The US Navy Bolted 32 Tomahawk Missiles Onto 58,000-Ton Iowa-Class Battleships. The Upgrade Took Their Reach From 24 Miles to 1,553.

Summary and Key Points: In December 1982, the United States Navy recommissioned a warship launched in 1942, and the ceremony’s real novelty sat amidships: eight gray armored boxes bolted to the deck where anti-aircraft guns once stood, each holding four cruise missiles. The Iowa-class modernization of the 1980s remains the strangest weapons marriage in American naval history, a hull designed to duel Yamato carrying weapons designed to fly into the Soviet Union, and every part of it can be measured — the reasons, the money, the missiles, the reach, and the seventeen days of combat that settled whether it worked.

And for me, the craziest part: you can at least see the Tomahawk equipment upgrades as they were left on the USS Iowa. I will include photos I took last August when I visited this battleship. 

The Kirov Problem and the 600-Ship Answer

The reasons began with a Soviet ship. The nuclear-powered Kirov-class battlecruisers, 28,000-ton missile ships that started appearing in 1980, rattled Western planners, and the incoming Reagan administration’s 600-ship Navy needed hulls fast.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger asked Congress in March 1981 to fund battleship reactivation as part of a $32.6 billion defense increase, and Chief of Naval Operations Thomas Hayward testified that New Jersey could return to sea in 16 months.

Four Iowa-class ships sat in mothballs at Bremerton and Philadelphia, each carrying nine 16-inch guns, 12 inches of belt armor, and 33-knot speed, and the Navy’s tactical concept was explicit: Tomahawks at long range, Harpoons at medium range, and the 16-inch battery for anything that survived to close range, with battleship surface action groups freeing carriers for the most dangerous waters.

Congress directed the reactivation in the summer of 1981.

New Jersey recommissioned on December 28, 1982, Iowa on April 28, 1984, Missouri on May 10, 1986, and Wisconsin on October 22, 1988.

Eight Armored Boxes, Thirty-Two Missiles

The conversion followed a single template across all four ships.

Yards removed four of the ten twin 5-inch gun mounts and the useless 40mm tubs, and into the cleared deck space went the Mark 143 Armored Box Launcher: a blast-hardened, elevating container holding four BGM-109 Tomahawks, chosen over exposed rails so the missiles could shelter behind the same philosophy as the ship’s armor.

Eight launchers per ship meant 32 Tomahawks. Four Mk 141 shock-hardened quad canisters added 16 Harpoon anti-ship missiles, four Phalanx guns provided close-in defense at 4,500 rounds per minute, and the electronics suite — SLQ-32 jammers, SRBOC decoy launchers, satellite communications, modern radars — dragged a 1944 combat system into the 1980s.

The nine 16-inch rifles and the remaining six 5-inch mounts stayed. Crewing fell from a wartime 2,700 to roughly 1,570.

A planned Phase II, which would remove the aft turret to accommodate 48 vertical launch cells or an aviation deck, was never funded.

What the Refit Cost for the Tomahawks

Hayward’s original pitch put New Jersey at $255 million; by April 2, 1981 the Navy’s estimate stood at $326 million, a 32 percent rise from the $247 million figure officials first gave, and the actual reactivation came in near that mark — roughly the price of a single new frigate for a 58,000-ton battleship.

Navy officials of the era put the four-ship average around $435 million per hull, and the Government Accountability Office’s later accounting settled the program total at about $1.7 billion for all four, roughly $5 billion in today’s dollars.

The Congressional Budget Office’s historical survey adds the sharpest context: the Reagan-era reactivations ran six times the per-ship cost of New Jersey’s bare-bones 1968 Vietnam reactivation, precisely because of the combat-systems upgrades — the missiles were most of the bill.

The missiles themselves cost about $2 million apiece in the dollars of the day.

The Reach the Missiles Added

The range mathematics are the heart of the upgrade, and they deserve precision by variant.

The 16-inch/50 Mark 7 threw its 2,700-pound armor-piercing shell to 24.047 miles at maximum elevation — the state of the art in 1944, and still the guns’ limit in 1980.

The Tomahawk family rewrote the number three ways.

The anti-ship variant reached 250 nautical miles (about 288 statute miles), a twelvefold increase in the number of ships it could kill.

The conventional land-attack version of the era flew roughly 700 nautical miles (about 806 statute miles), a 34-fold increase.

The nuclear-armed TLAM-N reached 1,350 nautical miles — 1,553 statute miles — a 65-fold extension of the ship’s striking arm, carried by a 992-pound-warhead missile cruising near 570 miles per hour a few dozen feet off the ground.

A battleship moored off Norfolk could, in principle, strike targets across half of Eastern Europe.

The guns got their own quiet upgrade, which the record tends to forget.

With the new Mark 160 fire-control system, the DR-810 muzzle-velocity radar mounted on the turrets, and improved propellant consistency, test shoots off Crete in 1987 put 15 shells from 34,000 yards into a 220-yard pattern, which the gunnery references rate as the most accurate battleship-caliber shooting ever recorded.

The 1980s battleship was simultaneously the world’s newest missile platform and its best-shooting gun platform.

What They Did With It

New Jersey drew the first combat, firing her 16-inch battery off Lebanon in 1983 and 1984 — gun work, with the missiles staying in their boxes.

The full system fought once, and completely.

At 1:40 on the morning of January 17, 1991, USS Missouri fired the first of her Tomahawks at Iraq, and she and Wisconsin stood among the nine ships that put 52 Tomahawks into the opening night of Desert Storm.

Across the campaign, the two battleships launched 52 land-attack missiles between them, 28 from Missouri and 24 from Wisconsin, with Wisconsin serving as the Tomahawk strike coordinator for the Gulf.

The guns joined on February 3, when Missouri’s main battery opened on Iraqi positions, and across 25 days the pair conducted 80 gunfire missions and fired 1,083 sixteen-inch shells — 759 from Missouri, 324 from Wisconsin, about 2.166 million pounds of ordnance by the Navy’s postwar accounting — with Wisconsin firing the last American battleship salvo in history on February 28, 1991.

Iraq had nothing afloat worth a Harpoon; the 16 anti-ship missiles per ship went home unfired.

The Size of the Upgrade, Measured

How big was it? I would measure it three ways.

In reach, a weapon system frozen at 24 miles since 1944 extended to 806 miles conventionally and 1,553 miles in its nuclear configuration, the single largest range extension any warship class has ever received in a refit.

In role, ships built to fight fleet duels became land-attack platforms that opened a war from over the horizon, a mission the class kept performing into an age their designers never imagined. In terms of accuracy, the same refit made forty-year-old rifles shoot patterns their 1944 crews would have called impossible.

But let’s not overstate what it meant compared to other warships.

Thirty-two missiles per ship was the magazine, with no reloads at sea, while the Ticonderoga cruisers and Burke destroyers arriving behind them carried the same Tomahawks in vertical launch cells with a tenth of the crew, an arithmetic that ended the experiment once the Soviet flag came down.

The End of the Battleships and Their Tomahawks 

The era carried its grief too: a turret explosion aboard Iowa on April 19, 1989, killed 47 sailors, the subject of GAO’s own investigative reporting alongside its cost work.

Iowa was decommissioned on October 26, 1990; New Jersey on February 8, 1991; Wisconsin that September, and Missouri, last of all the world’s battleships, on March 31, 1992 — the whole second career running under ten years, at $1.57 million of reactivation cost for every 16-inch round the class fired in its one war.

The hardware outlived the mission. The Navy scrapped the remaining 16-inch barrels and shells in 2006, with a final batch of projectiles disposed of in 2017, closing any road back for the guns.

The Tomahawk launchers became exhibits: Wisconsin’s museum at Norfolk has opened a Mark 143 for visitors, New Jersey’s boxes sit preserved on the Camden waterfront, and aboard Iowa at San Pedro the gray Tomahawk container amidships now draws more questions from visitors walking the museum decks — the comeback that will not repeat — even as the Navy’s proposed Trump-class battleships revive the 1981 question, with hypersonic cells in place of armored boxes, and 15 new hulls on the drawing board where four mothballed ships once waited.

My guess, those new battleships are going nowhere. But we will leave that for another time…

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.