NAPLES, Italy — A U.S. Navy submarine spotted earlier this week near Gibraltar made a port visit to the city on Saturday, the service said.
The fast-attack submarine USS Indiana arrived in Gibraltar as part of a regularly scheduled visit, Cmdr. Timothy Gorman, a spokesman for U.S. 6th Fleet, said in a statement on Saturday. The statement did not indicate how long the submarine would remain in Gibraltar.
On Monday, area ship watchers spotted Indiana completing a personnel transfer and later photographed its arrival on Saturday at a U.K. navy base in the British territory near the Strait of Gibraltar. Indiana, which carries Tomahawk missiles, also was seen last month in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
One of the last visits by a U.S. submarine to Gibraltar was in November 2022 when the ballistic missile submarine USS Rhode Island made a brief stop. Previously, the last ballistic missile submarine to make a port call there was USS Alaska in June 2021, according to the service.
The Navy typically does not announce the location of its submarines. But in August, the service announced that guided-cruise missile submarine USS Georgia had completed training exercises in the eastern Mediterranean.
That announcement came as the Pentagon bolstered its forces in the Middle East amid deepening worries of an Israel-Iran conflict.
It wasn’t clear on Saturday how long USS Indiana had been in the 6th Fleet area of responsibility, which spans from the Arctic Ocean to the coast of Antarctica, including the Adriatic, Baltic, Mediterranean and North seas, among others.
Indiana previously was deployed to 6th Fleet in 2022, traveling nearly 40,000 nautical miles during a more than 6-month deployment. It was only the second deployment for the submarine, homeported at the Naval Submarine Base New London in Connecticut, since its commissioning in 2018, according to the Navy.
USS Indiana makes its way down the Thames River after departing Submarine Base New London in Groton, Conn., for routine operations on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022. (John Narewski/U.S. Navy)
