At 2:38 in the morning on January 17, 1991, USS San Jacinto (CG-58) launched the first Tomahawk cruise missiles of Operation Desert Storm — the opening shots of the air campaign that would last forty-two days and drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait. San Jacinto was not the only ship to fire that night; the opening salvos were coordinated across multiple ships and submarines. But the image of the guided-missile cruiser in the Red Sea launching the weapons that announced the war to the world is one of the defining pictures of the Gulf War, and San Jacinto's crew has carried that distinction ever since. They were the ones who fired first.
The Ship
USS San Jacinto (CG-58) is a Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser, commissioned on January 23, 1988, and named for the Battle of San Jacinto — the 1836 engagement in which Sam Houston's Texan army defeated the forces of Santa Anna and secured Texas independence. She is an Aegis cruiser, built around the SPY-1 radar and the Aegis combat system that had been designed to defeat saturation attacks by Soviet anti-ship missiles. Her Mk 41 Vertical Launch System carried the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile alongside her surface-to-air and anti-submarine weapons — a combination that made her capable of striking targets deep inland from hundreds of miles at sea. She was homeported at Mayport, Florida.
The Opening Night of Desert Storm
The Desert Storm air campaign was planned as a coordinated, simultaneous strike against Iraqi air defenses, command-and-control facilities, and strategic targets — a strike designed to hit so many targets at once that Iraqi air defenses could not respond effectively to any of them. Tomahawk missiles were a central part of that plan. They could reach targets that manned aircraft would have to fight through integrated air defenses to strike; they could be timed to arrive simultaneously with aircraft strikes on other targets; and they were effective against hardened facilities that were difficult to destroy with conventional bombs.
San Jacinto's launches on the morning of January 17 were part of this coordinated campaign. The missiles flew hundreds of miles through the night to reach their targets — images of Tomahawks flying down Baghdad streets would become among the most iconic of the war. San Jacinto fired multiple salvos over the course of the opening hours, and her crew monitored the progress of the strikes from the combat information center as the reports came in. It was the operational validation of a weapons system and a doctrine that the Navy had developed over the previous decade, and it worked.
The Aegis Cruiser Comes of Age
The Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers had been designed for a different mission — fleet air defense against the Soviet threat — but Desert Storm demonstrated that their Tomahawk capability gave them a second mission of enormous strategic value. A surface combatant that could reach inland targets from hundreds of miles at sea, with precision that manned aircraft could not always match against defended targets, was a different kind of ship than the Navy had ever had before. The cruisers that opened Desert Storm established the land-attack mission as a core function of the surface fleet. San Jacinto was at the front of that transformation.
If you served aboard USS San Jacinto or want to honor someone who did, browse the full San Jacinto collection — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.
Legacy
USS San Jacinto continued to serve for decades after Desert Storm, deploying repeatedly and carrying the record of January 17, 1991, in her ship's history. She was among the first ships to fire Tomahawks in combat. That fact does not change regardless of what else happens in her career. The crew that stood watch that night, that tracked the missiles off the deck and through their flight to targets in Iraq, was part of something the Navy had been building toward for a generation. They were the tip of the spear when it came down.