Ticonderoga class cruiser

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This article is about a United States guided missile cruiser class authorized in 1978. For other uses, see Ticonderoga.

United States
USS Lake Champlain
Builders:	Ingalls Shipbuilding Bath Iron Works
Operators:	United States Navy
Preceding class:	Virginia
Following class:	CG(X) development program
Commissioned:	January 22, 1983
Ships in Class
Ships in class:	27
Ships in active service:	USS Antietam USS Anzio USS Bunker Hill USS Cape St. George USS Chancellorsville USS Chosin USS Cowpens USS Gettysburg USS Hué City USS Lake Champlain USS Lake Erie USS Leyte Gulf USS Mobile Bay USS Monterey USS Normandy USS Philippine Sea USS Port Royal USS Princeton USS San Jacinto USS Shiloh USS Vella Gulf USS Vicksburg
Ships in storage:	USS Thomas S. Gates USS Ticonderoga USS Valley Forge USS Vincennes USS Yorktown
General Characteristics
Class type:	Guided missile cruiser
Displacement:	9,500 tons
Length:	567 feet (173 m)
Beam:	55 feet (17 m)
Draught:	31 feet (9.5 m)
Propulsion and power:	4 × General Electric LM2500 gas turbines, 2 shafts, 80,000 shp
Speed:	32+ knots (exact maximum classified)
Range:	6,000 miles
Complement:	360
Armament:	variable number RGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles 8 RGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship missiles 114 vertical-launch SM-2 Standard surface-to-air (with anti-ship mode) and RUM-119 VL-ASROC anti-submarine missiles 2 127mm L/54 dual purpose guns 2 20mm L/50 gatling close-in weapons systems 6 12.7x99mm or 7.62x51mm machine guns 6 torpedo tubes
Armour:	limited Kevlar splinter protection in critical areas
Aircraft complement:	2 helicopters

Ticonderoga class cruiser is a class of warships in the US Navy, first ordered and authorized in FY 1978. The class use phased-array radar; the increased combat capability offered by the Aegis combat system and the AN/SPY-1 radar system justified the changing of the classification of Ticonderoga and Yorktown from DDG (guided missile destroyer) to CG (guided missile cruiser). Vincennes and Valley Forge may or may not have been authorized as DDGs; regardless, the DDG sequence continued with USS Arleigh Burke as DDG-51.

In addition to the added radar capability, the Ticonderoga class built after Thomas S. Gates are outfitted with two Vertical Launching System (or VLS). The two VLS systems allow the ship to have 127 launch tubes that can carry a wide variety of missiles, including the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Standard surface-to-air missile, and the ASROC anti-submarine missile. More importantly, the VLS system enables all missiles to be fully standing by at any given time, shortening the ship's reaction time. The original five ships, including Thomas S. Gates, had MK. 26 twin arm launchers which limited their missile capacity to a total of 96 missiles, and which could not fire the Tomahawk missiles increasingly vital to the role of the US Navy's surface warships. After the end of the Cold War, the lower capability of the original five ships limited them to home-waters duties. Due to the cluttered superstructure of the ships, inherited from the Spruance class destroyers they were derived from, two of the radar transcievers are mounted on a special pallet on the portside aft corner of the superstructure, with the other two mounted on the forward starboard corner. Later Aegis ships, designed from the keel up to carry the SPY-1 radars, have them all clustered together. The high weight of the ships - 1,500 tons heavier than the "Spru-cans," resulted in a highly-stressed hull and some structural problems in early service, which were generally corrected in the late 1980s and mid-1990s. Several ships had superstructure cracks which had to be repaired, also relating to weight problems.

All five of the twin-arm (Mk-26) cruisers have been decommissioned. The newer 22 of the 27 ships (CG-52 to CG-73) in the class will be upgraded to keep them combat-relevant, giving the ships a service life of 35 years each [1]. In the years leading up to their decommissioning, the five twin-arm ships had been assigned primarily home-waters duties, acting as command ships for destroyer squadrons assigned to the eastern Pacific and western Atlantic areas.

One ship of the class, USS Vincennes, became infamous in 1988 when she shot down Iran Air Flight 655 resulting in 290 civilian fatalities, which the captain of Vincennes had believed from misinterpreted radar returns was an Iranian Air Force F-14 Tomcat jet fighter on an attack vector. Vincennes was later decommissioned in 2005.

Of the "Ticos", at least six (Ticonderoga, Anzio,Yorktown, Valley Forge, Antietam and Princeton) share names with World War II aircraft carriers. Only one, Thomas S. Gates, is not named for a battle.

Originally, the Navy had intended to replace its fleet of Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers with cruisers produced as part of the CG(X) guided missile cruiser program; however, severe budget cuts from the 21st century surface combatant program coupled with the increasing cost of the Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer program have led to wide spread rumors that the CG(X) program was cancelled. If this is in fact correct then the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers do not yet have an intended replacement.