The future USS Cleveland slipped into its namesake city’s harbor on May 9, 2026, greeted by local officials and a small crowd along the waterfront as the warship completed a journey from the shipyard where it was built in Marinette, Wisconsin. The arrival marks the beginning of a week of events leading to the Navy’s commissioning of LCS 31 on May 16, a ceremony that will formally place the sixteenth and final Freedom-class littoral combat ship into active service.
After the ceremony, the ship will transit south to its permanent homeport at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, where it will join other surface combatants assigned to the Atlantic Fleet. The commissioning closes out a production run that began nearly two decades ago and became one of the most debated shipbuilding programs in modern Navy history.
A namesake tradition continues
Cleveland has lent its name to Navy warships for more than a century, including a World War II-era light cruiser and a Cold War-era amphibious transport dock. LCS 31 extends that lineage into a new era of naval warfare, and the Cleveland City Council moved quickly to mark the occasion, issuing a formal welcome and celebration announcement that treated the ship’s visit as a civic milestone.
The commissioning ceremony is scheduled for 10 a.m. EDT on May 16 in Cleveland. The acting Secretary of the Navy and elected officials are expected to speak, according to a Navy press release. Public access details and the full schedule of events have not yet been published in official channels, so residents hoping to attend should monitor Navy social media accounts and local news outlets for updates.
The last hull off the line
LCS 31 was christened and launched at Fincantieri Marinette Marine’s shipyard on the Menominee River in a ceremony the Department of Defense described as the last planned side-launch at the facility. In a side-launch, the completed hull slides laterally into the water rather than moving bow-first down a slipway. It is a dramatic, old-school shipbuilding tradition, and with no additional Freedom-class hulls on order, it ended with this ship…