American warship sunk by missiles off Scotland in live fire

The decommissioned American frigate USS Klakring has been sunk off the Hebrides during the joint US-UK live-fire exercise Atlantic Thunder 2026, in an engagement that drew in warships and aircraft from both navies, according to US Naval Forces Europe and Africa , which has released footage of the strike.

The video shows the American destroyer USS Paul Ignatius launching a missile and the frigate being hit. Other attackers took part alongside her, among them aircraft and further surface vessels, and the full order of battle has yet to be set out.

We will be bringing you an in-depth look tomorrow at what happened off the Hebrides, how the engagement was put together and which units and weapons were involved.

Paul Ignatius is an Arleigh Burke-class Flight IIA destroyer, hull number DDG-117, commissioned in July 2019 and named for the former Secretary of the Navy who held the post under Lyndon Johnson. She has been forward-deployed to Naval Station Rota in southern Spain since June 2022, one of the American destroyers held in Europe for ballistic missile defence and wider tasking across the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Klakring was an Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigate, decommissioned in 2013 and laid up at the Philadelphia Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility until she was towed down the Delaware River on 12 August ahead of the Atlantic crossing, making first for Campbeltown. The exercise itself was originally planned for a window in May before moving to the second half of September at the QinetiQ Hebrides range in north-west Scotland.

A Request for Information issued by the Ministry of Defence in August 2025, inviting industry to take part, described Atlantic Thunder 26 as “a US-UK multi-domain exercise designed to validate SUW kill chains, build resilient kill webs and deliver strategic messaging through kinetic demonstration.”

The strike was only one part of the exercise though, Klakring is expected to now settle at a depth of around 6,000 feet, where uncrewed underwater vehicles are to carry out battle damage assessment and seabed survey work, a phase the Ministry of Defence treated as central when it approached industry last year.

The precedent is Atlantic Thunder 22, held off the same range in September 2022, which ended with the sinking of the former USS Boone by HMS Diamond, USS Arleigh Burke, RAF Typhoons and US Navy P-8 Poseidons, and was billed at the time as the most complex multinational sinking exercise staged in UK waters.