In January 1991, USS Louisville (SSN-724) made history that most Americans never heard about. On January 19, 1991 — two days after the air war against Iraq began — Louisville fired Tomahawk cruise missiles from beneath the surface of the Red Sea, becoming the first submarine in history to launch cruise missiles in combat. The age of submarine precision strike had begun, and it began quietly, the way submarine operations always do: without fanfare, without a visible signature, from a depth that the enemy couldn’t see and couldn’t reach.
The Ship
USS Louisville (SSN-724) is a Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine, commissioned on November 8, 1986, and named for the city of Louisville, Kentucky. The Los Angeles class — sixty-two boats built between 1976 and 1996 — formed the backbone of the American attack submarine fleet through the Cold War and into the post-Cold War era, and their capabilities evolved significantly over the course of the class’s production run. Louisville was among the boats equipped with the vertical launch system for Tomahawk cruise missiles, which gave her the ability to strike land targets from a submarine’s operating depth — a capability that had never been used in combat before January 1991.
Desert Storm: The First Combat Tomahawk Launches From a Submarine
The opening days of Desert Storm demonstrated the Tomahawk cruise missile’s combat effectiveness in ways that changed American military strategy for the next three decades. While the first combat Tomahawk launches came from surface ships in the opening minutes of the air campaign on January 17, Louisville’s launches two days later marked a new chapter in submarine warfare — the first time a submarine had been used as a platform for long-range precision land attack. The missiles that Louisville fired from beneath the Red Sea traveled hundreds of miles to strike targets in Iraq, navigating terrain-following guidance systems that delivered them to specific buildings and installations with accuracy that had been considered impossible for weapons of their size only a decade before.
The submarine’s crew had prepared for this mission through months of training and deployment. Operating a submarine in the confined, heavily trafficked waters of the Red Sea and the northern Persian Gulf during a major combat operation required every skill the crew possessed — navigation, tactical awareness, coordination with the surface fleet operating above them, and the particular discipline that submarine service demands in the cramped spaces where every action has a consequence. The launches went as planned. The targets were struck.
Life on a Fast Attack Submarine
A Los Angeles-class fast attack submarine carries a crew of approximately 130 officers and enlisted sailors — a small, intensely close community that operates in spaces more confined than any surface ship. The submarine has no windows and no weather decks; the entire world of the crew is the interior of the boat, lit by artificial light, measured in compartments and watertight hatches. Navigation is calculated against precise charts of sea floor and coastline. The submarine maintains silence when operations require it and communications discipline at all times. The crew who served aboard Louisville during Desert Storm lived in that world for months, surfacing only when necessary, their presence unknown to everyone except the officers who tasked them.
Submariners who served during Desert Storm and the larger Cold War era carry an operational record that the public rarely sees in detail, because the details are often classified and because the whole point of a submarine is invisibility. Louisville’s crew knew what they had done. The fact that most Americans didn’t was, in a sense, the mission.
If you served aboard a submarine or want to honor someone who did, The Ship’s Store carries collections for the ships and boats of the Navy — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
USS Louisville’s first combat cruise missile launch in January 1991 established the submarine as a major element of American precision strike capability. Every subsequent submarine Tomahawk strike — in Bosnia, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria — is a direct descendant of what Louisville’s crew did in the Red Sea in January 1991. The submarine that fired first proved that the capability was real, and the Navy built on that proof through every combat operation that followed. Louisville was decommissioned in 1999, but what her crew did in the opening week of Desert Storm remains part of the permanent record of what submarines can do when history requires it.