The USS Fort Worth is entering “a new and final chapter,” as the Navy continues a yearslong push toward taking all of its shoreside combat ships out of service and investing the resources elsewhere, the ship’s commander told the USS Fort Worth’s Support Committee in an April 7, 2025, letter provided to the Report.
In 2022, then-U.S. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Fort Worth, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, blocked an effort to decommission the Fort Worth, which the Navy commissioned in 2012 at Galveston. Granger did not seek reelection in 2024.
Supporters of the ship experienced a surge of optimism earlier this year when a high-ranking Navy official was tentatively scheduled to visit Fort Worth amid hopes the ship would move to Florida from its base at San Diego and be awarded a new life. But that hope was dashed by the letter from the ship’s commanding officer, Dana Scott Canby, to the Support Committee.
The Navy has been “directing maintenance monies and resources to imminently-deploying ships and adding limits on those without clear paths to repair, crew certification and deployment,” Canby said in the letter.
“Unfortunately, our ship is in the latter category,” Canby said. “This means that repairs that require outside contractors or technical assistance will largely stop, and training organizations will redirect resources to other ships.”
Canby said in the letter that he’s been working on finding new opportunities in the Navy for the ship’s crew.
“While (the Navy’s) course of action removes my ability to ready Fort Worth for sea, I am fully committed to readying our sailors for sea,” Canby said.
For one, the crew is sponsoring a recruit training division class starting in June that will allow Canby to send sailors to boot camp and mentor new recruits “while exploring what a tour training new sailors would look like for them,” he said.
The Fort Worth is the third version of the littoral combat ship series, a fast, agile lightweight ship designed to operate close to shore in shallow water. Gordon England, Navy secretary for President George W. Bush, led development of the ship.
During peacetime of the 1990s, the military drew down resources, England said. By the early 2000s, “the entire military was in pretty poor shape, lacking equipment, lacking a lot of things,” he said. “Then, of course, 9/11 happened. We made the decision we would build fewer ships, because we needed the money to support the deployed forces.”
The Navy’s need for new affordable ships spawned the development of the littoral combat ship, England said. Now the Navy needs deep-water ships it can deploy to environments like Yemen and the South China Sea, he said.
“I think that’s what’s happened now,” he said. “It seems very personal, but the Navy makes changes all the time. It’s a complex environment, and the Navy needs to respond to that.”
The news is a letdown for the 15-member Support Committee, which has spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars in finding ways to support the ship’s crew and their families over the years, ranging from bringing crew members into Fort Worth for outings, to sending care packages to the ship full of donated items like sunscreen, lip balm, coffee, Mrs. Renfro’s salsa and other treats.
“They like whole beans because they last longer, so we sent them coffee grinders,” J.R. Labbe, president of the Support Committee, said in an interview. “We’re getting ready to send them waffle irons and a panini maker because they asked for it.”
England’s wife, who passed away five years ago, was known for sending care packages to the ship for every crew member who had a baby. The Support Committee also recognizes sailors of the quarter and year. And the ship is also full of Fort Worth memorabilia and objects like a pair of real longhorns.
“We will continue to do what we do best — be the premier support committee in the nation,” Labbe said. “She’s perfect for Fort Worth — small and scrappy.”
The small ships came with small crews. The Fort Worth’s today has 60-70 crew members, Labbe said.
“That’s been the beauty of that ship as a support committee, because we can really get to know the sailors,” Labbe said. “If she’d been an aircraft carrier, we wouldn’t have been able to do that.”
The Support Committee has been preparing for the possibility that the Navy might decommission the Fort Worth. The Navy has decommissioned other versions of the ship and had announced the ship would be decommissioned before Granger blocked the move in 2022.
“We knew this day would come someday,” Labbe said.
The Support Committee has been studying ways to put up “some kind of permanent historical feature” in Fort Worth to remember the ship.
“We are talking with the city of Fort Worth about a place in the new City Hall,” Labbe said. “We’re having conversations with the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History about an interactive display.”
If the Navy decommissions the Fort Worth (the other possibility is removing it from active service, while maintaining its seaworthiness and readiness), the Support Committee would be allowed to remove items like the longhorns for use in a permanent museum exhibit, Labbe said. “It has just been a beautiful, beautiful relationship.”
This article first appeared on Fort Worth Report and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.