On January 17, 1991, the opening night of Operation Desert Storm, USS Louisville (SSN-724) fired the first Tomahawk cruise missile ever launched from a submarine in combat. The weapon left the boat submerged in the Red Sea, climbed to cruise altitude, and flew hundreds of miles through the night to strike a target in Iraq — navigating terrain it had never seen, using maps stored in its memory, executing a mission that had been planned for weeks and rehearsed for years. It hit. When it did, submarine warfare changed. The boats that had spent the Cold War stalking Soviet ships and missile submarines had demonstrated a new capability: they could reach inland and strike targets their crews would never see. The Silent Service was silent no more.
The Boats
USS Louisville (SSN-724) and USS Pittsburgh (SSN-720) were Los Angeles-class nuclear fast attack submarines — the backbone of the Cold War submarine force and the most numerous class of nuclear submarines ever built by the United States. The Los Angeles class entered service in 1976 with the commissioning of the lead boat, USS Los Angeles (SSN-688), and production continued through 1996, ultimately producing sixty-two submarines. They were built for speed, stealth, and the kind of sustained high-tempo operations that Cold War submarine doctrine demanded.
Louisville was commissioned on November 8, 1986, at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. Pittsburgh was commissioned on November 23, 1985. Both were among the improved 688-class boats that incorporated the vertical launch system (VLS) — a set of twelve tubes in the forward ballast tank that allowed the submarines to carry Tomahawk cruise missiles in addition to their standard torpedo armament. This capability, which earlier Los Angeles boats lacked, is what put them in the Persian Gulf theater in 1991.
The Tomahawk and Desert Storm
The BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile had been in the Navy's inventory since 1983, but Desert Storm was its first use in combat. The weapon flew at subsonic speed at low altitude, guided by a terrain contour matching system (TERCOM) that compared radar altimeter readings against stored terrain maps, then transitioned to an optical scene matching system (DSMAC) for terminal guidance. The result was a weapon capable of hitting targets the size of a building from hundreds of miles away, launched from a submarine that never surfaced and whose crew might never know the result of their shot.
When the air campaign against Iraq began in the pre-dawn hours of January 17, 1991, Louisville fired first. The missiles — each one over twenty feet long and weighing more than 3,000 pounds — were ejected from the torpedo tubes by water pressure, broached the surface, ignited their turbofan engines, and climbed toward their cruise altitude. Pittsburgh launched its own salvo during the opening campaign. Between them and the surface ships firing simultaneously in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, the opening salvos of Desert Storm included more cruise missile launches than any military operation in history to that point.
Life on a Fast Attack Boat
The men who served aboard Louisville and Pittsburgh during Desert Storm lived in a world the surface Navy rarely glimpses. A Los Angeles-class submarine in 1991 had a crew of around 130 officers and enlisted men crammed into a pressure hull roughly 360 feet long and 33 feet in diameter. They shared berthing spaces, ate in a mess that doubled as a workspace, and stood six-hours-on, twelve-hours-off watch rotations that blurred the distinction between day and night — a distinction that lost meaning entirely once the boat submerged.
Submariners operate in a culture of self-sufficiency and closed-loop accountability that produces a particular kind of sailor. Everything that goes wrong on a submarine is managed by the crew. There is no calling for help. The depth of the water above the boat is not an abstraction — it is a physical fact that every man aboard is aware of at all times, in the back of the mind where the information sits without causing panic because panic is a luxury that submarines cannot afford. The men who fired the Tomahawks on January 17, 1991, went back to their watches afterward. The boat still needed to be run.
If you served aboard USS Louisville, browse the Louisville collection. If your boat was USS Pittsburgh, browse the Pittsburgh collection. The Silent Service has a home in the store.
Legacy
The combat debut of the submarine-launched Tomahawk in Desert Storm permanently changed how the United States Navy plans and executes power projection. The ability to strike land targets from a submerged submarine — quietly, without warning, from hundreds of miles away — transformed the fast attack submarine from an anti-submarine and anti-ship platform into a precision strike weapon with global reach. Every submarine-launched Tomahawk fired since 1991 traces its combat lineage to Louisville's opening shots on January 17. The boats are still out there. They're still quiet. And they can still reach.