USS Cleveland Joins U.S. Navy as New Freedom-Class Warship for Coastal Combat Missions.

The U.S. Navy has commissioned USS Cleveland (LCS 31), the final Freedom-variant littoral combat ship built by the Lockheed Martin-led team at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, adding a fast and shallow-draft surface combatant optimized for coastal warfare and maritime security operations. Official imagery released following the May 16, 2026, ceremony in Cleveland, Ohio, highlights the Navy’s continued focus on deploying Freedom-class ships for Atlantic and near-shore missions where speed, maneuverability, and interdiction capability matter more than heavy strike or air-defense power.

USS Cleveland is configured for surface warfare, escort, maritime interdiction, and operations against small boats and unmanned surface threats in confined waters. Its commissioning also signals how the Navy intends to employ the remaining Freedom-variant fleet: concentrated at Naval Station Mayport to support distributed maritime security, regional deterrence, and coastal operations in increasingly contested littoral environments.

Related topic: Final Freedom-Class Littoral Combat Ship USS Cleveland Delivered as U.S. Navy Shifts to Pacific Warfare.

USS Cleveland (LCS 31), the final Freedom-variant littoral combat ship, was commissioned in Cleveland, Ohio, adding a Mayport-based U.S. Navy surface combatant equipped for maritime security, interdiction, escort, and near-shore surface warfare missions (Picture source: U.S. DoW).

USS Cleveland belongs to the steel-monohull Freedom design, not the aluminum trimaran Independence design based in San Diego. The Navy lists the Freedom variant at 387.6 feet, or 118.1 meters, with a 57.7-foot beam, approximately 3,450 metric tons full-load displacement, 14.1-foot draft, and speed above 40 knots. Those figures define the ship’s useful operating niche. It has enough displacement for an embarked aviation detachment, mission-package weapons, RHIBs, and command systems, but a draft shallow enough for approaches to ports, chokepoints, archipelagic waters, and coastal traffic lanes where larger destroyers operate with less margin. Cleveland was accepted from Fincantieri Marinette Marine on November 26, 2025, after being christened and launched at Marinette, Wisconsin, on April 15, 2023, closing the Freedom-variant construction sequence.

The ship’s baseline armament is centered on the BAE Systems Mk 110 57 mm naval gun, a medium-caliber weapon used by both the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard. The Navy describes the Mk 110 as capable of firing up to 220 rounds per minute with a range of about nine miles, giving the ship a rapid-response weapon against small surface craft, exposed shore positions, low-end aerial threats, and warning or disabling fire during interdiction. This is not a substitute for long-range anti-ship missiles, but it is relevant in the scenarios most likely to involve a littoral combat ship: fast boats closing inside visual range, unmanned surface craft, suspicious vessels, and congested coastal operating areas where identification may occur shortly before engagement.

The Surface Warfare Mission Package gives Cleveland a more specific combat role. The Gun Mission Module uses the Mk 46 Mod 2 Gun Weapon System with a Mk 44 Mod 2 30 mm automatic cannon, firing Navy-qualified 30 x 173 mm ammunition, with 400 rounds in the turret and two ready-service magazines carrying 240 rounds each. The Surface-to-Surface Missile Module Mk 61 Mod 0 uses Longbow Hellfire missiles in launchers carrying 12 missiles each, for a total of 24. The combination is intended for fast attack craft and fast inshore attack craft, but the Navy has also cited a May 2022 ship-to-shore strike by USS Montgomery during JADED THUNDER and Red Sea counter-unmanned-aircraft work involving vertically launched Longbow Hellfire missiles on USS Indianapolis.

The short-range defensive layer is built around the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile family, which the Navy describes as a self-defense system against anti-ship cruise missiles and asymmetric threats, with no post-launch shipboard illumination requirement. In operational terms, this gives a Freedom-variant littoral combat ship a point-defense capability rather than an area-defense role. The distinction is important: Cleveland is not intended to replace an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer in ballistic missile defense, carrier escort, or long-range air defense. Its tactical purpose is closer to local defense, patrol, interdiction, counter-swarm response, and escort of lower-value or dispersed units where allocating a destroyer would be inefficient or unavailable.

Aviation and boats are central to the ship’s operational value. The Surface Warfare Mission Package includes an aviation module with an MH-60R helicopter armed with two Mk 299 Mod 2 launchers carrying eight Hellfire missiles, a GAU-21 .50 caliber machine gun, and an M240 7.62 mm machine gun, plus provision for an MQ-8 vertical-takeoff unmanned aircraft. The same mission package includes two 11-meter rigid-hull inflatable boats and visit, board, search, and seizure equipment. That means the ship can search beyond its radar horizon, classify contacts before escalation, insert boarding teams, support Coast Guard law-enforcement detachments, and maintain surveillance over a wider maritime area than its hull sensors alone would allow.

The U.S. need for ships of this type is partly a capacity problem. The Navy’s high-end surface combatants are already needed for carrier strike group defense, ballistic missile defense, Red Sea-style missile and drone threats, Indo-Pacific deterrence, and integrated operations with allies. A littoral combat ship cannot perform all of those missions, but it can absorb tasks that consume destroyer operating days: counter-narcotics patrols in U.S. Fourth Fleet, maritime-security patrols in U.S. Fifth Fleet, escort of logistics traffic, partner exercises, boarding operations, and surveillance of approaches to ports or straits. The Navy states that the Surface Warfare Mission Package is operating in the 4th, 5th, and 7th Fleet areas, which shows the mission set is already being applied outside a purely experimental context.

Cleveland should also be viewed against the LCS program’s record, not outside it. The Navy’s own data lists several earlier Freedom-variant ships already decommissioned, including USS Freedom, USS Milwaukee, USS Detroit, USS Little Rock, and USS Sioux City, which underlines that the class has had availability, sustainment, and force-structure consequences. The current mission-package emphasis is narrower than the original promise of rapid mission swapping across surface warfare, mine countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare. For that reason, Cleveland’s most credible role is not as a universal small combatant, but as a surface-warfare and maritime-security ship with enough speed, aviation capacity, and modular weapons to cover defined missions.

For U.S. naval strategy, USS Cleveland contributes at the lower and middle end of the force-employment spectrum. The Navy’s Navigation Plan 2024 prioritizes higher readiness by 2027, distributed maritime operations, greater fleet lethality, and faster use of robotic and autonomous systems; a Mayport-based Freedom-variant ship supports that approach by adding a deployable hull able to work with helicopters, unmanned aircraft, Coast Guard detachments, allied patrol forces, and larger combatants. Its value will depend on readiness, maintenance, mission-package availability, and command assignment. If those conditions are met, Cleveland gives the Navy another ship for daily sea-control tasks that do not require a destroyer but still demand weapons, sensors, boats, aviation, and a crew trained to operate in crowded littoral waters.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.