The Navy said the Pearl Harbor cruiser USS Port Royal and three others based elsewhere that had been slated for early retirement in March will be kept on duty for an undetermined length of time.
"This is good news for Hawaii and for the Navy," U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa, D-Hawaii, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.
"I think this decision by the Navy will help the U.S. to maintain its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, which is critical to our nation’s strategic and economic objectives. And, of course, for Hawaii, keeping her roughly 400 crewmembers on duty here will benefit our economy and our community," she said.
The Cowpens, Anzio and Vicksburg also received a reprieve from a March 31 end of service after Congress placed pressure on the Navy to keep the warships going.
How much longer the cruisers will be in the Navy fleet is unclear. Navy officials at the Pentagon declined to comment Thursday.
Commissioned in 1994, the 567-foot Port Royal is the newest cruiser in the Navy but was wracked by huge repairs and a questionable future when it ran aground off Honolulu Airport’s reef runway in 2009.
The Pentagon said in January the Port Royal "is in need of costly hull repairs."
In February, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said as a cost-saving move, seven "lower-priority" cruisers requiring significant repairs would be retired early.
Navy brass said the move would save about $4 billion that could be used toward much-needed maintenance on remaining ships.
The three other cruisers still slated to be retired include the Chosin, also based at Pearl Harbor; Gettysburg; and Hue City. They are scheduled to be removed from service in 2014.
Vice Adm. William Burke, deputy chief of naval operations, fleet readiness and logistics, told a congressional panel in March that "the cruiser retirements were an extremely difficult choice for us to make."
Burke added that "if we didn’t do this, if we kept too many ships, we would be under-maintaining all of them, and so we would end up down the road having a bigger problem than we have today."
U.S. Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., said in March that the Navy plan meant the retirement of "perfectly good ships" with plenty of life left in them. Forbes said the firepower on four U.S. cruisers exceeded the missile capacity of the entire United Kingdom Royal Navy fleet.
The Port Royal was a late addition to the list of cruisers gaining some added life. The House Armed Services Committee had previously opposed the 2013 retirement of the other three cruisers, Hanabusa said.
The Port Royal received $20 million in repairs starting in late 2010 to address cracks that were discovered in the aluminum alloy superstructures on all of the Navy’s cruisers. The Navy also spent $40 million to fix damage from the Port Royal’s 2009 grounding, and $18 million on refurbishment immediately before the warship ran aground.
