In March 1999, NATO began an air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians in the province of Kosovo. Operation Allied Force lasted 78 days and involved strikes by aircraft from thirteen nations — and by American warships in the Adriatic Sea that fired Tomahawk cruise missiles into Serbia and Kosovo from well below the range of any Yugoslav air defense. USS Barry (DDG-52) was among the destroyers and cruisers that contributed to that strike campaign, adding the Arleigh Burke class to the growing list of American warships that had demonstrated the Tomahawk’s reach in combat.
The Ship
USS Barry (DDG-52) is an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, commissioned on December 12, 1992, and named for Commodore John Barry — often called the Father of the American Navy, the Irish-born officer who commanded the Continental frigate Alliance in the Revolutionary War and was among the most capable naval officers of his era. The Arleigh Burke class, introduced with the lead ship DDG-51 in 1991, represented a generational leap in surface combatant capability: the Aegis combat system, the Vertical Launch System for Tomahawks and Standard missiles, a stealthy hull design, and a degree of redundancy and survivability that earlier destroyer classes couldn’t match. Barry was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia.
Operation Allied Force, 1999
Operation Allied Force was the largest NATO military operation since the alliance was founded in 1949, and it was conducted without a UN Security Council resolution — a controversial decision that shaped the political context around the campaign throughout its 78-day duration. The air campaign targeted Serbian military infrastructure, air defenses, command and control nodes, and the military forces conducting ethnic cleansing operations in Kosovo. American surface ships in the Adriatic Sea fired Tomahawks into Serbia and Kosovo as part of the sustained strike package, complementing the air campaign and striking targets that aircraft couldn’t reach as cost-effectively or as safely.
Barry’s role in Allied Force placed her crew in the particular operational environment of a combat cruise missile strike: careful planning, precise target data, crew briefings that made the target and the mission real, and then the launch itself — the missiles leaving the vertical launch cells and climbing away from the ship, the crew tracking them until they passed beyond radar range, and then waiting for the battle damage assessment that would tell them whether the mission had succeeded. Cruise missile strike is a clean kind of warfare from the ship’s perspective, but it is not an abstraction. The crew knows where the missiles are going and why.
Surface Warfare in the Post-Cold War Era
Allied Force was, in many ways, the defining operational test for the Arleigh Burke class. The Cold War had been the justification for building these ships — their Aegis systems and their armament were designed to fight Soviet naval and air forces at sea. What emerged in the 1990s was a different kind of employment: the destroyers and cruisers as precision strike platforms, their Tomahawks serving as the long-range punch of a power projection campaign. Barry and her sister ships had been built for one kind of war and found themselves fighting another. They adapted well.
The crew of Barry during the Allied Force deployment was part of the Navy that was figuring out its post-Cold War identity — not quite at war in the traditional sense, but not at peace either. The watch standers who managed the Tomahawk launches were the inheritors of a surface warfare tradition that stretched back to the gun-armed cruisers and destroyers of World War II, adapted to a world where the guns had been supplemented by missiles that could reach targets four hundred miles away.
If you served aboard a destroyer or want to honor someone who did, The Ship’s Store carries collections for the ships of the Navy — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
USS Barry continues to serve, more than three decades after her commissioning. The 1999 Allied Force deployment is one chapter in a long operational history that spans the Balkans, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the broader theater of post-9/11 operations. The ship named for the Father of the American Navy has carried that name into every significant naval operation of her era — a connection between Revolutionary War seamanship and twenty-first century precision warfare that the Navy’s naming tradition is uniquely capable of making.