Most of what a fast-attack submarine does never makes the news. She goes out, she disappears, and months later she comes home — and the crew can't tell you much about where they were or what they did. But in the spring of 1999, USS Miami did something that could not be hidden: from beneath the surface of the Mediterranean, she opened her missile tubes and sent Tomahawk cruise missiles arcing toward targets in the former Yugoslavia. It was Operation Allied Force, and Miami was in the fight.
A Los Angeles-Class Fast Attack
USS Miami (SSN-755) was a Los Angeles-class attack submarine, commissioned in 1990 and homeported at Naval Submarine Base New London in Groton, Connecticut — the historic home of the Atlantic submarine force. The 688-class boats were the workhorses of the Cold War and the decade that followed: fast, quiet, and armed with torpedoes and Tomahawk land-attack missiles. That last capability turned the attack submarine into something new — a strike platform that could sit undetected off a hostile coast and put precision missiles on targets hundreds of miles inland.
Operation Allied Force
In March 1999, NATO launched Operation Allied Force, an air campaign aimed at halting the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Kosovo. The campaign leaned heavily on standoff weapons in its opening nights, and Tomahawk-capable ships and submarines in the Adriatic and Mediterranean were among the first shooters. Miami was one of them. From her patrol station she launched Tomahawks against Serbian military targets, adding the submarine force's quiet contribution to the campaign that would run for seventy-eight days.
For a submarine crew, a Tomahawk strike is a strange kind of combat. There is no horizon full of the enemy, no roar of jets overhead — just the launch sequence, the shudder of the boat as a missile leaves the tube, and the tightly controlled choreography of the fire-control and missile teams. The men who did it will tell you the professionalism in the control room was total. It had to be.
The Two-Theater Boat
What made Miami's story remarkable was what had come just months before. In December 1998, during Operation Desert Fox — the four-day strike campaign against Iraq — Miami had also launched Tomahawks in combat. That made her the first U.S. submarine since World War II to fire ordnance in combat in two different theaters, and it earned her the nickname "Big Gun." In the space of a single deployment cycle, a Groton fast-attack had put missiles on targets in both the Persian Gulf and the Balkans.
It was a distinction that captured how the post-Cold-War submarine force had changed. Boats built to hunt Soviet submarines under the Arctic ice were now flexible strike platforms, called on to deliver precision firepower in regional conflicts a world apart. Miami and her crew proved the concept twice over.
Life Aboard a Fast Attack
Submarine life is its own world. A fast-attack crew of roughly 130 lives in a steel hull the length of a football field and change, sharing racks in a hot-bunking rotation, standing watch in six-hour cycles, and going weeks or months without sunlight or fresh air that didn't come from a scrubber. The food is famously good — the Navy knows morale rides on it — but the space is tight, the mission is classified, and the deployment ends when it ends. Submariners earn their dolphins by learning every system on the boat, because on a submarine everyone has to be able to save the ship.
The men who served aboard Miami in 1999 carried something few sailors do: the knowledge that they had taken their boat into combat, twice, in two seas, and done the job exactly as trained.
Legacy
USS Miami served the fleet for more than two decades before a shipyard fire ended her career in 2014. But her place in submarine history was already secure — the Groton fast-attack that became the first boat since 1945 to fire in combat in two theaters, and did it in a single stretch of the late 1990s. "Big Gun" earned the name.
If you served aboard USS Miami or want to honor a Miami submariner, browse the USS Miami (SSN-755) collection — ship's crest apparel and gifts for the sailors who ran silent and ran deep.
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