gunners, then managed to make its scheduled Baltic cruise that summer. I was embarked on the cruiser Ticonderoga, serving on a destroyer squadron staff for that deployment, and marveled at watching the battleship steam along (albeit with the stricken turret now inactive). 

The example of the Iowa-class is increasingly relevant to today’s fleet.

It reminds us that the industrial aspect of maintenance, repair, and overhaul is colossal—especially for older ships. Back then, the U.S. Navy fleet was getting younger and younger amid the frantic buildup to an (almost) 600-ship Navy. Today the fleet is aging, compounding the challenges, time, and cost of upkeep. You can run a classic car forever—if you’re willing to pay the cost, and don’t run it too hard. And spare parts for the classics become scarce. Hence our need to rummage for parts at the nearby Alabama museum ship. 

Again, the industrial factor is everlasting. 

The great baseball prophet Yogi Berra noted that prediction is tough, especially about the future. Like Yogi, I balk at prophecy. But here’s one: if you run a ship for eleven months, as with Ford during its recent combat cruise against Iran, or for over 250 days straight, as with Abraham Lincoln, unexpected woes are going to crop up when the ship puts into the yards after returning home. Machinery breaks. Overhauls suffer delays and cost overruns, setting back the fleet’s readiness for its high-seas duties. 

Back in the Reagan administration days, the Navy Department and the Pentagon limited peacetime deployments to six months out of each eighteen-month period, allowing adequate time for upkeep, training, and crew R&R.

The fleet was also twice the size it is now, allowing it to carry out its missions while keeping more forces in reserve, ready to deploy. One hopes we can make our way back toward a larger and less overworked navy. 

So there you have it. When a sailor starts a story saying There I was . . ., you know everything that comes after is a lie. 

There I was. 

James Holmes holds the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and served on the faculty of the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer, he was the last gunnery officer in history to fire a battleship’s big guns in anger, during the first Gulf War in 1991. He earned the Naval War College Foundation Award in 1994, signifying the top graduate in his class. His books include Red Star over the Pacific, an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of 2010 and a fixture on the Navy Professional Reading List.