USS Valley Forge (CG-50)

USS Valley Forge (CG-50): Endurance as Strategy

Commissioned on 18 January 1986, USS Valley Forge was named for the encampment where George Washington's Continental Army spent the winter of 1777 to 1778 , the crucible of the Revolution, the six months of cold, starvation, and disease that transformed a ragged militia into a professional army. Eleven thousand soldiers arrived at Valley Forge. Twenty-five hundred did not leave. The ones who did were different men, shaped by shared suffering into the force that would win the war.

The name was appropriate for a ship that would spend much of her service life in the Persian Gulf, where the operational tempo was relentless, the heat was brutal, and the threat environment ranged from Iranian naval forces to Iraqi Scud missiles to the slowly building pressure of a confrontation that would eventually become Desert Storm.

Valley Forge deployed to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991, serving as part of the Aegis air defense network that protected the coalition carrier groups and amphibious forces assembling for the liberation of Kuwait. Her SPY-1 radar maintained continuous air picture over the northern Persian Gulf through the air campaign and the ground war, tracking the coalition air traffic and monitoring for Iraqi air threats through 43 days of the most concentrated air campaign since World War II.

She was decommissioned on 15 January 2004. Named for the winter that made an army, serving in the summer heat that tested a fleet.

Tactically Acquired's USS Valley Forge (CG-50) collection honors the crew who brought Washington's name into the Persian Gulf and kept the watch through the Coalition's defining naval campaign.