United States naval districts
Although part of the Navy Department, the Marine Corps is a separate branch of the U.S. armed forces that now maintains its own organization of USMC support base locations.
The Secretary of the Navy ordered creation of a system of districts for "the purpose of decentralizing administrative functions with respect to the control of coastwise sea communications and shore activities in states and territories outside department headquarters in Washington DC".
As an agency in the U.S. Department of Treasury from 1790 to 1967, the USCG predecessor Lighthouse Board was the first maritime bureau to establish a district organization as directed by an 1838 act of Congress for steamboat safety.
Homeland Defense: Today's structure of land, air, and naval United States armed forces, with active duty and reserve components, was configured from 1903 to 1947 by a series of Congressional laws enacted to modernize U.S. state militias into a National Guard, strengthen military mobilization capability, and optimize U.S. land, air, and sea service organizations for the global conflicts of the 20th Century.
[6] Sectors, named by region, state, or city within each district, align the maritime multi-mission coastal, ports and waterways activities of Coast Guard forces with U.S.
Naval bases in northeastern cities were key to U.S. forces winning the campaigns in the Atlantic Ocean that achieved allied victory during the global wars in Europe 1914–1918, and again in 1939–1945.
From 1960 to 1980, the Navy retired several aging historic large naval shipyard bases in the northeastern states that dated from the colonial period and American Revolutionary War.
[9] 1st Coast Guard District encompasses the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, plus eastern New York and northern New Jersey.
In 1996 however, as part of the Coast Guard portion of the U.S. military's Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, the service closed the large USCG cutter support base on Governors Island NY (a New York harbor defense fortification since 1776) and moved CG Atlantic Area headquarters to Portsmouth VA. Fourth Naval District was established on 7 May 1903 headquartered at historic Philadelphia Naval Shipyard on the Delaware River at League Island, Pennsylvania, in accordance with General Order No.
Between 1960 and 1980, the Navy closed aging historic shipyards in the northeast United States and merged about half of the numbered naval districts for budgetary efficiency and military effectiveness.
Seventh Coast Guard District includes six coastal sectors and is homeport for afloat and shore units including major Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean patrol cutters, buoy tenders, homeland security boats, stations, shore bases, deployable maritime security units, and four Coast Guard air stations.
8th District boundaries include the Gulf of Mexico coast from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, to the Florida panhandle central time zone, west of Apalachicola, plus a small part of southwest Georgia.
Coast Guard 9th District works closely with agencies across the water border in Canada to protect the security, navigation (summer and winter), and natural environment of the large Great Lakes system from the St. Lawrence Seaway to Duluth, MN.
[25] Ninth Coast Guard District includes four sectors spanning the Great Lakes, and is homeport for afloat cutters and shore units including icebreaker patrol cutters, buoy tenders, homeland security boats, stations, shore bases, deployable maritime security units, and four Coast Guard air stations.
During the 1920s the Tenth was disestablished, but was reactivated on January 1, 1940, at San Juan, Puerto Rico under the command of Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance, USN.
[27] Eleventh Coast Guard District includes four coastal sectors and is homeport for afloat and shore units including major Pacific patrol cutters, homeland security boats, stations, shore bases, deployable maritime security units, and four major Coast Guard air stations.
As part of the post-Cold War military Base Realignment and Closure process in the 1990s, many historic large Pacific U.S. naval facilities such as Mare Island, Treasure Island, Hunters Point Shipyard, and Naval Air Station Alameda in the San Francisco Bay area, and Los Angeles-Long Beach port area of California were closed or re-located to San Diego or to Puget Sound.
[30] Thirteenth Naval District was established on 7 May 1903 with headquarters at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Bremerton, Washington, in accordance with General Order No.
[31] Thirteenth Coast Guard District includes two coastal sectors and is homeport for afloat and shore units including major Pacific patrol cutters, polar icebreakers, buoy tenders, homeland security boats, stations, shore bases, deployable maritime security units, and three Coast Guard air stations.
From 1899 when the U.S. Navy established bases in Hawaii until the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the United States Pacific Fleet grew enormously.
[34] Fourteenth Coast Guard District includes two coastal sectors in Hawaii and Guam, and is homeport for afloat and shore units including major patrol cutters that deploy to the South Pacific and east Asia, buoy tenders, homeland security boats, stations, shore bases, deployable maritime security units, and Coast Guard air stations.
Most of these bases were shore support facilities built during World War II by Navy Seabee Construction Battalions as U.S. forces regained control of the islands from the Japanese Empire.
In 2022 amid growing tensions with China, the United States and Philippine governments quietly began preparations for U.S. forces to return to the Subic Bay naval facility.
Starting in 1942, the Alaska territory and Aleutian Islands played a major role in the U.S. military effort to drive back and defeat the Japanese empire.
Japanese attacks during the Aleutian Islands campaign on Dutch Harbor in 1942, and Attu and Kiska in 1943 were the only battles of World War II fought on American soil.
In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt visited Adak Island air base, meeting with military commanders and eating with soldiers of the Aleutians garrison.
17th Coast Guard District maintains a large USCG air and sea base on Kodiak Island, AK and operates within geographic boundaries that cover a wide distance of waters from the stormy North Pacific Ocean to polar ice between Canada and Asia.
Seventeenth Coast Guard District includes two coastal sectors in Anchorage and Juneau, and is homeport for afloat and shore units including major patrol cutters that deploy for fisheries law enforcement across the North Pacific and Bering Sea, buoy tenders, homeland security boats, stations, shore bases, two major Coast Guard air stations and an air support facility.
JFHQ-NCR is responsible for homeland defense of the greater Washington, DC National Capital Region, including The Pentagon, Headquarters Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard HQ, and all U.S. military facilities in the area.
The Coast Guard Auxiliary District map adds sixteen sub-regions, aligned with USCG Sectors, that administratively support the U.S. recreational boating safety public outreach activities of thousands of CG Auxiliarists.
