Bath-built USS Spruance intercepts Iranian cargo ship in Arabian Sea

A Bath-built warship ended up in the middle of one of the world’s most volatile shipping lanes when USS Spruance intercepted an Iranian-flagged cargo ship in the north Arabian Sea and disabled it after repeated warnings. For Bath Iron Works, where the destroyer was built, the episode put a familiar name from the Kennebec River shipyard into a confrontation now reshaping traffic near the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. Central Command said Spruance intercepted the M/V Touska as it headed toward Bandar Abbas at 17 knots. The destroyer’s crew issued multiple warnings over a six-hour period before firing into the cargo ship’s engine room and stopping it. U.S. Marines later boarded the vessel and took control on April 20, turning what had been a maritime standoff into the first known firing and seizure of an Iranian-linked ship under the blockade.

The action followed a U.S. blockade announced April 12 and put into effect April 13 at 10 a.m. Eastern time, covering ships entering or leaving Iranian ports. CENTCOM said 21 ships had already complied by April 17, while later reporting put the number of vessels ordered to turn around at 25. The wider effect was visible even before the Spruance opened fire, with oil tankers steering clear of Hormuz and Iran’s military calling the blockade piracy and warning that Gulf ports would not be safe if its own shipping was threatened.

For Sagadahoc County, the most immediate connection is the destroyer itself. USS Spruance, hull number DDG 111, was built by Bath Iron Works, commissioned on Oct. 24, 2011, and is now homeported in San Diego. Construction began in Bath in 2009, extending a local naval legacy that still drives pride and payrolls along the Kennebec. A ship assembled in Maine’s shipbuilding center has now become an instrument of U.S. policy in one of the most strategically sensitive waterways on earth.

The ship’s namesake gives the moment added weight. Adm. Raymond A. Spruance, born July 3, 1886, commanded Task Force 16 at the Battle of Midway, where his decisions helped alter the course of the war in the Pacific. That history fits the present tense of the mission at sea: a Bath-built destroyer, carrying a name tied to one of the Navy’s defining victories, now enforcing a blockade with direct consequences for global trade, energy markets and the visibility of Maine shipbuilding far beyond the Kennebec.