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The capital ships of a navy are its most important warships; they are generally the larger ships when compared to other warships in their respective fleet. A capital ship is generally a leading or a primary ship in a naval fleet.


Strategic implications

There is usually no formal criterion for the classification, but it is a useful concept in naval strategy; for example, it permits comparisons between relative naval strengths in a
theatre of operations In warfare, a theater or theatre is an area in which important military events occur or are in progress. A theater can include the entirety of the airspace, land and sea area that is or that may potentially become involved in war operations. T ...
without the need for considering specific details of tonnage or gun diameters. A notable example of this is the Mahanian doctrine, which was applied in the planning of the defence of Singapore in World War II, where the
Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...
had to decide the allocation of its battleships and battlecruisers between the Atlantic and Pacific theatres. The Mahanian doctrine was also applied by the Imperial Japanese Navy, leading to its preventive move to attack Pearl Harbor and the battleships of the
U.S. Pacific Fleet The United States Pacific Fleet (USPACFLT) is a theater-level component command of the United States Navy, located in the Pacific Ocean. It provides naval forces to the Indo-Pacific Command. Fleet headquarters is at Joint Base Pearl Harbor� ...
. The naval nature of the Pacific Theater of Operations, more commonly referred to as the Pacific War, necessitated the United States Navy mostly deploying its battleships and aircraft carriers in the Pacific. The war in Europe was primarily a land war; consequently, Germany's surface fleet was small, and the escort ships used in the
Battle of the Atlantic The Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign in World War II, ran from 1939 to the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, covering a major part of the naval history of World War II. At its core was the Allied naval blockad ...
were mostly destroyers and
destroyer escort Destroyer escort (DE) was the United States Navy mid-20th-century classification for a warship designed with the endurance necessary to escort mid-ocean convoys of merchant marine ships. Development of the destroyer escort was promoted by th ...
s to counter the U-boat threat.


Age of Sail

Before the advent of the all-steel navy in the late 19th century, a capital ship during the
Age of Sail The Age of Sail is a period that lasted at the latest from the mid-16th (or mid- 15th) to the mid- 19th centuries, in which the dominance of sailing ships in global trade and warfare culminated, particularly marked by the introduction of naval ...
was generally understood as a ship that conformed to the
Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...
's rating system of a ship of the line as being of the first, second,
third Third or 3rd may refer to: Numbers * 3rd, the ordinal form of the cardinal number 3 * , a fraction of one third * 1⁄60 of a ''second'', or 1⁄3600 of a ''minute'' Places * 3rd Street (disambiguation) * Third Avenue (disambiguation) * Hi ...
or fourth rates: * First rate: 100 or more guns, typically carried on three or four decks. Four-deckers suffered in rough seas, and the lowest deck could seldom fire except in calm conditions . * Second rate: 90–98 guns. * Third rate: 64 to 80 guns (although 64-gun third-raters were small and not very numerous in any era). * Fourth rate: 46 to 60 guns. By 1756, these ships were acknowledged to be too weak to stand in the line of battle and were relegated to ancillary duties, although they also served in the shallow North Sea and American littorals where larger ships of the line could not sail.
Frigate A frigate () is a type of warship. In different eras, the roles and capabilities of ships classified as frigates have varied somewhat. The name frigate in the 17th to early 18th centuries was given to any full-rigged ship built for speed and ...
s were ships of the
fifth rate In the rating system of the Royal Navy used to categorise sailing warships, a fifth rate was the second-smallest class of warships in a hierarchical system of six " ratings" based on size and firepower. Rating The rating system in the Royal ...
;
sixth rate In the rating system of the Royal Navy used to categorise sailing warships, a sixth-rate was the designation for small warships mounting between 20 and 28 carriage-mounted guns on a single deck, sometimes with smaller guns on the upper works an ...
s comprised small frigates and
corvette A corvette is a small warship. It is traditionally the smallest class of vessel considered to be a proper (or " rated") warship. The warship class above the corvette is that of the frigate, while the class below was historically that of the sloop ...
s. Towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars and into the late 19th century, some larger and more powerful frigates were classified as fourth rates.


Battleship / battlecruiser

The term "capital ship" was first coined in 1909 and formally defined in the limitation treaties of the 1920s and 1930s in the
Washington Naval Treaty The Washington Naval Treaty, also known as the Five-Power Treaty, was a treaty signed during 1922 among the major Allies of World War I, which agreed to prevent an arms race by limiting naval construction. It was negotiated at the Washington N ...
, London Naval Treaty, and
Second London Naval Treaty The Second London Naval Treaty was an international treaty signed as a result of the Second London Naval Disarmament Conference held in London, the United Kingdom. The conference started on 9 December 1935 and the treaty was signed by the pa ...
. This applied mainly to ships resulting from the dreadnought revolution; dreadnought battleships (also known first as dreadnoughts and later as battleships) and battlecruisers. In the 20th century, especially in World Wars I and II, typical capital ships would be
battleship A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of large caliber guns. It dominated naval warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term ''battleship'' came into use in the late 1880s to describe a type ...
s and
battlecruiser The battlecruiser (also written as battle cruiser or battle-cruiser) was a type of capital ship of the first half of the 20th century. These were similar in displacement, armament and cost to battleships, but differed in form and balance of attr ...
s. All of the above ships were close to 20,000 tons displacement or heavier, with large caliber guns and heavy armor protection. Cruisers, despite being important ships, were not considered capital ships. An exception to the above in World War II was the . Though this class was technically similar to a heavy cruiser, albeit slower but with considerably heavier guns, they were regarded by some as capital ships (hence the British label "Pocket battleship") since they were one of the few heavy surface units of the Kriegsmarine. The American , Dutch
Design 1047 battlecruiser Design 1047, also known as Project 1047,Noot (1980), p. 257 was a series of plans for a class of Dutch battlecruisers prior to the Second World War. These large capital ships were intended to counter the threat posed by Japanese aggression towards ...
and the Japanese
Design B-65 cruiser Design B-65 was a class of Super Type A cruisersAccording to ''Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1922–1946'', p. 178, the Japanese classified Super Type A cruisers as heavy cruisers; however, Garzke and Dulin assert in ''Battleships: Axis ...
, planned specifically to counter the heavy cruisers being built by their naval rivals, have been described as "super cruisers", "large cruisers" or even "unrestricted cruisers", with some advocating that they even be considered as battlecruisers, however they were never classified as capital ships. During the Cold War, a
Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nationa ...
large missile cruiser had a displacement great enough to rival World War II-era battleships and battlecruisers, perhaps defining a new capital ship for that era. In regard to technical design, however, the ''Kirov'' is simply a supersized guided-missile cruiser with nuclear propulsion.


Aircraft carrier

It took until late 1942 for
aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for Carrier-based aircraft, carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. Typically, it is the capital ship of a ...
s to be universally considered capital ships. Only full-size fleet carriers (whether purpose built, or converted from battleship/battlecruiser hulls) were regarded as capital ships, while
light carrier A light aircraft carrier, or light fleet carrier, is an aircraft carrier that is smaller than the standard carriers of a navy. The precise definition of the type varies by country; light carriers typically have a complement of aircraft only one-h ...
s (often using cruiser hulls) and escort carriers (often using merchant ship hulls) were not. The U.S. Navy was forced to rely primarily on its aircraft carriers after the
attack on Pearl Harbor The attack on Pearl HarborAlso known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, ju ...
sank or damaged eight of its Pacific-fleet battleships. In the 21st century, the aircraft carrier is the last remaining capital ship, with capability defined in decks available and aircraft per deck rather than in guns and
caliber In guns, particularly firearms, caliber (or calibre; sometimes abbreviated as "cal") is the specified nominal internal diameter of the gun barrel bore – regardless of how or where the bore is measured and whether the finished bore match ...
s. The United States possesses supremacy in both contemporary categories of aircraft carriers, possessing 11 active duty
supercarrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for Carrier-based aircraft, carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. Typically, it is the capital ship of a ...
s each capable of carrying and launching nearly 100 tactical aircraft, and nine
amphibious assault ship An amphibious assault ship is a type of amphibious warfare ship employed to land and support ground forces on enemy territory by an amphibious assault. The design evolved from aircraft carriers converted for use as helicopter carriers (and, as ...
s which are equivalent in the "
Sea Control Ship The Sea Control Ship (SCS) was a small aircraft carrier developed and conceptualized by the United States Navy under Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt during the 1970s. Currently the term refers to naval vessels that can perform similar du ...
" configuration to the light
VSTOL A vertical and/or short take-off and landing (V/STOL) aircraft is an airplane able to take-off or land vertically or on short runways. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft are a subset of V/STOL craft that do not require runways at a ...
carriers operated by other nations.
James F. Amos James F. "Jim" Amos (born November 12, 1946) is a retired United States Marine Corps four-star general who served as the 35th Commandant of the Marine Corps. As a naval aviator, Amos commanded the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing during the Iraq War i ...
br>"Gen Amos' speech to Surface Navy Association."


Nuclear submarines

Ballistic missile submarine A ballistic missile submarine is a submarine capable of deploying submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) with nuclear warheads. The United States Navy's hull classification symbols for ballistic missile submarines are SSB and SSBN – t ...
s (or "boomers"), while important ships and similar in tonnage to early battleships, are usually counted as part of a nation's nuclear deterrent force and do not share the sea control mission of traditional capital ships. Nevertheless, many navies, including the Royal Navy and the United States Navy, consider these ships to be capital ships and have given some of them names previously used for battleships, e.g. ''Dreadnought'' and ''Vanguard''.


Naming

Some navies reserve specific names for their capital ships. Names reserved for capital ships include chiefs of state (e.g. ), important places, historically important naval officers or admiralty (e.g. ), historical events or objects (e.g. ), and traditional names (e.g. ). However, there are some exceptions to the rule. Beginning with (the first U.S. battleship), U.S. capital ships were traditionally named after U.S. states. Cruisers are typically named after
U.S. territories Territories of the United States are sub-national administrative divisions overseen by the federal government of the United States. The various American territories differ from the U.S. states and tribal reservations as they are not sove ...
(e.g. Alaska-class cruisers just before and during World War II) or U.S. cities. Prior to and during World War II, the Imperial Japanese Navy also followed the practice of naming battleships after provinces (e.g. ). Despite their significance to modern fleets, the U.S. Navy has never named aircraft carriers after U.S. states. Today, U.S. aircraft carriers are usually named after politicians and other individuals notable in US naval history such as
Gerald R. Ford Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. ( ; born Leslie Lynch King Jr.; July 14, 1913December 26, 2006) was an American politician who served as the 38th president of the United States from 1974 to 1977. He was the only president never to have been elected ...
and
Chester W. Nimitz Chester William Nimitz (; February 24, 1885 – February 20, 1966) was a fleet admiral in the United States Navy. He played a major role in the naval history of World War II as Commander in Chief, US Pacific Fleet, and Commander in C ...
. Beginning with the first class of
Trident A trident is a three- pronged spear. It is used for spear fishing and historically as a polearm. The trident is the weapon of Poseidon, or Neptune, the God of the Sea in classical mythology. The trident may occasionally be held by other marine ...
-equipped ballistic missile submarines (i.e. the ), state names have been applied to U.S. nuclear submarines. Previous ballistic missile submarines (e.g. Poseidon missile-equipped submarines) had not been named for states. After the completion of the last ''Ohio''-class ballistic missile submarine, state names were also applied to attack submarines (e.g. ). Earlier attack submarines had usually been named for marine animals or, commencing with the ), cities and towns.


See also

* Ship of the line *
Flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the ...
*
Dreadnought The dreadnought (alternatively spelled dreadnaught) was the predominant type of battleship in the early 20th century. The first of the kind, the Royal Navy's , had such an impact when launched in 1906 that similar battleships built after her ...
*
Battleship A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of large caliber guns. It dominated naval warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The term ''battleship'' came into use in the late 1880s to describe a type ...
*
Battlecruiser The battlecruiser (also written as battle cruiser or battle-cruiser) was a type of capital ship of the first half of the 20th century. These were similar in displacement, armament and cost to battleships, but differed in form and balance of attr ...
*
Aircraft carrier An aircraft carrier is a warship that serves as a seagoing airbase, equipped with a full-length flight deck and facilities for Carrier-based aircraft, carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering aircraft. Typically, it is the capital ship of a ...
* Nuclear submarine *
List of sunken battleships Sunken battleships are the wrecks of large capital ships built from the 1880s to the mid-20th century that were either destroyed in battle, mined, deliberately destroyed in a weapons test, or scuttling, scuttled. The battleship, as the might of a ...
*
List of sunken battlecruisers Sunken battlecruisers are large capital ships built in the first half of the 20th century that were either destroyed in battle, scuttled, or destroyed in a weapon test. They were similar in size and cost to a battleship, and typically carried th ...
*
List of sunken aircraft carriers With the advent of heavier-than-air flight, the aircraft carrier has become a decisive weapon at sea.Bishop & Chant, p. 1 In 1911 aircraft began to be successfully launched and landed on ships with the successful flight of a Curtiss Pusher aboa ...
* List of sunken nuclear submarines


Notes


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Capital Ship Ship types