Arabian Gulf Now A SubLant Pond?

In an otherwise run of the mill article on current SUBPAC operations in The Honolulu Advertiser, I found an interesting tidbit:

The Pacific submarine fleet has had so many missions assigned to it recently that it no longer sends submarines to the Persian Gulf or Arabian Sea to support the war in Iraq. Instead, submarines are deployed there from the Atlantic Fleet.

I realized after reading this that it had been quite a while since I'd read about a PacFleet sub doing a 5th Fleet deployment -- for example, the Ronald Reagan Strike Group didn't have an attached submarine during their deployment earlier this year. It makes sense, though; there are a lot more threats that submarines might be expected to deal with in the Pacific than in the Atlantic or Med. It'll be interesting to see when PacFleet subs start returning to the Indian Ocean.