Missile and torpedo fire sinks decommissioned US frigate in Atlantic Thunder drills off the Hebrides

A decommissioned United States warship has been sunk in the North Atlantic, about 170 miles (274km) off Scotland's Outer Hebrides, after being hit by a missile and a torpedo during a live-fire training exercise. The target was the former guided missile frigate USS Klakring, which went down on Monday at the Ministry of Defence's Hebrides range, far to the west of the Scottish mainland.

The killing shots came from two US warships. Klakring was struck by a missile fired from USS Paul Ignatius and a torpedo from USS Massachusetts, both of which were participating in Exercise Atlantic Thunder 2026 — a serial that involved US and UK armed forces working together. The Royal Navy, for its part, used the same target to test its own "ship-busting" weapons, giving both sides of the alliance the chance to measure how their anti-ship systems perform against a realistic surface target.

For the frigate itself, the sinking marked the end of a service life spanning more than four decades. USS Klakring entered service in 1983 and was decommissioned in 2013, leaving a 43-year-old hull that had long since been stripped of its operational value but retained considerable value as a target. Ships of her type were built to carry and launch guided missiles, meaning a hulk of this kind offers a far more demanding test for a shooter than a simple barge or floating target.

The vessel also carried a notable namesake. She was named for Rear Adm Thomas B Klakring, who was awarded three US Navy Crosses for his service as a submarine commander during the Second World War. The choice of a submarine commander as the ship's patron reflected the US Navy's submarine heritage, and the honour was marked on a frigate that would itself be used to demonstrate anti-ship warfare decades after the war ended.

Sinking a prepared hulk at sea is a long-established practice, but the scale of these exercises varies enormously. The BBC understands that other warships — including an aircraft carrier in 2006 — have been deliberately sunk at sea by the US, both as part of training and to create artificial reefs for marine life. Because retired vessels are a scarce and expensive resource, planners have to balance the value of a single sinking against the need to keep hulls available for repeated, smaller-scale test events.

That is the justification the US Navy put forward for this sinking. A spokesperson said that sinking ex-navy vessels, which are specially prepared as targets, provides a practicable way of running the large-scale exercises needed to train at the high level required by the armed forces. In other words, the destruction of Klakring was not the point in itself: it was the end state of a training sequence designed to rehearse coordination, weapon employment and targeting across an entire task group.

Preparations went well beyond simply towing the ship out to open water. The US Navy said the vessel was put through what it called a "rigorous" cleaning process to remove contaminants and old equipment, and that personnel checked for the presence of whales and dolphins before live firing began. The latter precaution is significant in the waters off the Hebrides, an area associated with cetacean populations and with seabirds and marine mammals that would be vulnerable to underwater noise, debris or contamination.

Environmental scrutiny of such operations is intense, and the navy said the sinking exercises were prepared in strict compliance with environmental regulations. The spokesperson argued that the extensive preparations — including the cleaning of the hulk — assured that the environmental impact of the exercise would be minimal. Critics of live-fire sinking have in the past pressed for clearer independent monitoring of what happens to the wreck afterwards, and of whether the reef it becomes genuinely offsets the release of fuel, oils and paint.

The location itself is part of the safety case. Firing 170 miles offshore places the target in deep water, well clear of fishing grounds, coastal communities and inshare waters, and gives firing ships room to manoeuvre and withdraw without risk to civil traffic. It also allows engagements to be run at the ranges where a real threat would most plausibly be detected and engaged.

For the Royal Navy, the serial offered the chance to validate anti-ship weapons against a genuine frigate-sized hull rather than a purpose-built surrogate, in an environment that resembles operations in the open ocean. Exercises of this kind are also a test of allied interoperability — how US and UK ships share targeting information, how they deconflict in a crowded sea, and whether doctrine holds up when units from two navies operate in the same box.

The sinking also carries a practical legacy. Where a hulk is left on the seabed in a suitable depth, it can gradually become a productive artificial reef, offering shelter and substrate for fish and invertebrates in an otherwise featureless expanse of North Atlantic. In that sense, Klakring's final voyage converts a decommissioned warship into a long-term feature of the marine environment rather than scrap metal awaiting the breakers.

The images released by US Naval Forces Europe-Africa show orange flame and smoke rising from the grey hull as the frigate is struck, and again as the second wave of weapons hits. They record, in effect, the last moments of a vessel that spent three decades as a warship and one afternoon as a target — a routine but heavily choreographed piece of naval work, in which environmental preparation, weapons testing, alliance training and reef creation all depend on the same single, carefully managed event.