HMS Dragon on way to Cyprus
The warship's been spotted off of Gibraltar
Last updated 17th Mar 2026
The naval warship, HMS Dragon, is on her way to Cyprus after setting sail from Portsmouth last week.
HMS Dragon's been spotted in Gibraltar.
HMS Dragon's primary role will be protecting RAF Akrotiri, which was hit with an Iranian-made drone earlier this month.
Sean Bell, a military analyst, said: "I can only imagine, having served on His Majesty's ships so often in my career, the amount of training that's been going on over the last week or so since it set sail from Portsmouth.
"Most of the crew won't have been ready to go to sea, they won't have been trained, and around a third of the crew were probably brand new.
"There's a lot of fighting the ship, everybody owns that, there are no passengers, you are all part of fighting the ship.
"So this is the culmination, now they're arriving in the sort of warzone, they'll be looking very carefully about how do we now add value, how do we make this ship genuinely add to the defensive capability."
The Type 45 destroyer's 4.5-inch calibre Mk 8 naval gun can fire 25 rounds per minute.
Doctor Matthew Heaslip, Senior Lecturer in Naval History at the University of Portsmouth, told us more about the ship.
He said: "Dragon is a Type 45 air defence destroyer.
"By global standards, it's a very, very capable, high-end warship.
"They are sometimes called armoured hedgehogs, used in a slightly insulting way, but I actually think that's a nice term for them.
"They guard things, they look after, they defend, so they're perfect for the role of looking after Cyprus in the present day.
"Very high-end warships."