Why Navy Scrap Ships It Still Needs

The story of the Spruance-class destroyers is a study in how a “future-proof” masterpiece can be retired decades early—not because it failed, but because the Navy’s threat picture, technology, and balance sheet changed faster than the ships themselves.

At a Glance

Spruance-class destroyers began life mocked as “empty” ships, yet became the template for modern U.S. surface combatants.
They were aggressively upgraded—24 received vertical launch systems—and could technically have served into the late 2010s.^[5]^[10]
Despite that potential, the Navy accelerated their decommissioning from 1998 to 2005, largely to cut operating costs and make room for Arleigh Burke destroyers.^[1]^[4]^[5]
Most Spruances were sunk as targets or scrapped, fueling a narrative of waste that collides with the Navy’s cost-efficiency rationale.^[1]
Their fate fits a recurring pattern: legacy ships retired early in favor of more capable, cheaper-to-run successors during shifts in strategy and technology.^[13]

From “Empty Decks” to Blueprint for the Modern Fleet

When USS Spruance (DD-963) and her sisters first joined the fleet in the mid-1970s, they looked wrong to many eyes. At over 8,000 tons, these were big ships with strikingly uncluttered decks—no forest of visible guns and launchers that matched popular expectations of a Cold War destroyer. Contemporary critics and some sailors joked that the Navy had built “floating targets” or “empty ships,” a reaction to a design that deliberately hid its virtue: volume, not spectacle.^[2]

The Spruance class was engineered around gas-turbine propulsion, generous internal margin for growth, and a quiet hull optimized for hunting submarines at range. Where older gun-and-missile destroyers crammed legacy systems into tight spaces, Spruances carried modular electronics, open deck plans, and deep below-deck machinery spaces that could accept new weapons as they matured. This “empty deck” philosophy was not a miscalculation; it was a bet that the Navy’s needs in the 1980s and 1990s would look different than its needs in 1975—and that a hull with room to grow would be worth more than one frozen in time.^[1]^[2]^[5]

Designed for Submarines, Adapted for Strike

The original mission of the Spruance-class was straightforward and demanding: protect carrier battle groups from the most advanced Soviet submarines then entering service. Their gas-turbine plants gave them long legs—over 6,000 nautical miles at 20 knots—allowing them to self-deploy and operate far forward, often independently, in anti-submarine roles and presence missions. They replaced steam-era destroyers with a cleaner, simpler engineering plant, reducing some maintenance burdens even as the ships grew larger.^[1]^[5]

Crucially, the class did not remain single-mission for long. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the Navy executed what naval encyclopedists now describe as a “successful modification” series: twenty-four of the thirty-one Spruances had their forward ASROC launcher replaced by a 61-cell Mark 41 vertical launch system (VLS), capable of firing Tomahawk land-attack and Harpoon anti-ship missiles. Later upgrades added Rolling Airframe Missile launchers and improved sensors, giving many Spruances a robust strike and point-defense capability on top of their anti-submarine core.^[2]^[5]^[9]

By the mid-1990s, U.S. Naval Institute authors were describing VLS-equipped Spruances as premier strike and undersea warfare platforms, with projected decommissioning dates around 2018–2020 if modernized. In other words, the “empty” destroyer had become the Navy’s versatile workhorse: a quiet sub-hunter that could also rain cruise missiles ashore and operate comfortably in littoral environments.^[10]

Why the Navy Cut Them Loose Decades Early

Against that backdrop, their rapid retirement looks jarring. All thirty-one Spruance-class destroyers were decommissioned between 1998 and 2005, many in their early twenties—well short of the 30–35 year service lives that comparable cruisers achieved. The Navy’s own documentation, summarized in later histories, indicates that the class could have served to around 2019 if maintained and updated. Yet the last ship, USS Cushing, left service in 2005; almost all of her sisters had already been removed from the battle line.^[1]^[2]^[4]

The explicit rationale was financial and comparative. According to budget records cited in later analyses, the Navy accelerated Spruance decommissioning to save roughly $28 million annually in operating costs. At the same time, Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers—equipped with the Aegis combat system, modern radar, and their own VLS batteries—were arriving in numbers. By 2000, the 27 Flight I and II Burkes in commission effectively duplicated or exceeded the Spruances’ capabilities in air defense, strike, and anti-submarine warfare.^[4]^[5]^[11]

Spruances were described in those years as expensive and manpower-intensive compared with Burkes, which offered more warfighting value per crew member and per dollar of upkeep. In 1998, seven Spruances that lacked the VLS upgrade were retired after only about two decades of service specifically to accommodate the introduction of newer destroyers. As post–Cold War budgets tightened and the Soviet submarine threat that had justified the Spruances’ birth receded, a large, upgrade-hungry destroyer became harder to defend in Pentagon spreadsheets.^[1]^[3]^[5]^[9]^[11]

Sinking the Fleet: Cost Savings Versus Perceived Waste

The most emotionally charged aspect of the Spruance story is not that they were retired early—it is what happened next. Unlike some older classes that lingered in reserve or were sold to allied navies, most Spruance-class ships were either broken up or sunk as targets in training and weapons tests shortly after decommissioning. Only one, USS Paul F. Foster, was retained as a test ship; the rest disappeared into the deep or the scrapyard.^[1]^[2]

For critics, this looks like textbook waste. Commentators in venues like 19FortyFive and specialized blogs argue that sending structurally sound, heavily upgraded warships to the bottom removed a flexible reserve force that could have filled gaps or been modernized later, especially once it became clear that follow-on programs like the Zumwalt class and Littoral Combat Ship would be fewer or less capable than advertised. Those same writers point to Ticonderoga-class Aegis cruisers, which shared hull form and machinery with Spruances and were largely upgraded instead of scrapped; more than twenty received life-extension work in the early 2000s.^[1]^[2]^[7]

From the Navy’s perspective, live-fire sink exercises and scrapping are standard end-of-life options. Target use validates new weapons, generates realistic training data, and avoids carrying mothballed hulls on the books. In later budget materials for other classes, the Navy has quantified the benefit of early retirements—tens of millions of dollars in near-term operating savings and avoidance of costly modernization packages that, in their analysis, did not pass a warfighting value test. The Spruances appear to have gone through a similar calculus; what is missing is a detailed, public cost-benefit analysis specific to the class, which would clarify how much the Navy believed it was saving.^[13]^[18]

Could They Have Been Modernized Instead?

The strongest counter-argument comes from inside the naval community rather than from outside punditry. In 1997, a Proceedings article titled “Don’t Forget the Spruances” laid out a concrete modernization path: upgrade all VLS-equipped Spruances to support littoral operations, extend their service life by roughly 15 years beyond the planned 30, and use them as one-for-one replacements until new SC-21–era ships (a conceptual ancestor of today’s next-generation destroyers) arrived. The author warned of a looming gap in strike and undersea warfare capability if Spruances were retired before replacements were ready.^[10]

Retrospective analyses have extended that logic. One detailed blog comparison notes that twenty-two of twenty-seven Aegis cruisers built on the Spruance hull were mechanically upgraded in 2003 to remain combat-relevant for at least 35 years; had a comparable mechanical overhaul been granted to the 24 VLS Spruances, many would still have been in service well into the late 2010s. Naval encyclopedias similarly argue that while Spruances remained more vulnerable to air and missile attack than Burkes, their firepower and endurance could have justified modernization if budgets had allowed.^[1]^[2]^[9]

That gap between “could” and “did” is the crux. Technically, the ships were adaptable; structurally, they could have borne more upgrades. But financially, every modernization dollar competes with new construction. By the late 1990s, the Navy had committed strongly to the Burke production line as its principal surface combatant, and early concepts for successor ships were in circulation. In that environment, investing heavily in a non-Aegis legacy hull—with weaker air defense and higher crew counts—was an increasingly tough sell, especially once the original Soviet submarine threat had largely collapsed.^[5]^[6]^[9]^[10]

$$$. Aegis technology was almost placed on Virginia class cruisers, but the price tag per unit exceeded Congressional budget, so they put Aegis on Spruance destroyers

— BP (@veteran_BP) June 29, 2026

A Pattern, Not an Exception: How the Navy Treats Legacy Ships

Step back from the Spruance case, and a broader pattern emerges. In recent budgets, the Navy has repeatedly requested early retirement for ships with service life still remaining—Ticonderoga-class cruisers, Whidbey Island-class amphibious ships, and even young Littoral Combat Ships—arguing that material condition, upgrade cost, and marginal warfighting return do not justify keeping them. Defense News and official Navy messages have shown the same logic in play: retire platforms that consume outsized maintenance budgets and manpower, even if they are not yet worn out, to free resources for newer, more integrated designs.^[13]^[14]^[18]

Seen through that lens, the Spruance decision looks less like an aberration and more like an early, decisive example of a now-familiar divest-to-invest strategy. That does not make the outcome any less bittersweet. For crews who served on Spruance destroyers—and for historians looking back—the ships proved their worth across the Cold War, the Persian Gulf conflicts, and countless peacetime deployments as flexible, long-legged workhorses. Their hull and machinery formed the basis of Aegis cruisers; their VLS upgrades validated the vertical launch concept that dominates U.S. surface combatants today.^[1]^[2]^[5]

But navies are not museums. The Spruance class was retired and sunk not because it lacked adaptability, but because newer ships could deliver similar or greater capability with fewer sailors and lower lifecycle cost, in a strategic environment where the original mission that justified the class had faded. The debate over whether that was a “mistake” or an unavoidable trade-off is really a debate about how much risk and redundancy a fleet should carry when budgets are finite and new technology beckons.