The USS Wisconsin (BB-64) is an Iowa Class battleship that is docked permanently at Nauticus, The National Maritime Center permanently. The battleship is the last and largest battleship ever built by the US Navy. The USS Wisconsin BB-64 is the second ship built by the US Navy in honor of the U.S state Wisconsin. She was built in the Philadelphia Ship Yard and was launched in early Dec 1943. Wisconsin was part of the World War II Korean War and Gulf War’s effort earning a total of 6 battle war stars for its service. Currently Wisconsin functions as a ship museum at Nauticus, where she attracts more than hundreds of visitors per day.

Wisconsin was one of the “fast battleships” designs planned in 1938 by the Preliminary Design Branch at the Bureau of Construction and Repair. She was the third of the four completed ships of the Iowa class of Battleships. Although Wisconsin is numerically the highest numbered battleship built in the US, she was actually completed before USS Missouri. That makes Missouri the last completed US battleship.

The USS Wisconsin was first commissioned for World War II (1944-1945) where it did a significant amount of damage on the enemy lines. On the 14th of March, it bound for Japan. It eliminated airborne and land resistance from the Japanese homeland to American forces off Okinawa. Her second commission was in 1950 when she was sent to the Korean War to ward off the North Korean forces that were invading South Korea. The only damage done to Wisconsin was not from war efforts but from a collision with another battleship, USS Eaton, where her bow was damaged. Wisconsin was last commissioned on the 7th of August 1990 to the Gulf War for the fight against the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This was the last time that any United States battleships actively participated in a foreign war.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s and the absence of a perceived threat to the United States came drastic cuts in the defense budget, and the high cost of maintaining and operating battleships as part of the United States Navy's active fleet became uneconomical; as a result, Wisconsin was decommissioned on the 30th of September 1991 and was berthed permanently at Nauticus downtown Norfolk, Virginia, in 2000.