Keep in mind that we once had many battleships in the fleet. They were rendered obsolete by the airplane.
Battleships are very fat targets in this age.
Bismarck and Musashi were eventually sunk by bombs. Then there was the near-successful attempt sinking USS Cole reflecting the potency of asymmetric warfare, and of course current drone technology which, if Ukrainian boat drones are able to sink large Russian missile cruisers, what more with a battleship about the size of an Iowa?
He’s in it mainly for the belief he wants to show a bigger e-peen.
Against a single multi-million dollar missile? Yep. Against a cloud of 500 cheap drones, each one moving in an unpredictable way? No. I suspect it would kill a lot of them, but some of them would get through.
Apparently a Phalanx fires 4500 rounds per minute, but that “rounds per minute” figure is deceiving because it can’t fire for a minute. It has a magazine that holds about 1500 rounds, enough for about 20 seconds. The original “Block 0” phalanx took 2 men 10-30 minutes to change a magazine. Block 1 improved that to less than 5 minutes. This makes sense with their original threat model: one, maybe 2 very expensive missiles coming at the ship.
It seems to me that if you can spend 100 drones to draw fire for the Phalanx for 20 seconds, you now have a 5 minute window where there’s no CIWS to protect the ship.
The USS Cole was nearly sunk by a small fiberglass boat. And, you don’t even need weapons. The USS John McCain almost sunk itself by running into another ship, just a month or so after something similar happened to the USS Fitzgerald.
Anytime someone mentions the CIWS in a situation that isn’t about cruise missiles or drone boats I instantly disregard what they have to say.
People like that only bring it up because it’s the only thing they know about and they only know about it because it’s extremely flashy.
That’s usually because they’re referring to the Phalanx CRAM system, which is a derivitave of the Phalanx CIWS system used by the US navy. The two look extremely similar (for obvious reasons, they share many components) and often the CIWS label is (incorrectly) used interchangably to refer to both systems. CRAM, which for at least the last fifteen years has been deployed on Navy vessels operating close enough to a coastline that the whole “swarm of drones” tactic is a feasible threat, is more than capable of engaging with those threats, and has repeatedly demonstrated that capability. It’s massively expanded magazine capacity, cheaper ammunition and (greatly) improved mechatronics on top of a more-accurate-at-engagement-range weapon are extremely flashy, but also extremely effective.
It’s super flashy, that’s why you see it in movies and stuff. But the CI in CIWS stands for Close In, meaning they’re one of the last layers of defence before something hits the ship. If the Phalanx has to fire, all the other layers of defence have failed. Like most military stuff, stats about it are not available to the general public. But, we do know about some of the failures. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jarrett