The Navy has been decommissioning Ticonderoga-class cruisers for years, and the standard fate for these 9,600-ton Cold War leftovers is either the scrapper’s torch or a slow rust at anchor while Congress argues about what to do with them.<\/p>\n
One of them got a different sendoff. On July 12, a Canadian diesel-electric submarine came up to periscope depth somewhere off the north shore of Kauai, lined up on the drifting hulk of USS Mobile Bay<\/em>, and put a heavyweight torpedo into her side as the finale of a live-fire sinking exercise at RIMPAC 2026<\/a>.<\/p>\n The boat that pulled the trigger was HMCS Corner Brook. And here is the part that is almost funny if you follow Ottawa’s defense headlines: six days earlier, the Prime Minister’s Office had put out a release confirming that only one of Canada’s four submarines was seaworthy.<\/p>\n One boat. One shot. One 9,600-ton American cruiser on the bottom of the Pacific.<\/p>\n The weapon was a Mk 48 Mod 7AT heavyweight torpedo, the same 21-inch wire-guided fish the US Navy runs on its own attack submarines. Corner Brook is a Victoria-class boat, formerly the Royal Navy’s HMS Ursula, launched in 1989 and sold to Canada in 1998. NATO-standard tubes, NATO-standard torpedo, thirty-seven-year-old hull burning diesel instead of splitting atoms.<\/p>\n There is a nice piece of irony in that torpedo, too. Corner Brook spent from 2014 to 2021 stuck in an Extended Docking Work Period, repairing damage from a 2011 underwater grounding. One of the upgrades she picked up during those seven years in the shed was the ability to fire the Mod 7AT in the first place, replacing the older Mk 48 4M. The refit that kept her tied up is what armed her for this.<\/p>\n The target was no small thing either. Mobile Bay<\/em> was CG 53, the seventh Ticonderoga built, a 567-foot Aegis cruiser of the kind that used to be the surface Navy’s answer to Soviet regiments of anti-ship missiles. Per the Navy, she was commissioned in February 1987 at the Alabama State Docks in Mobile, and decommissioned in August 2023. Call it 36 years in the fleet.<\/p>\n She was also one of the first Ticonderogas built around vertical launch cells rather than twin-arm rails. From CG 52 onward the class rolled out of the yard with Mk 41 VLS from the keel up, which is the single reason these ships carried Aegis usefully into the 2000s.<\/p>\n This was not a courtesy assignment, and to understand why it mattered to Ottawa you need to know what submarines usually do at RIMPAC.<\/p>\n Mostly they play target. A boat at the exercise often works as what Paul Mitchell, a professor at the Canadian Forces College writing a book on the Victoria class, calls a “clockwork mouse,” moving predictably so surface ships can practice tracking it. Mitchell told the National Post that no submariner wants that job, describing it as “boring and dull and there’s no glory in it.”<\/p>\n Corner Brook did not get handed the mouse costume. She got the kill shot.<\/p>\n It was Canada’s first submarine at RIMPAC in twelve years, since HMCS Victoria attended in 2014, and the boat only returned to full operational service in April 2025 after more than a decade out of the normal cycle. Capt. Landon Creasy, the Canadian task group commander, said live-fire targeting work of this kind is “invaluable to our submariners.”<\/p>\n He is not wrong, and the reason is structural. Detect a contact, classify it, track it, solve the firing problem, launch a wire-guided torpedo, and put a real hull on the seabed. That is the entire engagement chain end to end, and Corner Brook ran it against an actual warship rather than a simulator.<\/p>\n Mitchell also made the practical point about why any of this matters. Canada has to keep these aging boats running for another decade, because they are the only thing available to train crews for the German-built fleet Ottawa just committed to buying<\/a>. The same July 6 release that admitted three of four submarines could not sail was the one naming TKMS preferred supplier for up to 12 new ones.<\/p>\n Corner Brook did not sink the cruiser alone. Before the Canadians got their turn, Mobile Bay<\/em> ate a full menu.<\/p>\n Coalition forces put HIMARS rockets, Japanese Type 12 anti-ship missiles, AGM-158C LRASMs, Spike NLOS missiles and heavyweight torpedoes into the hull. At least one LRASM came off a Navy Super Hornet.<\/p>\n The helicopters were the surprise act. US Army AH-64 Apaches from the 16th Combat Aviation Brigade fired Spike NLOS at the cruiser, a weapon most people file under anti-tank work, now cleared for shooting at warships. The Army has been integrating it under its Mobile Long-Range Precision Strike Missile effort since late 2023.<\/p>\n Over on the Peleliu shoot five days later, a Royal New Zealand Navy SH-2G(I) Seasprite off HMNZS Te Mana put a Penguin missile into the hulk, a Royal Australian MH-60R Seahawk fired a Hellfire, and an Italian Navy SH-101 launched a Marte anti-ship missile.<\/p>\n Three Harpoons converged on the same target from three different navies: the Spanish frigate ESPS \u00c1lvaro de Baz\u00e1n, the Japanese destroyer JS Kongo, and the Los Angeles-class submarine USS Columbia firing an encapsulated UGM-84 from underwater.<\/p>\n The last thing to hit Peleliu<\/em> was the most interesting, and it is the part of RIMPAC 2026 that people will still be talking about in five years.<\/p>\n The Navy sent in Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft from Unmanned Surface Vessel Division 32. Two were present; one ran the full end-to-end attack. Video from the observing craft shows the drone boat motoring past holes already torn open by Harpoon, Spike and LRASM before detonating against the waterline.<\/p>\n It was the first time the US Navy has used a kamikaze sea drone against a large warship in a live-fire event.<\/p>\n The specifics matter. TWZ reports the GARC is roughly 16 feet long, displaces about 4,800 pounds fully loaded, and carried a 1,000-pound payload into the Peleliu. The autonomy package was Anduril’s Lattice, the same software family the company has been pushing across every uncrewed platform it can get it onto<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe shot: one Mk 48, one Ticonderoga<\/h2>\n
The clockwork mouse that finally got to shoot<\/h2>\n
Everything else that hit her first<\/h2>\n
The drone boat that finished the job<\/h2>\n