Every pier you’ve ever walked past has a few rubber pads bolted along its face, sitting between the concrete and whatever ties up alongside. They’re called marine fenders, and on a normal pier you swap a couple out in a morning with a crane, two guys and a long lunch. You’ve seen a thousand of them and you’ve never once thought about them, which is more or less the job description of a fender.<\/p>\n
At Nauticus<\/a> in Norfolk, swapping two of them took about a year of planning and the first movement of the battleship Wisconsin since December 7, 2000.<\/p>\n Crews pulled the pedestrian bridge off the ship around 7:30 Tuesday morning, let go the chains holding her against the pier, and tugboats from Crofton Industries pushed 887 feet of Iowa-class battleship four or five feet out into the Elizabeth River. One fender came out before noon. The second had clearly been doing more of the work, and it brought some of the ship’s paint up with it. If you’re picturing a battleship steaming off somewhere, it wasn’t that. Nobody started an engine. The tugs did the pushing and the ship just leaned away from the wall.<\/p>\n “It takes a lot of planning, it takes a lot of physics,” Nauticus executive director Stephen Kirkland told WTKR<\/a>.<\/p>\n He’s not exaggerating, and the hard part probably isn’t what you’d guess. Shoving her out into the river is the simple part, and a pair of tugs will do that all day. What’s complicated is everything bolted across that gap after 26 years of a warship working as a building, because the phone lines, the IT lines, the shore power and the water hookups all run over there, and none of it stretches. Kirkland says tracing all of that is what ate the year. None of it is glamorous work, and all of it has to be right before anybody lets go of a chain.<\/p>\n So what’s the big deal about four feet?<\/p>\n Roughly 45,000 tons of big deal. That’s the Wisconsin’s standard displacement in the Navy’s own history of the ship, and she’s listed at 57,540 tons fully loaded. She isn’t carrying fuel oil or ammunition these days, so Tuesday’s real number sat somewhere underneath that, and as far as I can tell nobody publishes what a museum battleship weighs on a given morning. Either way, you’re not nudging it by hand, and you can’t tap the brakes once it’s moving.<\/p>\n The Wisconsin’s one of four Iowa-class ships, the biggest and fastest battleships this country ever built. She came out of mothballs in October 1988 as part of the Reagan-era push for a 600-ship Navy, sailed for the Gulf the following summer, and was sitting on station before most Americans had heard of Operation Desert Shield. On the first night of Desert Storm she ran the Tomahawk launch sequence for the entire Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n Then she went to work with the guns, and the ammunition’s worth a sentence here. Those 16-inch rifles fire two different things. One’s a 2,700-pound armor-piercing shell built to punch through the side of another battleship. The other’s a lighter 1,900-pound high-capacity round for hitting things on land, and that’s the one Iraq got. The Naval History and Heritage Command<\/a> calls them one-ton high-explosive projectiles, which gives you the general idea. Neither one is subtle, but only one of them was ever meant for a beach.<\/p>\n By the time she was done she’d put 528 of them ashore across 36 separate fire missions.<\/p>\n On the morning of February 26, 1991 she anchored 11 miles off Kuwait City, inside the range of Iraqi Silkworm missiles, and fired the final gun mission of the war. No American battleship has fired a shot in anger since. The Navy buys reach a different way now, and you can see where the money went in a destroyer rewired end to end<\/a> so that one radar can do the work of two ships.<\/p>\n During the 1980s refit the Wisconsin picked up eight RQ-2 Pioneers. If you haven’t seen one, it’s a propeller drone about the size of a car, shot off the stern with a rocket booster and caught in a net on the way home, with a daylight television camera and an infrared one in the nose. Its job was watching where the shells landed and telling the gunners how far off they were, and it was sending video back to the ship from more than 60 miles out.<\/p>\n That worked well enough that the Iraqi troops on Faylaka Island figured out what the buzzing overhead meant. A drone showed up, and a couple minutes later so did the shells. You can probably see where this is going, and it went there faster than anyone expected.<\/p>\n By the Navy’s account, a Pioneer flight over Faylaka on March 1, 1991 found hundreds of Iraqi soldiers underneath it with white flags up. It’s the first time on record that troops surrendered to a drone. That’s arguably the strangest thing that’s ever happened to an American warship, so I went looking for a clean date on it, and here’s where it gets annoying. The Navy’s own entry says the first of March. Naval History magazine says February 27, and counts 40 men. The National Air and Space Museum<\/a>, which asked for that exact airframe when the Navy offered it a Pioneer, doesn’t give a date at all and says the drone was doing damage assessment after the Missouri’s shells hit the island. I’m going with the Navy on this one.<\/p>\n The drone itself, Air Vehicle 159, sits in Washington now. Its descendants are doing the same job in a different shape, and the current version of the idea is a drone boat that carries its aircraft sealed inside the hull<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Wisconsin was struck from the Naval Vessel Register in 2006, and on December 14, 2009 the Navy formally handed her to the city of Norfolk. The transfer ceremony the following April ended the requirement to keep her fit for a recall to active duty, which is a fairly polite way of saying the paperwork finally caught up with reality.<\/p>\n You’ll still hear the recall story on the tour. It was true for a long stretch, and it isn’t now.<\/p>\n What’s left is a 45,000-ton artifact leaning on two rubber pads in downtown Norfolk, plus a maintenance job most people will never think about again. Nauticus says nearly 3,000 people came through over Labor Day weekend to see her before the closure, about twice the weekend before, which tells you a decent number of you would happily spend an afternoon watching a tugboat move a battleship four feet.<\/p>\n The museum stayed open all week, and Kirkland’s crew expects the Wisconsin back alongside no later than Friday, September 11, with two new fenders between the hull and the pier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every pier you’ve ever walked past has a few rubber pads bolted along its face, sitting between the concrete and … <\/p>\nShe fired the last shots any American battleship has fired<\/h2>\n
So where does the drone come in?<\/h2>\n
The Navy isn’t coming back for her<\/h2>\n