The Navy has sent USS Wichita back into the shipyard for another round of repairs, less than eight months after the ship returned to sea from a 26-month overhaul. According to the Department of War's July 2, 2026 contract announcement, BAE Systems–Jacksonville Ship Repair LLC has been awarded a $49,339,702 firm-fixed-price contract to conduct the Freedom-class littoral combat ship's fiscal 2026 docking selected restricted availability.
Background
USS Wichita (LCS 13) has spent much of the last four years either broken down, in the yard, or on limited duty. In October 2022, the ship suffered what the Navy classified as a Class A mishap when its propulsion plant failed while it was returning home from a Caribbean deployment. During that patrol, Wichita's crew had helped interdict nearly 10,000 pounds of cocaine. The breakdown reflected a design flaw in the combining gear that links the ship's diesel engines and gas turbines, a defect that caused multiple Freedom-class sister ships to break down at sea and forced the Navy to halt deliveries of new Freedom-class vessels until the problem could be fixed.
The Navy's fiscal 2023 budget request proposed decommissioning nine Freedom-class ships, Wichita among them, arguing the vessels were too expensive to maintain and repair relative to the capability they provided. Congress rejected that plan, blocking the early decommissioning through provisions in the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, and by August 2023 the Department of Defense reversed course, opting to give Wichita a full main engine replacement rather than retire it.
The Navy proceeded with a lengthy repair that replaced Wichita's main propulsion diesel engines and both of its combining gears. That work stretched roughly 26 months before the ship returned to sea on Nov. 14, 2025, resuming its counter-illicit-trafficking mission with 4th Fleet. The new contract puts the ship back in dry dock within months of that milestone.
Key Details
The $49,339,702 contract (N0002426C4415) covers maintenance, modernization and repair work during Wichita's fiscal 2026 docking selected restricted availability. If all options are exercised, the cumulative value of the contract could rise to $60,891,843. Work is being performed at BAE Systems' Jacksonville Ship Repair facility in Mayport, Florida, with an expected completion date of May 2027.
Funding for the contract comes from fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026 Navy other procurement funds, split roughly 94 percent to 6 percent between the two fiscal years, and neither tranche is set to expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The Naval Sea Systems Command's contracting activity for the award was not competitively procured. The Department of War's contract notice states the award was made "in accordance with 10 U.S. Code 3204(a)(3) Industrial Mobilization," the statutory exception that allows the government to bypass full and open competition when doing so is necessary to maintain a facility, producer or supplier's industrial readiness for national defense purposes.
The war.gov notice does not specify which systems the new docking availability will address beyond describing the scope as all labor, supervision, equipment, production, testing, facilities and quality assurance necessary to prepare for and accomplish the Chief of Naval Operations Availability for critical modernization, maintenance and repair programs.
A docking selected restricted availability differs from the emergency propulsion overhaul Wichita underwent after the 2022 mishap. Rather than an unplanned casualty repair, a docking selected restricted availability is a scheduled maintenance period built into a ship's life cycle, during which the vessel is placed in dry dock so crews can inspect and service the hull, underwater systems and other components that cannot be reached while the ship is waterborne. The Navy schedules these availabilities on a recurring basis across the surface fleet, which means Wichita's return to Mayport this cycle is, on paper, routine rather than a sign of a fresh mechanical failure. Even so, the timing — coming within months of the ship's 26-month repair — stands out from a typical docking cycle.
What It Means for Contractors
The award illustrates how the industrial mobilization exception under 10 U.S.C. 3204(a)(3) functions in ship repair: when a yard has already built the specialized workforce, equipment and technical data package for a specific hull class, the Navy can return to that same yard without running a new competition, provided it justifies the award as necessary to preserve that industrial capability. For regional ship repair companies near fleet concentration areas such as Mayport, San Diego or Norfolk, this reinforces that incumbency and proximity to homeported ships remain durable advantages, even against firms that might submit a lower bid from farther away.
The recurring nature of Wichita's yard visits also points to a continuing revenue stream for Freedom-class sustainment work. The Navy proposed decommissioning nine Freedom-class ships in its fiscal 2023 budget request before Congress intervened, and the combining-gear defect that ultimately took a full engine and gear replacement to fix on Wichita alone suggests other hulls in the class are likely candidates for comparable docking availabilities in coming fiscal years. Ship repair contractors positioned to bid — or already holding facilities near Freedom-class homeports — can expect a pipeline of similar single-award, sole-source-justified contracts rather than one-off events.
For prime contractors and subcontractors supplying propulsion components, the contract is a reminder that combining-gear and engine-related systems on the Freedom class remain an active area of Navy attention even after the completion of a major repair. Firms with certified replacement parts, diagnostic tools or engineering support relevant to the class's propulsion train should expect continued demand regardless of whether individual ships have already undergone a full engine swap. The fiscal 2025/2026 funding split — drawn from Navy other procurement accounts across two fiscal years, none of which are set to expire at the end of the current fiscal year — is also a detail worth noting for contractors tracking how the Navy structures repair funding to keep work moving past a single fiscal year.
Finally, the contract underscores a broader oversight dynamic that contractors serving the Navy's surface fleet should track: congressional intervention in 2023 preserved the Freedom-class hulls against early retirement, but that decision came with an implicit expectation that the ships would be reliably repaired and returned to service. Recurring, costly yard visits so soon after a major overhaul may draw renewed scrutiny from the House and Senate Armed Services Committees during upcoming budget cycles, a dynamic that could affect future Freedom-class sustainment funding levels and, by extension, the contracts available to yards that service the class.
