Decommissioning 6 GC-built cruisers

The Navy is weighing whether to cancel six planned service-life extensions of its oldest cruisers in 2021-22 - Mobile Bay, Bunker Hill, Antietam, Leyte Gulf, San Jacinto, and Lake Champlain, all built on the Gulf Coast (GC) in the 1980s. At that point, the sea-service will have 16 largest surface combatants, according to defense officials who spoke to Defense News. The Navy will propose the plan to Congress to decommission (decom) the six cruisers by 2022 and forego service life extensions that have been supported by lawmakers in past years All six ships will be at/near the their 35-year service lives at decommissioning, but the Navy has not decided on a replacement for the cruisers, which have 122 vertical launch systems (VLS) cells. Navy needs all the missiles it can muster downrange in case of potential threats from Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles. Cruisers have 26 more VLS cells per hull than the Arleigh Burke Flight IIA destroyer, and 32 more than Flight I Arleigh Burke. Cruisers are lead air defense ships in carrier strike groups, but have been reputably difficult to maintain. The service plans to release an updated 30-year shipbuilding plan very soon, but declined comment until it was public. The Navy has been making the most of the ships. USS Mobile Bay was the first ship in the fleet to have the latest version of the Aegis Baseline 9 installed on its Baseline 8 system as an experiment to prove new installs on legacy ships could be done in weeks vs. years. The Navy wants to employ it for all ships going forward.(Source: Defense News 03/18/19) Gulf Coast Note: All six of the cruisers were built at the Pascagoula, Miss.-based Ingalls Shipbuilding Division of Litton Industries (now HII) in the 1980s. USS Mobile Bay (CG 53) was commissioned on Feb. 21, 1987, at the Alabama State Docks in Mobile, Ala.