Career
Ordered:
Laid down:	6 November 1972
Launched:	22 February 1974
Commissioned:	24 September 1979
Decommissioned:
Fate:
Struck:
General Characteristics
Displacement:	4,820 tonnes
Length:	125 m (410 ft)
Beam:	14.3 m (47 ft)
Draught:	5.8 m
Propulsion:	COGAG (Combined Gas and Gas) turbines, 2 shafts 2 turbines producing 36 MW
Speed:	30 knots (56 km/h)
Range:
Complement:	287–301
Armament:	2 x Sea Dart missile launcher 4.5 inch (114 millimetres) Mk8 gun 2 x 20 mm Oerlikon guns 2 x Phalanx (CIWS) 2 x triple anti-submarine torpedo tubes NATO Seagnat and DLF3 decoy launchers
Aircraft:	Lynx HMA8
Motto:

The third and present HMS Cardiff (D108) is a Type 42 (Batch 1) destroyer of the Royal Navy. She was built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering and is much smaller than the Batch 3 of her type. She was launched in 1974 by Lady Caroline Gilmore and commissioned in 1979. She is one of only a few ships still in the Royal Navy to have been involved in the Falklands War.

She was under the command of Captain M. G. T. Harris for the duration of the Falklands War. During that conflict, she was not damaged, though two of her sister-ships were sunk (Sheffield and Coventry) and one suffered damage (Glasgow). A very tragic incident involving Cardiff occurred during the war, when an Army Air Corps Gazelle was shot down by Cardiff's Sea Dart missile system. Four people were killed.

In 1991, Cardiff was deployed at the then largest deployment of Royal Navy warships since the Falklands War, in which she also had the distinction of being part of, during the Gulf War. On 24th January, while deployed to the Persian Gulf, Cardiff sighted three Iraqi vessels operating from the occupied Kuwaiti island of Qaruh . Her Lynx helicopter destroyed two of the vessels, which later turned out to be minesweepers. In 2003, Cardiff was once again in the Persian Gulf this time on a six-month deployment as part of Armilla Patrol. She returned to Britain in August 2003.

It was announced in July 2004, as part of the Delivering Security in a Changing World review, that Cardiff would be decommissoned in August 2005.

See HMS Cardiff for other ships of the name.