Is San Diego the toughest American City?

Question

Recently when taking a Harbor tour of San Diego, I was surprised to see how much firepower this city has. At the time of my tour, there were 3 Aircraft carriers in port (4 if you count the Midway) and 2 nuclear attack subs. And the ship's captain said there was more on the south end of the bay.

Seems to me you don't want to mess with San Diego. They're packing a lot of firepower and are probably more heavily armed then half the world's nations.

Answer 1

After taking a harbor tour, it's easy to think that. North Island Base is really big and they have a lot of boats. There's also another base of some sort south of Coronado.  

Answer 2

Yaeh, uh, I'm gonna have to, uh, sort of disagree with you.

Just because the Navy and Marines have a bunch of bases there doesn't mean that San Diego is heavily armed. You should check out Texas for a heavily armed population. You know what they say - don't mess with Texas!  

Answer 3

San Diego is so laid back and relaxed. It just happens to be a military (Navy and Marine) town (only 3 ships) and a ship building town

Answer 4

San Diego in and of itself is not armed; the Navy has it's SouthWest fleet operations here, and the primary ship-builder -- General Dynamics/NASSCO -- is located here as well (so when repairs need to be done, they're done here).  San Diego is also one of only 2 naturally-occurring deep ports on the west coast (the other being San Francisco), so ships can move in and out of the bay freely.  This explains the large compliment of combat- and non-combat ready ships.  

To be perfectly honest with you though, San Diego is a #1 target for bombing if it should ever come to that, BECAUSE of the large fleet compliment.  It would be akin to Pearl Harbor if it every came down to disabling the US Naval Fleet on the west coast in a war.

Also, I have lived my entire life in San Diego, and I can tell you now that it is NOT the military town it was 20 or even 10 years ago; with the down-sizing of the military and budget cuts in general, the city is actually FAR less militarily populated that it was when I was a kid.