Navy commissions USS Ted Stevens in Whittier

The Navy commissioned the destroyer USS Ted Stevens in a rainy ceremony in Whittier on Saturday, putting a warship named for Alaska's longest-serving U.S. senator into active service.

Capt. Mary Katey Hays took command of a crew of about 340. Hays was the ship's first crew member, and sponsor Lily Stevens Becker said she had built the crew "from one, herself, to 346." The ship will be homeported in Norfolk, Virginia, according to the Navy. It is the first Navy ship commissioned in Alaska since USS Anchorage in 2013.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao placed the ship in commission. "On behalf of the President of the United States, I hereby place United States Ship Ted Stevens in commission," Cao said. Becker, her mother, Catherine Ann Stevens, and her sister Susan Stevens Covich, the ship's sponsors, then gave the traditional order: "Officers and crew of the USS Ted Stevens, man our ship and bring her to life!" Former Navy Secretary Sean O'Keefe, who once worked for Stevens, passed the long glass to the ship's first officer of the deck.

Adm. Steve Koehler, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said the ship is the 78th Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and the third of its newest version, Flight III, to join the fleet. Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, won the job in 2018 as one of six destroyers in a $5.1 billion contract. Construction began in 2020, the sponsors christened the ship Aug. 19, 2023, and it reached Norfolk in May. When it asked Congress for the money, the Navy estimated the ship and the one other destroyer funded that year would cost about $3.5 billion together, or roughly $1.75 billion each. U.S. Rep. Nick Begich described the crew's trip north: "The roughly 340 sailors who have brought this ship from Mississippi to Norfolk, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific, and finally here to Alaska are the ones who will give this ship life."

Much of the ceremony was about Stevens himself, who served in the Senate from 1968 to 2009. Becker read from a 1999 memo in which her father was asked to say, in 100 words or less, how his World War II service contributed to his career. "He had 100 words to talk about his own experience, but he spent half of them talking about others," she said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski recalled Stevens' wartime flights over the Himalayas, a route pilots called the Aluminum Trail "because on a clear day you could navigate by the wreckage of the downed planes." Sen. Dan Sullivan said his own Stevens story began in 1990, when he was dating a Stevens staffer, Julie, now his wife of 32 years. He keeps a photo in his Senate office of Stevens giving her a bear hug on her last day of work.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy said, "Senator Stevens understood something that remains just as important today: Alaska is central to America's security, not on the sidelines of it." Cao, on his first trip to Alaska, called it "the most strategic place in the world."

Hays said the crew is ready to defend freedom "whether the winds of war blow near the rugged coast of Alaska or in the far reaches of the globe."

The ship is scheduled to visit Juneau Oct. 7 to 10, according to a proclamation read at the Juneau Assembly's Sept. 15 meeting.