Thirty-three years after she was commissioned at Pearl Harbor, the guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70) left the fleet in a ceremony at Naval Base San Diego on Sept. 25, 2026. She was the Ticonderoga-class cruiser that, in February 2008, fired the missile that destroyed a 5,000-pound errant U.S. satellite in orbit.
Five days later the Navy retired a sister ship, USS Shiloh (CG 67), in Hawaii. The two ceremonies leave the service with five Ticonderoga-class cruisers in commission.
The Navy’s account of the ceremony came from Commander, Naval Surface Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, in a release written by Lt. Jamie Miller and distributed Sept. 26. It states the ship “commissioned on July 24, 1993, at Pearl Harbor Naval Station,” and that she “played a leading role in the development and operational testing of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense system.” Her last deployment, per the same release, ended in June 2026 after 11 months at sea in the U.S. 4th Fleet area supporting Operation Southern Spear.
“Our ship may be leaving the fleet, but her Sailors are not. They will take a piece of Lake Erie with them to their next commands, and in doing so, they will carry this ship’s legacy forward.” — Capt. Drew Borovies, Lake Erie’s final commanding officer
Operation Burnt Frost and a single SM-3
The mission that made Lake Erie’s name was Operation Burnt Frost. A Navy News Service story from Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet Public Affairs, filed Feb. 22, 2008 and archived by GlobalSecurity.org, reported that the ship “fired a single modified tactical Standard Missile (SM) 3 to destroy the toxic satellite” on Feb. 20, 2008. The Standard Missile-3 was built to hit ballistic missile warheads in flight; for this shot it was modified to engage a satellite instead.
The commanding officer then was Capt. Randall M. Hendrickson, who credited “team effort” and training. That same story names Lt. Cmdr. Andrew Bates, the tactical action officer, as the officer who fired the missile. Hendrickson, now a retired rear admiral, returned as guest of honor at the Sept. 25 decommissioning.
Why the satellite had to come down is laid out in NASA’s Orbital Debris Quarterly News for April 2008. The spacecraft, USA-193, had failed after reaching orbit with a tank of unused, frozen hydrazine fuel, and reentry analyses “indicated that the tank and its contents would survive a natural reentry and might pose a threat of human casualty.” NASA reported the satellite was engaged on 21 February (UTC) “at an altitude just below 250 km,” and that “the majority of the debris fell to Earth within an hour of the break-up.”
A test ship for Aegis missile defense
Lake Erie had been shooting at targets beyond the atmosphere for years before 2008. A March 2005 Navy NewsStand story, “USS Lake Erie Makes Naval History”, described her part in the latest Missile Defense Agency test of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense program and the SM-3 in February 2005, and stated at the time that “Lake Erie is the only Navy ship that has intercepted a ballistic missile.”
The capability she helped test is no longer confined to cruisers. The Missile Defense Agency’s Aegis BMD program page describes the capability as one that “builds upon the Aegis Weapon System” aboard “U.S. Navy destroyers and cruisers.”
Shiloh, Germantown and the five cruisers left
Seven days brought three decommissionings. USNI News reported Oct. 1 that Shiloh “was formally decommissioned Wednesday at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, after 34 years of service,” and that the dock landing ship USS Germantown (LSD 42) decommissioned in San Diego on Sept. 24 after 40 years. Shiloh spent 17 years forward-deployed to Yokosuka, Japan, according to the outlet.
USNI News named the cruisers still in service: USS Robert Smalls (CG 62), USS Princeton (CG 59), USS Gettysburg (CG 64), USS Chosin (CG 65) and USS Cape St. George (CG 71). Robert Smalls left Yokosuka for what is expected to be the last time and is shifting homeport to San Diego ahead of her own decommissioning next year, the outlet reported.
The retired rear admiral who commanded Lake Erie during Burnt Frost addressed her final crew directly at the San Diego ceremony. “You inherited this ship and added to the legacy habitually while you stood the watch,” Hendrickson said, according to the Navy release. “For that, the nation, the American people are grateful.” With Robert Smalls next in line, the cruiser count is set to drop again in 2027.
Top image: The guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG 70), shown in port before her Sept. 25, 2026, decommissioning. Image Credit: Rhk111 — CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.