BAE Systems wins modernization deal for littoral combat ship St. Louis

The U.S. Navy has awarded BAE Systems’ Jacksonville ship repair business a $66.5 million contract to dry-dock and overhaul the littoral combat ship USS St. Louis (LCS 19) in Mayport, Florida, with work due to finish by December 2027. Naval Sea Systems Command awarded the firm-fixed-price contract on Oct. 28, and options could raise its value to $80.7 million.

Of the $66.5 million obligated at award, $58.8 million comes from fiscal 2027 U.S. Navy other procurement funds, $7.5 million from fiscal 2026 funds and $234,355 from fiscal 2025 money. The Navy ran the competition as full and open and received two offers. The announcement does not list the systems to be repaired or modernized, and it does not say when the ship will enter dry dock.

A docking selected restricted availability is depot-level maintenance, alteration and modification work done while the ship sits in dry dock, scheduled by the Chief of Naval Operations. Under the contract, BAE Systems Maritime Solutions Jacksonville supplies the labor, supervision, equipment, facilities, production, testing and quality assurance for the job.

The ship left Naval Station Mayport on Sept. 13 to take over U.S. Northern Command’s maritime mission along the southern border, relieving USS Cooperstown (LCS 23), and stopped in Nassau, Bahamas, on Sept. 21. It flew the same mission in a surge deployment that ended on Nov. 10, 2025. The U.S. Navy has not said how long the current deployment will last.

St. Louis is the 22nd littoral combat ship delivered to the U.S. Navy and the 10th of the Freedom variant, the steel monohull design built at Marinette, Wisconsin. The ship was christened and launched there on Dec. 15, 2018, commissioned at Mayport in 2020 and assigned to Littoral Combat Ship Squadron 2. On its first deployment, eight months with U.S. 4th Fleet in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the U.S. Navy said the crew disrupted and seized more than $100 million in illicit cargo in five operations.

In late 2020, the U.S. Navy declared a class-wide flaw in the Freedom variant’s combining gear, the gearbox that links the ship’s diesel engines and gas turbines, after a failure on USS Little Rock (LCS 9) in March of that year. German manufacturer RENK developed a fix that replaced the gear’s ball bearings with journal bearings, and the U.S. Navy stopped accepting new Freedom-variant ships until it was proven. St. Louis was the last ship delivered before that pause and, in 2022, became the first already-delivered ship to receive the correction.

The U.S. Navy’s fiscal 2023 budget sought to decommission nine Freedom-variant ships, St. Louis among them; Congress allowed four. In 2023, the U.S. Navy still planned to retire St. Louis, Wichita, Billings and Indianapolis in 2025 and make them available for foreign military sales, even though St. Louis had just been repaired. That retirement did not happen, and in January 2026, U.S. Navy officials said the service had shelved plans to decommission five Freedom-variant and two Independence-variant ships.

The class has been shrinking at the old end and growing at the new one. USS Fort Worth (LCS 3), one of four early hulls designated as test ships in 2016, was decommissioned in July 2026, the sixth Freedom-variant ship to leave service. USS Cleveland (LCS 31), the 16th and last of the variant, was commissioned on May 16, 2026, in Cleveland, Ohio, and joined the Freedom-variant fleet at Mayport.

BAE Systems’ Jacksonville yard handles much of the surface-ship docking work at Mayport. In 2023, it won a $83 million docking selected restricted availability for the destroyer USS Ramage (DDG 61), with options worth up to $93 million, after a competition that drew three offers. In 2021, Naval Sea Systems Command set up two multiple-award contracts worth up to $2.27 billion combined to sustain Mayport-based littoral combat ships, including docking availabilities. BAE Systems Jacksonville Ship Repair and Fincantieri Marine Systems North America held the larger of the two, with an ordering period expected to end in August 2026. The St. Louis work was awarded as a separate contract, N00024-27-C-4405.