When USS Spruance (DD-963) was commissioned in 1975, she was widely criticized. Naval analysts and some members of Congress argued that the new destroyer was underarmed — a big, expensive ship with less firepower than the destroyers it was replacing. They were right, for the moment. What they did not fully anticipate was that the Spruance class was designed around a hull large enough to accept the weapons systems that didn't yet exist, and that within a decade those systems — the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System, advanced anti-submarine torpedoes — would turn the most criticized warship of the 1970s into one of the most capable surface combatants the Navy had ever built. USS Spruance was the lead ship of that transformation.
The Ship
USS Spruance (DD-963) was a destroyer, commissioned on September 20, 1975, and named for Admiral Raymond A. Spruance — the commander of the American fleet at Midway and the Philippine Sea, the admiral who is widely considered the most consistently effective carrier commander of the Pacific War. She was the lead ship of a thirty-one-ship class that was controversial at commissioning and indispensable by the time the Cold War ended. Gas-turbine powered, with a hull large enough to absorb decades of upgrades, the Spruance class outlasted the ships that critics had wanted to build instead. She was homeported at Norfolk, Virginia.
The Weapons That Changed Everything
The original Spruance armament — two five-inch guns, anti-submarine torpedoes, and a helicopter — was indeed modest by the standards of the destroyers that preceded her. But the hull had volume and topside space that the older ships did not. When the Tomahawk cruise missile entered service in the 1980s, Spruance-class destroyers received the Armored Box Launcher that could carry eight Tomahawks. When the Mk 41 Vertical Launch System was developed, Spruance herself received a sixty-one-cell VLS forward — the largest VLS installation on any American surface combatant at the time. The ship that critics had called a “destroyer escort in a destroyer's hull” became a Tomahawk platform capable of striking targets five hundred miles inland.
Desert Storm and Combat Operations
USS Spruance deployed to the Persian Gulf for Operation Desert Storm and participated in the Tomahawk strikes that were a central feature of the air campaign. The Spruance-class destroyers that fired Tomahawks in January and February 1991 validated everything the Navy had promised when it designed the VLS upgrade — a surface combatant that could contribute to the strategic air campaign from a position hundreds of miles from the target. Spruance's crew executed those strikes as part of the coordinated opening of the air war, part of the wall of Tomahawks that hit Iraqi targets in the first hours of Desert Storm.
If you served aboard USS Spruance or on any of the Spruance-class destroyers, The Ship's Store carries collections for the ships of the surface fleet.
Legacy
USS Spruance was decommissioned on October 31, 2005, and later expended as a target. She was sunk during SINKEX exercises. The Spruance class as a whole — thirty-one ships — served into the 2000s before being replaced by the Arleigh Burke-class DDGs whose design incorporated many of the Spruance's lessons. The criticism that greeted Spruance at commissioning is a useful reminder that naval architecture is a long game. The ships that prove their worth do so over decades, not at the commissioning ceremony. Spruance took longer to reach her potential than her critics expected. She got there.