Yesterday, the guided missile frigate USS Simpson was decommissioned.

The Simpson is an Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigate, commissioned thirty years ago last week, at the height of the Cold War.

She was designed as a (relatively) low-cost, high-performance anti-submarine escort, intended to guard convoys against Soviet submarines and aircraft.

But as the Cold War wound down and the Middle East heated up, she found herself in the Persian Gulf on her first overseas deployment.  As the Iran-Iraq war slogged on, she was part of the multinational effort to escort oil tankers through the Persian Gulf, in response to another ship – Simpon’s sister ship, the Samuel Roberts – hitting an Iranian mine in international waters.

There,  on April 18 1988, Simpson and two other US ships attacked an Iranian intelligence station aboard an oil platform.  The Iranian missile boat Joshan – a French-built fast attack craft armed with US-built Harpoon missiles – launched a Harpoon at the US force.  The missile was shot down or decoyed away from the task force.

A “Combattante II” class missile boat – in this case, the Greek “Plotarchis Vlachavas”, a sister of “Joshan”.

Simpson then returned fire with four “Standard” antiaircraft missiles, hitting Joshan in the superstructure.  The task force finished the Iranian ship off with gunfire.   Simpson shared credit as one of the very few US vessels since World War 2 to actually sink an enemy ship in combat.

Simpson went on to a long career; it rescued the crew of a burning naptha tanker two years later; it served in Desert Storm, as well as several deployments on humanitarian and counter-piracy missions off the coast of Somalia.

But beyond that, it’s not an especially notable ship, and its decommissioning isn’t big news; it’s one of many, as the Obama Administration mothballs the Navy at an alarming rate.

But the notable thing about the decommissioning of Simpson is that with its departure from active service, the US Navy now has exactly one vessel in commission (that is to say, an active, commissioned vessel in the Navy, as opposed to a museum ship or a decommissioned vessel in the reserve “mothball fleet”) that has ever sunk an enemy ship in action.

This one:

The USS Constitution, commissioned in 1797, and which racked up quite a record in the undeclared war with France in 1806, the War of 1812, and the actions against the Barbary Pirates, and still a commissioned US Navy warship.