Considerably larger and more powerful than the preceding Colorado class, the South Dakota class was designed to achieve 23 knots (43 km/h; 26 mph), they represented an attempt to catch up with the increasing fleet speeds of its main rivals, the British Royal Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy.

The South Dakotas were authorized in 1917, but work was postponed so that the U.S. Navy could incorporate information gained from the Battle of Jutland, fought in mid-1916, in their design.

As the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 both restricted the total battleship tonnage allowed the U.S. Navy, and limited individual ship size to 35,000 long tons (35,562 t), construction was halted in early 1922.

The unfinished hulls were scrapped the following year, the guns were transferred to the U.S. Army and their boilers and armor were used to modernize older battleships.

Before World War I began in August 1914, the Navy was not well funded by the U.S. Congress, which had failed to heed the General Board's recommendation of a building program of two battleships per year.

The start of the war began to change that attitude and, in early 1915, the General Board called for construction of four battleships in Fiscal Year (FY) 1916, although the Committee on Naval Affairs rejected that recommendation on the basis that it was not prudent to make changes to the existing program before enough had been learned from the experiences of the war.

[1] Events abroad like the Japanese Twenty-One Demands on China in early 1915, German attempts to begin unrestricted submarine warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania in May exposed US weaknesses to the public eye.

Congress was debating the appropriation bill while the Battle of Jutland occurred in at the end of May 1916 and the British victory confirmed the value of the battleship in eyes of the Congressmen.

[3] The General Board's requirements were not thoroughly spelled out at the beginning of the design process and it requested a main armament of a dozen 16-inch (406 mm) guns and higher speed than the existing 21 knots of the earlier ships to counter trends it saw in fast foreign battleships like the British Queen Elizabeth and the Japanese Nagato classes.

After a flirtation with a design armed with twelve guns in six twin-gun turrets that came out much larger than desired, successful long-range gunnery trials with the triple turrets used by Pennsylvania caused the Preliminary Design section of the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) to choose four triple gun-turrets for the new ships.

Rear Admiral David W. Taylor, Chief Constructor of the Navy and head of C&R calculated the weight required to implement all of these changes would exceed the board's allowed draft of 32 feet 6 inches (9.9 m) to easily pass through the canal.

On 6 July, the board changed its draft specification to 33 feet (10.1 m) at normal load, which meant that the ships would have to off-load weight to pass through the canal and dropped its requirement for a gyrostabilizer for which 600 long tons (610 t) had been reserved.

One advantage of turbo-electric drive was that the substitution of flexible electric cables for bulky steam-lines allowed the motors to be mounted further to the stern of the ship; this reduced vibration and weight by shortening the propeller shafts.

[12] In the South Dakotas, two turbo generators (General Electric for Indiana and Montana, Westinghouse for the others) were coupled to a pair of AC alternators of 28,000 KVA and 5,000 volts.

These fed four electric motors, each driving one propeller shaft, rated at 11,200 kilowatts (15,000 hp) of direct current (DC).

[5] A dozen water-tube boilers, each in their own individual compartment outboard of the turbine rooms, provided steam for the generators at a working pressure of 285 psi (1,965 kPa; 20 kgf/cm2).