#2 ...Sadly, the battlewagons are gone. Iowa, New Jersey, and Missouri are all museums and beyond bringing back as warships. Wisconsin was held in semi-restorable status for some years, but IIRC that was changed a couple years ago and she is now a museum herself at Norfolk. There are no spares, no support facilities, and most importantly, there is no money for a crew that big.
As far as designing a new 'heavy combatant'...Dear Lord, think about how badly the current Naval-Industrial Complex would frack that up. Look at the horror show design of the LCS - I mean, frigate - became. Imagine what they'd do to a 'heavy combatant'. (Actually, you don't have to imagine, just look at the USS Zumwalt.)We'd have to design a new missile - Tomahawk and Harpoon are both, bluntly, obsolete, so there's a couple of hundreds of billions of dollars there. And finally, any idea of a heavy gun is going to have to stay buried - the USN can't design a proper 5' gun any more, much less anything bigger, and we no longer have the industrial base to do so anyways. Railguns might - MIGHT - be a game changer, but it's way too early to tell.
Keep in mind too that big is nice - lots of space to put in new stuff later and absorb hits if it comes to that - but it's really not necessary, at least not for us. Everything we need to kill other ships we can squeeze into a Burke class DDG because American technology. The Soviets needed a Kirov sized hull because that's what was needed to carry their tech, along with two separate propulsion systems because they couldn't build one big enough and well enough to trust - an American Kirov, with the same punch, would have been notably smaller.
Mike |