USS Cleveland marks the end of the LCS fleet: What lies ahead for the Navy's embattled 'little crappy ships'?

The U.S. Navy commissioned the 35th and last littoral combat ship, the USS Cleveland, earlier this month at a pier in its namesake Ohio city, marking the end of a shipbuilding program that has drawn both praise and scorn.

“Steel. Strength. Power,” acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao posted on social media to mark the occasion.

Critics of the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program had other words. “Easy meat,” said one former Navy captain. “An experiment that didn’t work,” added a defense analyst. And an expensive one at that. The program’s price tag is pegged at $60 billion, but a 2023 investigation by ProPublica warned the eventual cost could top $100 billion, calling it “one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems.”

The LCS are what the Navy calls the “low-end” of its surface fleet: smaller than guided-missile destroyers, with fewer crew, less firepower and lighter defenses. But they are faster and capable of operating in shallower waters, a niche that seemed promising when the program was conceived around the turn of the century. At the time, naval planners wanted a smaller platform for coastal environments where larger warships might be vulnerable, and they hoped to maintain fleet size with cheaper, quicker-to-build vessels.

Yet from the start, the LCS program was plagued by what a 2014 report by then-Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Work described as “constant change” in mission requirements. Critics argued that then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark “first decided he needed a ship and only then turned to figuring out what the ship would do.” The Navy ultimately built two different designs — the monohulled, steel-constructed Freedom class (like the Cleveland) and the trimaran, aluminum-hulled Independence class — which complicated logistics and supply chains.

Mechanical failures soon tarnished the fleet’s reputation. In 2016, the USS Fort Worth suffered propulsion damage in Singapore, sidelining the four-year-old ship for eight months. That was one of four major mechanical incidents in a single year. By 2021, the Navy began decommissioning the oldest LCSs, some after only a few years of service — far short of the expected 25-year lifespan. Seven have been retired so far, with an eighth slated for retirement later this year, though Congress has blocked further decommissionings to protect the billions already invested.

Now, with the Cleveland in the water, the Navy is trying to salvage what it can. The 2026 shipbuilding plan released this month describes the LCS as “an essential low-end fleet capability” that can complicate adversary decisions, serve as a mine countermeasures platform, and be armed with Naval Strike Missiles for surface warfare. But analysts remain skeptical.

“What remains to be seen is how useful they would actually be in a combat scenario, as they have never been in one,” said Emma Salisbury, a non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. She noted that during the current conflict with Iran, three LCSs deployed to the Middle East for minesweeping have not been visibly engaged in that role, with destroyers instead taking the lead in clearing the Strait of Hormuz.

Former Navy Capt. Carl Schuster added that the LCS lacks adequate anti-aircraft defenses, making them “easy meat to a cruise missile, drone or aviation platform.” Even anti-piracy patrols, he argued, become too dangerous in areas with hostile drone or missile threats.

Both analysts see the LCS as a stopgap. The Navy announced a new frigate design, the FF(X), in December 2025, based on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class cutters. These ships will be larger and more capable, displacing 4,750 tons, with the first hull expected by 2028 and a potential total of 50 to 65 ships. “They will be kept until the new frigates enter service in 3-4 years,” Schuster predicted. “Then they’ll be quietly retired one or two at a time.”

For now, the USS Cleveland — the last of its kind — represents both the end of an era and the beginning of a reckoning over what the Navy truly needs from its next-generation surface fleet.