The forever cruisers

The Navy developed the Ticonderoga class in the 1970s to carry the new Aegis air-defense system—a highly-automated radar guiding long-range Standard surface-to-air missiles. The Navy needed to be able to fire off lots of accurate missiles quickly in order to stop volleys of Soviet anti-ship missiles.

Together, Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipbuilding assembled 27 Ticonderogas between 1980 and 1994 for $1 billion apiece in then-dollars. The first five of the 567-foot-long vessels each had a pair of twin-arm missile launchers—these ships decommissioned in 2004 and 2005. The remaining 22 ships have 122 vertical-launch cells compatible with a variety of anti-air, anti-submarine and land-attack cruise missiles.

In recent years, the Navy has modified five of the cruisers with new software and high-tech SM-3 missiles for shooting down incoming ballistic rockets, like the kind North Korea could use to lob nuclear warheads.

After the Ticos, the Navy began acquiring Arleigh Burke-class destroyers that have roughly the same radars and weapons as the cruisers but are slightly smaller. Today the sailing branch has 62 Burkes, with more on the way. The sea service tinkered with a next-generation cruiser design it called the CG(X), but planners couldn’t justify the new ships’ $3.5-billion-apiece price tag. The Navy kept buying Burkes, instead.

In 2012 the sailing branch proposed decommissioning seven Ticos, but Congress blocked the move—and insisted the sea service keep all 22 cruisers for 35 years each. But the Navy balked at the high cost of keeping the aging vessels up to date and fully manned with more than 300 sailors each.

So this year, planners found a work-around, one that saves money and keeps the cruisers in service for decades longer than anyone originally imagined. If Congress allows it, the Navy will keep 11 of the cruisers in active service and dock the other 11 without crews for an extended period of leisurely technological enhancement.

The proposed plan keeps the 11 oldest cruisers at sea until 2019. At that point, one or two of the older Ticos will decommission every year, with one or two upgraded Ticos returning to service to replace them. The formerly laid-up cruisers will stick around until they, too, begin leaving the fleet one or two at a time starting in 2035.

The “youngest” cruiser, the 1994-vintage USS Port Royal, will finally bow out in 2045, by which time she could be one of the oldest active warships in the world. “What we wanted to do was make sure we got the most ship years out of this class of ship,” said Adm. Jon Greenert, the Navy’s top officer.