USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) is the lead ship of the most numerous class of destroyers ever built by the United States Navy. More than ninety Arleigh Burke-class destroyers have been commissioned since 1991, and the class is still in production — the ships coming off the line today are more capable than the ship that led the class, but they are unmistakably descendants of the design that DDG-51 established. The decision to name the lead ship after Fleet Admiral Arleigh Burke — the destroyer commander who became the longest-serving Chief of Naval Operations in history — was a statement about what the class was supposed to be. Burke himself attended the commissioning. He died three years later, but he lived to see the ship named for him go to sea.
The Ship
USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) was commissioned on July 4, 1991, at Norfolk, Virginia. She is a guided-missile destroyer built around the Aegis combat system and the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System — the combination that had proven itself on the Ticonderoga-class cruisers and that the Navy wanted in a smaller, more numerous, and more affordable hull. The Burke class was designed to replace the aging Spruance-class destroyers and the Kidd-class guided-missile destroyers, and to do so at a cost that would allow the Navy to build enough of them to maintain the numbers the fleet required. She was homeported at Norfolk. Her namesake, Admiral Arleigh Burke, had commanded destroyers in the Pacific War with an aggressiveness that earned him the nickname "31-Knot Burke" — he had sent a message promising to arrive at a battle at thirty-one knots, and he did.
Early Deployments and the Post-Cold War Fleet
USS Arleigh Burke conducted her first deployment in 1992, joining a fleet that was rapidly adjusting to the post-Cold War security environment. The Soviet Navy that the Burke class had been designed to fight was gone, but the threats that required surface combatants with Aegis capability and Tomahawk strike capacity had not disappeared — they had shifted. DDG-51 and the rapidly growing Burke class became the surface Navy's most flexible and capable multi-mission platforms, equally able to contribute to carrier battle group air defense, to launch Tomahawk strikes against inland targets, to conduct anti-submarine operations, and to perform the theater ballistic missile defense mission that became increasingly important through the 1990s and 2000s.
The early Burke-class deployments established the operational template that the class has followed ever since: integrated with carrier strike groups, deployable independently for presence missions, and capable of the full range of surface warfare, anti-air, anti-submarine, and strike missions that the fleet requires. DDG-51 was the first, but the pattern she established was rapidly replicated across a class that grew to dwarf every other destroyer class in American naval history.
The Class That Defined an Era
The Arleigh Burke class represents a particular moment in American naval history — the decision, made in the late Cold War, to build a large number of highly capable, multi-mission surface combatants that could be sustained in production long enough to develop and incorporate new capabilities over decades. The flight I ships that were built first gave way to flight II and flight IIA ships with improved capabilities, and the flight III ships now entering the fleet represent a substantial upgrade over DDG-51 herself. But the hull form, the basic architecture, and the Aegis foundation that DDG-51 established in 1991 runs through all of them.
If you served aboard USS Arleigh Burke or any of the ships of the Burke class, The Ship's Store carries collections for the destroyers of the surface fleet.
Legacy
USS Arleigh Burke remains in active service, more than three decades after her commissioning — a testament to the durability of the design and the sustained maintenance and upgrade programs that keep her capable. She has been modernized repeatedly, receiving new systems and capabilities that her designers could not have fully anticipated. The lead ship of the class has outlasted the ships she replaced, and the class she leads continues to grow. Fleet Admiral Arleigh Burke would recognize what his name is sailing on: a ship built for fighting, capable, and ready.