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USS Fort Worth’s mechanical damage made its early retirement a foregone conclusion
On the afternoon of July 29, 2026, the United States Navy decommissioned the LCS USS 'Fort Worth (LCS-3)' at a ceremony at Naval Base San Diego, making it one of 14 warships that will be decommissioned or inactivated in Fiscal Year 2026 (FY26). However, unlike the Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship USS 'Germantown (LSD-42)' or the Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine USS 'Newport News (SSN-750)', both of which were to be broken up after a lengthy carreer, the 'Fort Worth' was only commissioned in September 2012, making it a mere 13 years old at the time of its decommissioning. When commissioned,she was intended to be operational for around 25 years; its early retirement was coming a decade early, brought on largely by reliability issues. What is also notable is that the defense appropriations bill, signed by D. Trump on Feb 3, 2026, actually limited the decommissioning of just one LCS this year. With USS Forth Worth being the oldest of the Freedom class, its fate was all but sealed. The USS 'Forth Worth' has been in and out of service since 2016, when it suffered serious damage to its combining gear, the system that links the gas turbine and diesel engines to the water jet shafts, leaving it essentially dead in the water. Although a subsequent investigation revealed the failure was the result of crew members not following proper procedures during an operational test of the diesel engines, the vessel was sidelined for several months. Given such issues with the earliest models of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships and a lack of a clear mission that resulted from Congress cancelling its mission modules, the US Navy sought to see the ship decommissioned as early as 2019, only seven years after it had entered service. Frustration at such a short lifespan led Congressional lawmakers to push back, requiring in that year’s defense bill that the warship remain in service. The US Navy was accepting delivery of the littoral combat ships despite the flaws, and retiring the oldest models. The newest and active Freedom-class vessels have redesigned combining gears to address the critical propulsion and transmission breakdowns, and the sea service instituted operational forces that improved the day-to-day readiness of the remaining hulls. Likewise, a structural cracking issue with the Independence-class was also mitigated with targeted reinforcement plating, but the fact remained that the LCSes were vessels that were conceived during the Global War on Terrorism, when the USA faced a very different threat environment.
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