USS Wisconsin: A Drone Surrender, 'Temper, Temper' and a Kentucky Bow

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Picture this, it's late February, 1991 You are an entrenched Iraqi soldier.

SPEAKER_2 (0:06)

Right, right on Faylaka Island.

SPEAKER_1 (0:08)

Exactly, Faylaka Island, right off the coast of Kuwait. The air is thick with tension, the ground has been shaking for days from artillery fire, and you are just bracing for this massive amphibious invasion.

SPEAKER_2 (0:20)

Waiting for the worst, basically.

SPEAKER_1 (0:22)

Yeah.

And suddenly, you hear this sound. It's a distinct, high-pitched buzzing, almost like a massive lawnmower.

SPEAKER_2 (0:32)

Or a really loud dirt bike.

SPEAKER_1 (0:33)

Yeah.

You look up, and there's a tiny, primitive robotic drone just circling in the sky above your trench.

And instead of shooting at it, instead of running to cover, you and your unit do something completely unprecedented.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

You wave a white flag.

SPEAKER_1 (0:49)

You start frantically waving makeshift white flags. You are literally surrendering to a robot.

SPEAKER_2 (0:55)

It remains, I mean, it's one of the most surreal and defining moments of the Gulf War. It is the very first time in recorded military history that human soldiers surrendered to an unmanned aerial vehicle.

SPEAKER_1 (1:06)

Which is wild.

SPEAKER_2 (1:07)

Oh, it's completely wild. But the context of what was actually controlling that drone makes the story even more fascinating.

SPEAKER_1 (1:14)

Right, because that is the detail that completely hooks you. That futuristic buzzing drone from the early 1990s was being piloted from the deck of a 57,000-ton steel behemoth that was built, wait for it, during World War II.

SPEAKER_2 (1:28)

Yeah, an incredible contrast.

SPEAKER_1 (1:31)

We're talking about an analog, heavy metal battleship executing 1990s drone warfare.

So if you're listening to this today, that's our mission for this deep dive. We are tracking the 50-year biography of that exact machine.

SPEAKER_2 (1:45)

The USS Wisconsin.

SPEAKER_1 (1:46)

Hole number Bb-64.

SPEAKER_2 (1:49)

Tracing the life of the Wisconsin is basically a masterclass in how military strategy, industrial engineering, and combat technology just drastically evolved over half a century.

SPEAKER_1 (1:58)

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_2 (1:59)

Because a battleship of that scale is essentially a floating city, right? And for that city to survive and actually remain relevant for 50 years, it has to constantly rebuild itself. It has to adapt to a world that's advancing technologically faster than any other period in human history.

SPEAKER_1 (2:15)

I want to dig into the sheer scale of this machine first, because to understand how a 1940s battleship was accepting surrenders via a buzzing robot in the 1990s, we have to look at the unique philosophy behind her creation.

SPEAKER_2 (2:28)

Where she came from.

SPEAKER_1 (2:29)

Exactly. The Wisconsin was authorized by Congress in 1938 and officially commissioned in April 1944 She's an Iowa class battleship, and numerically she is the highest numbered US battleship ever built.

SPEAKER_2 (2:42)

The Iowa class really represents the ultimate, like the final evolution of the American battleship line. And the physical specifications are staggering when you consider the era she was built in.

SPEAKER_1 (2:52)

No computers to design her.

SPEAKER_2 (2:54)

Exactly. All slide rules and drafting tables. She was 887 feet long, and she displaced over 57,000 tons when fully loaded for combat.

SPEAKER_1 (3:03)

And whenever we talk about naval ships, you know, that term displacement comes up. For anyone trying to visualize this, displacement isn't just the weight of the ship itself, right? It's the actual weight of the water the ship pushes out of the way when it sits in the ocean.

SPEAKER_2 (3:16)

That is the perfect way to visualize it. Imagine a steel structure so massive and dense that it literally displaces 57,000 tons of ocean just by existing.

SPEAKER_1 (3:28)

Unbelievable.

SPEAKER_2 (3:30)

Her main battery consisted of nine massive 16-inch guns. But despite all that heavy metal and thick armor plating, her defining trait, the engineering miracle that really set the Iowa class apart, was her speed.

SPEAKER_1 (3:43)

Right, because she was capable of 32.5 knots, which for a ship of that size is incredibly fast. How do you even physically propel 57,000 tons of steel through the water at almost 40 miles per hour?

SPEAKER_2 (3:56)

It required an immense, almost terrifying amount of power. Below decks, she housed eight massive oil-fired boilers.

SPEAKER_1 (4:04)

Okay.

SPEAKER_2 (4:05)

And these boilers superheated steam, feeding it into four geared steam turbines. Those turbines then turned four individual propellers.

And each one of those propellers was roughly the size of a two-story house.

SPEAKER_1 (4:18)

Wait, really?

SPEAKER_2 (4:19)

Yeah.

SPEAKER_1 (4:19)

A two-story house?

SPEAKER_2 (4:21)

Yeah. They were massive. The entire system generated 212,000 shaft horsepower.

To put the engineering tolerances in perspective, the designers built those turbines to safely handle a 20% overload if the ship needed to escape a desperate situation.