In February 1922, a piece of paper with a signature made official what was already underway. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt Jr., signing in the Secretary's absence, — eldest son of the 26th president — signed General Order 78, formally establishing the U.S. Destroyer Base, San Diego, at the foot of 32nd Street. But the base had not waited for him. Nine months earlier, in May 1921, USS Prairie, a destroyer tender, had been directed to moor at the 32nd Street site and begin repair operations. She tied up to a new pier on a bay that was still, at the time, partly industrial, partly wild, and wholly unprepared for the scale of what was coming. The order caught up to Prairie in February. The order made it permanent. The ship had made it real.
A century later, what those piers have become is simply staggering.
More than 50 ships call Naval Base San Diego home — the designated principal homeport of the United States Pacific Fleet's surface forces since 1994, when Long Beach Naval Station closed and the Navy consolidated its Pacific surface forces here. Destroyers. Cruisers. Amphibious assault ships large enough to carry entire Marine battalions with their tanks, helicopters, and landing craft. Supply ships. Coastal patrol boats. Research vessels. The full spectrum of American surface naval power, tied to piers a few hundred yards off the eastern shore of the bay.
More than 150 tenant commands operate from this base. On any given day, tens of thousands of active-duty sailors move through an installation that stretches from just south of downtown to below the Coronado Bridge. The logistics of maintaining 50 warships — fuel, food, ordnance, repair, crew scheduling, continuous training — add up to something like a small industrial city organized entirely around the water.
The base that exists today was shaped by what happened between 1941 and 1945. When the attack on Pearl Harbor pulled the United States into the Pacific war, San Diego became the industrial hinge of American naval power in the west. The 32nd Street facility became a massive repair complex. Between 1943 and 1945 alone, more than 5,000 ships were maintained, converted, or repaired here. Battle-damaged destroyers came back from the Pacific with torpedo holes in their hulls. They left this bay months later, welded tight and ready to return.
The bay never slept. Shifts ran around the clock. The civilian workforce swelled into the tens of thousands. The city wrapped itself around the base the way port cities always have — pragmatic, loyal, and built on the understanding that the ships would keep coming.
They have.
When JADA sails south through the main bay, the eastern shore reveals itself in a slow panorama. Pier after pier, grey hull after grey hull, radar mast after radar mast stretching toward the Coronado Bridge. You cannot take it all in at once. The view rewards a slow sweep from bow to stern — Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, San Antonio-class amphibious ships, the occasional research vessel with its distinctive antenna arrays, auxiliaries and patrol craft filling the gaps between the larger hulls.
There is nothing else like it on the West Coast. The largest concentration of American surface warships in the Pacific Fleet is right there, a few hundred yards off your starboard rail, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. The ships are not performing for you. They are doing what ships do when they are not at sea: taking on fuel, offloading ordnance, rotating crew, receiving maintenance. The ordinary, continuous work of projecting power across the Pacific. From the water, at a normal conversation distance, the scale of that enterprise becomes real in a way that no photograph ever captures.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. signed that order in 1922. USS Prairie had already been at the pier for nine months. And then history kept arriving: a Depression, a world war, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Gulf, and the ongoing choreography of Pacific deterrence that continues today.
USS Prairie is long gone. But the bay is full of her descendants — faster, more capable, bristling with weapons systems that would have been unrecognizable science fiction when the first destroyer tender tied to that first pier. The mission has not changed. The tools have become extraordinary.
Come sail past them aboard JADA, where the largest concentration of surface warships on the West Coast is laid out along the eastern shore for as long as it takes to pass.
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