How much does it take to sink a warship constructed to Cold War specifications? In June 2000, during the world’s largest naval exercise, the U.S. Navy learned the hard way.
USS Buchanan (DDG‑14), a Charles F. Adams‑class guided missile frigate commissioned in 1962, had spent close to a decade as a decommissioned hulk when she was chosen as a target ship for RIMPAC 2000 off Kauai. Within a period of over 24 hours, she had taken on board an arsenal that would have incapacitated most contemporary surface combatants. As reported by the ship’s official record, “She took three hits from Hellfire missiles fired from SH‑60 LAMPS helos; Three Harpoon Missiles fired from RAAF F‑111 & US P‑3 aircraft, and several allied ships; and a GBU‑24 (2400 lb laser guided) bomb.” The intended coup de grâce a heavyweight MK-48 torpedo from the USS Buffalo did not function.
Each of these weapons had unique engineering lineages. The AGM‑114 Hellfire, a 100‑pound, semi‑active laser‑guided missile intended for precision targeting, is most suited to small, high‑value targets. The RGM‑84 Harpoon, conversely, is a sea‑skimming, anti‑ship cruise missile that carries a 488‑pound high‑explosive warhead and has a range of more than 60 nautical miles in its Block 1C variant. The 2,000-plus-pound penetrator warhead GBU‑24 Paveway III is designed to penetrate hardened targets its impact on the superstructure of a destroyer should have been catastrophic. The MK‑48, a 3,500-pound torpedo that can travel in excess of 55 knots, is intended to shatter a vessel’s keel via an under-hull explosion.
However, Buchanan’s survival was not an accident. U.S. destroyers of the Cold War era were constructed to exacting survivability standards that matched susceptibility, vulnerability, and recoverability. The Adams‑class had strong longitudinal framing, redundant power and damage control systems, and numerous watertight compartments design provisions enshrined in Navy survivability policy and subsequently codified in OPNAVINST 9070.1B. These provisions, spawned during World War II and developed and honed during the missile age, were designed to guarantee that even after being seriously damaged, a ship could stay afloat and, if it was at all possible, continue fighting.
The RIMPAC 2000 scenario underscored those principles. Despite losing her mast and suffering severe damage “forward of the ASROC,” as SINKEX coordinator Rick Dillard’s poem recorded, Buchanan “still stood in dignity, upon an even keel.” Senior Chief Randy Carpenter recalled the reaction across range control: “We should build them like that now they don’t build them like that anymore.”
RIMPAC itself was a proving ground on an enormous scale. The 2000 iteration featured over 50 ships, 200 aircraft, and 22,000 personnel from allied navies such as Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Chile, and the United Kingdom. Exercises spanned anti‑submarine warfare to live‑fire missile shoots, challenging interoperability in sophisticated maritime environments. For weapons designers and naval designers, SINKEX exercises provided uncommon empirical information on the interaction of munitions with actual‑scale warship structures information that cannot be exactly duplicated by computer simulations and sub‑scale testing.
The MK‑48 strike failure in this instance also underscores the complexity of the “kill chain” outlined in contemporary analysis of naval combat. Even with weapons that can do catastrophic damage, technical failures, aimed shots, or environmental circumstances may cut short an otherwise deadly chain. In the missile arena, as anti‑ship missile effectiveness studies caution, managing concurrent salvos from several platforms is a tall order, and single or sequential strikes might not register mission kill against a well‑constructed hull.
Buchanan’s career prior to her last trial was as colorful as her demise. She received the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal for service in Vietnam, accidentally collided with a civilian fishing boat in 1967, and in 1984 was refused entry to New Zealand for violating its nuclear‑free policy, even though she did not have nuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War, she played out the dual purpose of the guided missile destroyer air defense through Standard missile ancestors and land‑attack capability and acted as a training platform for SEAL boarding operations in her last active year.
When finally it came, it was not from above nor below, but from within. On June 14, 2000, an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team inserted 200 pounds of C‑4 in prearranged locations. “Sixteen minutes and three seconds after igniting the time fuse,” Carpenter explained, “the Buchanan gracefully in a bow down attitude slid below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.” Among the four target ships of that RIMPAC, she alone needed demolition charges to complete the task a testament to a bygone day when U.S. warships were designed with the hope that they might get battered and continue fighting.
