USS CONOLLY
- Name: USS CONOLLY
- Ship Class: Destroyer Tender
- Ship Number: DD-979
- Date Commissioned:
- Status: Unknown
Ship History:
A destroyer is a lovely ship, probably the nicest fighting ship of all.
Battleships are a little like steel cities or great factories of destruction. Aircraft carriers are floating flying fields. Even cruisers are big pieces of machinery, but a destroyer is all ship.
In the beautiful clean lines of her, in her speed and roughness, in her gallantry, she is completely a ship in the old sense.
- John Steinbeck- USS CONOLLY (DD 979)
STRIKE DESTROYER
CONOLLY was built by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corporation in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and commissioned on 14 October 1978, the seventeenth of thirty-one SPRUANCE Class destroyers. With a displacement of approximately 9,000 tons, CONOLLY is nearly four times the size of her World War II ancestors.
Throughout her life, the CONOLLY has proved that she is ready for operation anywhere in the world, and is “Leading the Way!”
Powered by four gas turbine engines driving two controllable-reversible pitch propellers, which give an extremely high degree of flexibility and maneuverability, she is capable of speeds in excess of 30 knots, and can accelerate from dead in the water to maximum speed in less than two minutes. Equally impressive, she can stop from maximum speed in less than a minute. Equipped with the most modern Naval weapons systems, CONOLLY is a versatile, multi-mission ship, capable of operating with equal effectiveness, either independently, or as part of a carrier task group. She can strike targets deep within enemy territory, with cruise missiles, bombard shore positions, support amphibious assaults, escort military and Merchant Marine convoys, establish blockades, and destroy enemy submarines.
One of the first U.S. Navy ships to be configured for strike warfare operations, and known since the addition of Tomahawk in 1984 as “The Strike Destroyer,” CONOLLY is capable of carrying up to eight Tomahawk cruise missiles and eight Harpoon cruise missiles. Two five- inch guns, the NATO Sea Sparrow Missile System, two Phalanx Close-In Weapons Systems, six torpedo tubes, and the Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC) complete the installed weapons systems. The helo hangar is configured to carry two SH-60B Helicopters (LAMPS MARK III) which, with the AN/SQR-19 Towed Array SONAR Systems, are an integral component of the AN/SQQ-89 Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) system.