USA — USS Freedom to Arrive in San Diego

SAN DIEGO (NNS) — The Navy’s first lit­toral com­bat ship (LCS), USS Free­dom (LCS 1), will arrive in San Diego April 23, after com­ple­tion of her maid­en deploy­ment.

The lit­toral com­bat ship USS Free­dom (LCS 1) Source: U.S. Navy pho­to by Mass Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Spe­cial­ist Sea­man Matthew J. Haran

Free­dom depart­ed May­port, Fla., Feb. 16 for oper­a­tions in the U.S. 4th Fleet and U.S. 3rd Fleet Areas of Respon­si­bil­i­ty (AOR). The ship con­duct­ed counter-illic­it traf­fick­ing oper­a­tions, mak­ing four suc­cess­ful inter­dic­tions that net­ted more than five tons of cocaine, seized two “go fast” drug ves­sels and took nine sus­pect­ed smug­glers into cus­tody. In addi­tion to inde­pen­dent oper­a­tions, Free­dom suc­cess­ful­ly inte­grat­ed with USS Carl Vin­son (CVN 70) Car­ri­er Strike Group for high-speed oper­a­tions, re-fuel­ing at sea, sur­face gun­nery events and vis­it, board, search and seizure evo­lu­tions. Free­dom also con­duct­ed joint maneu­vers with USS McIn­er­ney (FFG 8) and Fire Scout, the frigate’s embarked unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cle. Dur­ing the deploy­ment, Free­dom com­plet­ed the­ater secu­ri­ty coop­er­a­tion port vis­its to Carta­ge­na, Colom­bia; Pana­ma City, Pana­ma; and Man­zanil­lo, Mex­i­co. In each port, the crew con­duct­ed sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ty out­reach events and par­tic­i­pat­ed in numer­ous pro­fes­sion­al exchanges with part­ner nation navies. The LCS is a fast, agile, mis­sion-focused ship that demon­strates the lat­est in naval tech­nol­o­gy. The ship is specif­i­cal­ly designed to defeat threats in shal­low, coastal water regions, includ­ing sur­face craft, diesel sub­marines and mines. LCS fea­tures an inter­change­able mod­u­lar design that allows the ship to be recon­fig­ured to meet mis­sion require­ments. Crew mem­bers are part of an inno­v­a­tive man­ning con­struct that reduces crew size, demand­ing each Sailor main­tain high lev­els of pro­fi­cien­cy in mul­ti­ple fields. These “hybrid” Sailors are part of two rota­tion­al crews, “blue” and “gold” that opti­mize ship oper­abil­i­ty. Detach­ments embarked dur­ing deploy­ment to sup­ple­ment the core crew include the Sur­face War­fare Mis­sion Pack­age; Heli­copter Sea Com­bat Squadron (HSC) 22, Detach­ment 2, based in Nor­folk, Va.; and a U.S. Coast Guard Law Enforce­ment Detach­ment. Free­dom will help pro­vide deter­rence, pro­mote peace and secu­ri­ty, pre­serve free­dom of the sea and humanitarian/disaster response with­in U.S. 3rd Fleet’s 50-mil­lion square mile AOR in the East­ern Pacif­ic, as well as sup­port­ing the nation’s Mar­itime Strat­e­gy when for­ward deployed. 

Press release