History
The 46 ships of the Knox class were the largest, last and most numerous of the US Navy’s second-generation ASW escorts. The lead ship of the class was the USS Knox (FF-1052), laid down 5 October 1965 and commissioned 12 April 1969, at Todd Shipyards in Seattle. Planned as the follow-on to the twin 5-inch gun armed Garcia class frigates and the Tartar missile-equipped Brooke class frigates, their initial design incorporated the prior classes’ pressure-fired boilers (the design later was changed to conventional 1,200 psi (8,300 kPa) boilers) in a similar-sized hull designed around the massive bow-mounted AN/SQS-26 sonar.
Ten ships were authorized in FY 1964, sixteen in 1965 and ten each for FYs 1966, ’67 and ’68; six were canceled in 1968 and four more in 1969. They were built in four different shipyards and were originally commissioned as destroyer escorts (DEs) 1052–1097 in 1969–1974, they were redesignated as frigates (FF) on 30 June 1975.
The Knox class was the Navy’s last destroyer-type design with a steam powerplant.
Due to their unequal comparison to destroyers then in service (large size with low speed and a single screw and 5 inch gun), they became known to a generation of destroyermen as “McNamara’s Folly.”
These ships were retired from the US Navy at the end of the Cold War due to a declining need for an advanced ASW capability. By 1994 all ships of this class had been retired from the US Navy, although some remain in service with foreign nations such as Egypt, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Mexico.
Read more about this topic: Knox Class Frigate
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)