US Navy decommissions USS Fort Worth after 14 years of mechanical failures and rising repair costs.

On July 29, 2026, the U.S. Navy decommissioned the Freedom-class littoral combat ship USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) at Naval Base San Diego after 13 years and 10 months of active service. The early retirement allows the Navy to redirect operating and sustainment funds toward upgrading active production hulls with redesigned gearboxes and expanded anti-ship missile capacity. The decision reflects a broader force-structure adjustment to phase out early-hull operational test platforms that require disproportionate investment relative to their remaining service life.

Commissioned in September 2012 at an estimated cost of $400 million, USS Fort Worth completed less than 56% of its planned 25-year lifecycle following combining-gear propulsion casualties and the termination of its dedicated anti-submarine warfare mission package. Following inactivation, the vessel will be transferred to the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Washington, to be harvested for reusable equipment and propulsion components to support active Freedom-class ships.

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The USS Fort Worth became the sixth of 16 Freedom-class ships retired, following USS Freedom, USS Milwaukee, USS Detroit, USS Little Rock, and USS Sioux City, and its departure left ten Freedom-class ships in active service. (Picture source: US Navy)

On July 29, 2026, the U.S Navy decommissioned USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) at Naval Base San Diego after 13 years, 10 months, and seven days in commission, less than 56% of its planned 25-year service life. Originally expected to remain active until the late 2030s, the USS Fort Worth became the sixth of 16 Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) already removed from service, leaving ten ships of the variant active. The decision followed five years without a normal operational deployment, a major combining-gear casualty in 2016, repeated class-wide propulsion problems, high support requirements, elevated fuel consumption, and the failure of the original Anti-Submarine Warfare Mission Package to mature into a deployable capability. The ship had cost roughly $400 million to build, but by 2026 the US Navy decided that spending additional money would not produce enough deployed days and combat capacity. 

Estimates that returning the first four LCS test ships to regular sea duty could require another $2 billion indicated a notional average of $500 million per ship before accounting for future operating expenses, weapons upgrades, or unexpected repairs. The USS Fort Worth was therefore retired not because it had reached the end of its structural life, but because the cost of making it operationally relevant again exceeded the value the Navy expected to recover from the ship before the late 2030s. Lockheed Martin and Fincantieri Marinette Marine built the USS Fort Worth at Marinette, Wisconsin, where the keel was laid on July 11, 2009, the hull was launched on December 4, 2010, and construction was completed before commissioning at Galveston, Texas, on September 22, 2012. LCS 3 was the second Freedom-class ship after USS Freedom (LCS 1), the first production hull of the design and the first U.S Navy ship named after Fort Worth, Texas. 

It entered service at a time when the US Navy had not yet accumulated enough operational data to understand the full maintenance burden of the Freedom-class propulsion system, the practical limits of its reduced-crewing model, or the integration problems affecting its mission packages. The USS Fort Worth remained based in San Diego, unlike the later Freedom-class ships concentrated at Naval Station Mayport, because its operational history and later test role were tied to the Pacific Fleet. The ship’s record included Battle Efficiency awards in 2013 and 2019, and a Chief of Naval Operations Afloat Safety Award in 2014, but these unit-level achievements did not change the later cost and readiness assessment. After inactivation, the USS Fort Worth is scheduled to move to the Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility in Bremerton, Washington, where propulsion components, electronics, weapons equipment and other reusable items can be removed to support the remaining LCS fleet before dismantling. 

The USS Fort Worth’s main operational deployment began in November 2014, when the ship left for Singapore under the rotational LCS presence model in the U.S. Seventh Fleet area. It remained in the Western Pacific for 16 months and traveled more than 15,000 nautical miles, or 27,780 km, one of the longest deployments completed by an LCS. The ship operated in the South China Sea, Java Sea and Sulu Sea, visited ports across Southeast Asia and became the first Littoral Combat Ship to visit Vietnam. In January 2015, it also joined the Indonesian-led search for AirAsia Flight QZ8501 in the Java Sea. The USS Fort Worth also became the first LCS to complete an overseas Preventive Maintenance Availability, with repair and upkeep conducted in Asia rather than after a return to the continental United States.

That maintenance period required the US Navy to move contractor personnel, spare parts, diagnostic equipment and engineering support to Singapore and Japan, demonstrating that forward sustainment was feasible but not inexpensive or manpower-light. The deployment validated the ability of an LCS to remain forward for more than one year, but it also showed that the ship’s small organic crew could not independently absorb the full maintenance workload. The practical result was a support model in which reduced shipboard manning was offset by shore-based sailors, contractors, logistics personnel and specialized technicians, weakening the original expectation that the LCS ships would be significantly cheaper to operate than conventional surface combatants.

The USS Fort Worth also tested rotational crewing, crew transfer procedures, overseas logistics, maintenance scheduling, engineering practices, training standards, and the integration of modular warfare equipment. The vessel helped determine how incoming crews assumed responsibility for weapons, propulsion spaces, aviation facilities, maintenance records, certifications and damage-control readiness without taking the ship out of service for extended periods. It also supported early work on the Anti-Submarine Warfare Mission Package, including the towed sonar systems intended to give the Freedom-class a submarine detection capability that the baseline ship lacked. In 2016, the US Navy redesignated the first two ships of each LCS variant as non-deploying test assets.

The USS Freedom and USS Fort Worth were assigned to anti-submarine warfare development, while early Independence-class ships were used for mine countermeasures testing. This decision formally separated the USS Fort Worth from the normal deployment cycle and converted it into an experimental asset whose value depended on the successful development of systems that had not yet reached operational maturity. After returning to San Diego, the ship was used mainly for training and equipment evaluation, and after its final period at sea in 2021, crew members increasingly completed qualifications or deployments aboard other San Diego-based ships because LCS 3 remained pier-side. By the time of decommissioning, the USS Fort Worth was still counted as an active ship, but it was no longer generating the sea days, regional presence, or operational availability expected from a deployable combatant.

The decisive mechanical event occurred in January 2016 during the USS Fort Worth’s deployment to Singapore. The Freedom-class propulsion system used two diesel engines for lower-speed cruising and two gas turbines for high-speed operation, with combining gears transmitting power to four waterjets. This configuration allowed speeds above 40 knots, but it placed the ship’s mobility under the control of a complex transmission system linking all major propulsion machinery. During a diesel-engine operational test, personnel failed to follow the required procedures, causing severe damage to the combining gear and leaving the ship unable to operate normally. The casualty extended the deployment by several months, required major repairs in Asia, and delayed the ship’s return to California.

The incident was directly caused by human error, but it occurred within a class already affected by recurring combining-gear failures, showing that Fort Worth’s problem was not limited to one crew or one maintenance event. The USS Milwaukee, for instance, experienced a propulsion problem only 20 days after commissioning in 2015 and had to be towed more than 40 nautical miles, while other Freedom-class ships suffered breakdowns that reduced speed, interrupted deployments and increased maintenance periods. The combining gear became the principal mechanical weakness of the class because a failure could prevent the ship from using its diesel engines, gas turbines or waterjets as designed. Later Freedom-class ships received a redesigned gearbox, but fitting equivalent equipment to early hulls required expensive work, associated engineering changes, testing and recertification.

The class also imposed operating costs and tactical limitations that could not be corrected by replacing the gearbox alone. Freedom-class ships relied heavily on contractor maintenance, while their reduced crews had to cover engineering watches, weapons operations, aviation support, maintenance, damage control and administrative duties with fewer sailors than a conventional frigate or destroyer. High crew workload increased dependence on shore support and reduced the margin available for casualties, extended operations and battle damage. The ship’s high-speed requirement also imposed a fuel penalty. Operating gas turbines and four waterjets at high power increased consumption, shortened unrefueled endurance and made the Freedom-class more expensive to use for patrol and presence missions than purpose-built cutters operating at lower speed.

High underwater radiated noise created a separate problem for anti-submarine warfare because machinery and waterjet noise can reduce passive sonar effectiveness and make the ship easier for an opposing submarine to detect. Survivability also remained limited by the ship’s small hull, restricted redundancy, light permanent armament and the absence of a large vertical launch system. The baseline Freedom-class armament included a 57 mm Mk 110 gun, short-range defensive weapons, aviation assets and mission-package equipment, but it did not provide the layered air defense, long-range anti-submarine weapons or magazine depth of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer or a purpose-built frigate. The addition of the Naval Strike Missile improved anti-ship reach, but it did not eliminate the maintenance burden of the propulsion plant.

These inconveniences did not make the class unusable, but they narrowed the number of missions it could perform independently in a high-threat environment and reduced the return from expensive modernization of the earliest hulls. The larger failure concerned the modular operating concept that had justified the LCS program. When development began in 2002, the US Navy planned to acquire 55 ships able to shift between surface warfare, mine countermeasures and anti-submarine warfare by exchanging mission packages containing sensors, weapons, boats, aircraft and uncrewed systems. The US Navy reduced procurement to 32 ships in 2014 as costs rose and confidence in the original concept declined. In practice, package development took longer than ship construction, integration problems delayed testing, and the US Navy could not routinely move a hull from one mission to another between deployments.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Mission Package was particularly important to the USS Fort Worth because the ship’s post-2016 test role depended on the successful introduction of the towed sonar and associated processing equipment. That package failed to mature on schedule and did not provide the deployable capability needed to justify retaining the first Freedom-class test ships. In 2022, then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday proposed retiring the first nine Freedom-class hulls after the sonar package failed to meet requirements. The US Navy subsequently shifted toward fixed employment, with surviving Freedom-class ships focused more heavily on surface warfare, regional presence and maritime security, while Independence-class ships increasingly assumed mine countermeasures missions.

Current improvements include the Naval Strike Missile, uncrewed surface vessels and the Mk 70 Payload Delivery System, but these additions reflect a more limited and permanent mission configuration rather than the rapid three-role interchangeability originally promised. The USS Fort Worth therefore lost both its operational deployment role and the specialized anti-submarine test mission that had justified keeping it in commission during a deliberate reduction of the early Freedom-class fleet. The USS Freedom was decommissioned in September 2021, USS Sioux City left service in August 2023 after less than five years, USS Milwaukee followed in September 2023 after fewer than eight years, and USS Detroit and USS Little Rock were also retired before reaching half of their planned 25-year lives.

The US Navy had sought to retire the USS Fort Worth as early as 2019 and again included it in the Fiscal Year 2022 divestment plan, but Congress blocked that retirement and temporarily preserved the hull without restoring it to sustained operational use. By July 2026, the ship had not been to sea for five years, its planned anti-submarine warfare package had failed to mature, and its propulsion modernization requirement competed with upgrades for ten later Freedom-class ships. Moreover, the contrast with the USS Cleveland (LCS 31) is particularly significant.

The USS Cleveland, the 16th and final Freedom-class ship, was commissioned on May 16, 2026, only 74 days before the USS Fort Worth was decommissioned, meaning the Navy completed production of the variant while removing an early hull that was less than 14 years old. This overlap shows that the class was not being eliminated as a whole. The US Navy is clearly separating later ships with revised propulsion equipment and longer remaining service lives from early hulls that require disproportionate investment. Removing the USS Fort Worth reduced the official fleet count by one ship, but the immediate loss in deployed capacity was limited because the vessel had already ceased normal operations.

Its decommissioning instead released sailors, berthing space, spare parts, maintenance capacity, and modernization funding for LCS ships capable of producing more operational days. The central force-planning conclusion for the US Navy is that an active hull that remains pier-side, lacks its intended mission equipment, and requires hundreds of millions of dollars to return to deployable status contributes less to combat capacity than its presence in the Naval Vessel Register suggests.

Written by Jérôme Brahy

Jérôme Brahy is a defense analyst and documentalist at Army Recognition. He specializes in naval modernization, aviation, drones, armored vehicles, and artillery, with a focus on strategic developments in the United States, China, Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye, and Belgium. His analyses go beyond the facts, providing context, identifying key actors, and explaining why defense news matters on a global scale.

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