SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — The USS Lake Champlain, which has been homeported in San Diego for decades, is home from what is most likely its final mission. The Navy plans to decommission the ship, which could happen by the end of the year.
“Over time, the cost to maintain a ship, and to maintain its relevancy in the what we call kill chain starts to become a little higher than we anticipate," said Navy expert Howard Warner, a retired submarine captain who previously served as commanding officer of Naval Base Point Loma. “It makes sense to decommission ships as we bring on newer ships into the fleet.”
The Lake Champlain, named after a naval battle during the War of 1812, is a guided-missile cruiser that went into service in 1988 and has served in the Pacific ever since, including supporting operations in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. The Navy is beginning to phase out that class of ship, replacing them with more modern destroyers.
Warner says decommissioning is always emotional for the sailors and officers who served on the ship. When the submarine he commanded, the San Diego-based USS Bremerton, was decommissioned, he did not want to attend the ceremony. “I wanted to keep the memory of that operational ship in my head and keep it that way for the rest of my life. It’s a bittersweet end. The memory can’t go away, doesn’t go away. But we recognize the ships do have a finite lifespan. It is what it is.”
There is, perhaps, an emphasis on modernizing the ships based in San Diego, as tensions with China rise and put more focus on the Pacific theater. “I do think that the missions and the deployments, quite frankly, do take on a larger sense of value," Warner said. “What it demonstrates is that our navy is a forward-deployed power projection of American diplomacy.”
