The USS Spruance breaks the record for the deployment of a destroyer since 1945 due to the war with Iran and puts pressure on Rota

He USS Spruance It closes a 342-day deployment: no American destroyer has lasted so long at sea since 1945.

She set sail from Naval Base San Diego on 21 November 2025 as escort for the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group. The journey was budgeted in seven months. Routine. What has returned to port is the longest deployment by a US destroyer since the end of World War II.

On February 28, 2026, the Operation Epic Furythe US campaign against Iranian targets. He USS Spruance fired missiles Tomahawk in the opening salvo, it then absorbed Tehran’s response and, once the large-scale combat operations were over, it was integrated into the naval blockade with which Washington is trying to suffocate the Iranian economy.

The arithmetic of a deployment that doubled

The last trace of the ship was placed by maritime trackers eleven days ago, crossing the Strait of Malacca in front of Singapore, heading east. The US Navy has not announced a return date; the San Diego press places it at some point in November. If the docking is delayed, the record will pass the entire year.

It is not the first sign of wear. The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln returned home in August after the families’ complaints became a matter of national interest. He traveled with three destroyers. One returned with him. The other two, the Spruance and the USS Michael Murphythey were left holding the blockade. At the beginning of August, the acting Secretary of the Navy, Hung Cao, met with some 200 families of the combat group and defended, according to the testimonies collected at that time, that the group was a composite unit and should return together. It didn’t happen.

There are accounts of food supply problems, plumbing failures and low morale. ‘They experienced the same psychological tension and the same impossible schedule,’ said a relative. The departure of the aircraft carrier was read as a grievance.

The USS Spruance record is not an isolated feat: it is the bill in sea hours of a war that ate into the fleet’s margin.

There was also his moment of glory. On April 19, the destroyer used its five-inch deck gun against the engine room of the Iranian-flagged freighter Touska and set it adrift: the first such attack on another ship since the Operation Praying Mantisin 1988. donald trump He mentioned it in several speeches without mentioning the name of the ship.

Rota: where fleet wear and tear becomes a Spanish problem

The basis of Rattan is the other end of this thread. There the US Navy maintains destroyers of the same class as the Spruance permanently deployed, integrated into the naval pillar of the NATO anti-missile shield (the European Phased Adaptive Approachthe program with which the Alliance deploys ground and shipboard interceptors in Europe). In 2023, Washington and Madrid agreed to increase the number of these ships from four to six.

The problem is with communicating vessels. Each destroyer immobilized in the Indian Ocean or the Gulf is a destroyer that does not cover its rotation in the Mediterraneanand the Sixth Fleet covers the gap with what is closest to hand: the helmets of Cádiz. This compresses the maintenance windows that Navantia runs in the bay, and stretches the crews’ cycles.

For Spain, the equation has two variables: the availability of US ships in Rota and the defense spending schedule committed to NATO. Added to that is the energy cost. A naval blockade on Iran maintains the risk premium for crude oil, and the refinery of Repsolairline kerosene and the electricity bill of any home. The Spanish Navy maintains, in parallel, its own rotation of frigates in the permanent groupings of the Alliance and in the European mission of the Red Sea.

Washington Logic

It is important to understand what problem Washington is trying to solve before counting days at sea. The US Navy has just over seventy destroyers to cover three simultaneous theaters—Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and the Atlantic-Mediterranean axis—and, due to the maintenance and training cycle, only a third are available at any given time. A year-long war against Iran is not fought with new ships: it is fought by lengthening the ones already there. The extension of Spruance is not an ideological decision, it is a subtraction.

There is precedent. The bar that the record invokes—1945—is that of the radar picket destroyers that the Navy kept for months off Okinawa, under constant air attack, because there was no replacement to send. The logic is identical eighty-one years later: when demand exceeds supply, the Pentagon pays with sea hours.

The political coalition that supports this way of doing things is not new either. He Republican Party has been selling the promise of a fleet of 355 ships for four decades while the American naval industry accumulates delays in each new hull. Trump has turned naval reconstruction into a grassroots issue: shipyards, industrial employment, sovereignty. And that story coexists poorly with the evidence that existing ships are worn out before their time.

The unknown remains, and it is not the record: it is the hangover. Each extra month of deployment is paid later in dry dockand the bill arrives in 2027, when those helmets must go into deep maintenance right at the beginning of another rotation. For Spain, the strategic reading is different: Rota is worth more the scarcer the fleet is, and that scarcity is what forces Madrid to decide whether the bilateral agreement is reinforced or managed. The next window will be the defense authorization law that the Capitol is processing these months.

Case File

• The case: The destroyer USS Spruance returns after 342 days of deployment, the longest for a ship of its class since 1945, for the campaign against Iran that began on February 28, 2026.
• Key data: Departed San Diego on November 21, 2025 for seven months; planned return in November 2026. The aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln returned in August; the Spruance and the USS Michael Murphy remained in the blockade.
• For Spain: The wear and tear of the fleet puts pressure on the rotations of the destroyers based in Rota, compresses Navantia’s maintenance in Cádiz and increases the cost of the crude oil imported into the Spanish economy.