USS San Diego LPD-22 — the namesake comes home.

On a clear afternoon in San Diego Bay, a sailor standing the quarterdeck watch aboard USS San Diego (LPD-22) can see, without binoculars, the downtown skyline of the city whose name runs across the ship's bow in block letters. It is a rare thing in the modern Navy — a warship homeported in her own namesake city, close enough that the Coronado Bridge frames her flight deck when she stands out to sea. Commissioned on May 5, 2012, the San Diego is the fourth United States Navy vessel to carry the honor of Southern California's great port city, and the first to moor within sight of its towers — the culmination of a naming lineage that runs from a doomed armored cruiser through the most decorated light cruiser of the Second World War to one of the most capable amphibious warships ever put to sea. That lineage is not decorative. It is a ledger of what the Navy asked of this city, and what the city gave back.

The name's first bearer earned it by dying. USS San Diego (originally commissioned in 1904 as USS California and redesignated ACR-6 after her rename in 1914) was a steel armored cruiser displacing some 13,680 tons, built in the muscular mold of a Navy that had just seized an overseas empire. She patrolled Atlantic convoy routes through the early years of American involvement in the Great War, a grey presence off the Eastern Seaboard, until the morning of July 19, 1918, when, ten miles south of Fire Island, New York, she struck a mine — almost certainly laid by the German submarine U-156 on a covert minelaying sortie along the American coast. She sank in twenty-eight minutes. Six sailors were lost; the rest of her crew of more than 1,100 were pulled from the water by vessels that raced to the plume of smoke. She settled in roughly 110 feet of water, where she lies today, the last major United States Navy warship destroyed in the First World War — a distinction no ship's company would choose.

The name came back, reinvented, for a different ocean and a different kind of war. USS San Diego (CL-53), an Atlanta-class light cruiser commissioned on January 10, 1942 — one month after Pearl Harbor — spent three and a half years proving that a name could carry either the worst luck or the best. Sailors called her the Lucky Lady. She fought at the Aleutians, Tarawa, Kwajalein, the Marianas, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa, earning fifteen battle stars — more than any other cruiser in the fleet and, by the reckoning of the Naval History and Heritage Command, among the most any vessel in the entire United States Navy received across the whole of the war. Through all of it, not a single enemy shell found her hull. On September 2, 1945, she was among the first American warships to enter Tokyo Bay, present for the formal Japanese surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri — an arrival in the bay of a defeated empire that the first San Diego, broken apart by a German mine, had been denied a generation before.

The third ship to carry the name served its country more quietly, in the way that navies are actually sustained. USS San Diego (AFS-6) was a Mars-class combat stores ship, commissioned in 1969 into the unglamorous work of fleet logistics — carrying ammunition, spare parts, provisions, and dry stores to warships operating across the Pacific and Indian Oceans through Vietnam, the drawn-out Cold War, and the Gulf War of 1991. She replenished destroyers and cruisers at sea in all weather, the essential invisible machinery of sustained naval power, and was decommissioned in 1997. There are no battle stars on her record and no famous photographs of her entering a conquered harbor. But the ships she kept at sea through three decades of operations owed her their ability to fight, and the name borne by a cruiser decked in fifteen stars had served its second tour in the hold of a stores ship without complaint.

The fourth San Diego is something the earlier three could not have imagined. As a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock, she stretches 684 feet from stem to stern, displaces nearly 25,000 tons at full load, and embarks a crew of roughly 360 sailors alongside 800 Marines with all their equipment. Her most distinctive feature is her well deck — a floodable internal bay at the waterline — capable of launching and recovering two Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft, each of which can carry an M1 Abrams tank across coral reefs and shallow beaches that would ground any conventional landing craft. Her flight deck handles two MV-22 Ospreys simultaneously. She carries armored vehicles, a fully equipped surgical suite, and command-and-control systems capable of running a joint amphibious operation. Laid down in April 2009 at Huntington Ingalls Industries' Pascagoula shipyard and launched in November 2010, she was commissioned under the command of Captain Lawrence Vasquez before thousands of San Diegans who watched the city's name go back to sea for the fourth time.

San Diego did not become the hub of American amphibious power by accident. The city's deep, sheltered bay and its proximity to the Marine Corps bases at Camp Pendleton and Miramar made it the natural home for the Navy-Marine Corps team that developed the doctrine and hardware of ship-to-shore assault during the Second World War and never stopped refining it. Naval Base San Diego — the largest surface warfare base on the West Coast — now hosts much of the Navy's amphibious force, and LPD-22 operates regularly with I Marine Expeditionary Force, whose infantry battalions and aviation squadrons rehearse over-the-horizon assault on these same waters, loading through her well deck, lifting off her flight deck, cycling through her berthing and mess decks as though the ship were a floating forward operating base — which, in every meaningful sense, she is.

The San Antonio class that LPD-22 represents was designed with the explicit recognition that the old model of amphibious warfare — a mass assault against a known beach by a large, slow fleet — no longer matched the threats or the missions the Navy would actually face. Where the Austin-class LPDs she replaced were conceived for the Cold War's anticipated NATO versus Warsaw Pact scenarios, the San Antonios are built for contested littorals, humanitarian crises, special operations insertions, and the kind of grey-zone presence operations that dominate 21st-century naval competition. San Diego has deployed to the Western Pacific multiple times since commissioning, passing through straits and across sea-lanes that CL-53 crossed under Japanese air attack in 1944 — the same geography, entirely different stakes, the same underlying logic that a Navy able to project power from the sea can shape events ashore without a single boot touching ground unless and until the moment calls for it.

What the four ships named San Diego accumulate into, laid end to end across a century of American naval history, is a record of what a city permanently astride the Pacific asked its Navy to become — and what the Navy, in each generation, answered with steel and people and sweat. The name that first went down off Fire Island in twenty-eight minutes came back as the luckiest cruiser in the Pacific, then as the quiet sinew of fleet logistics, and finally as a command ship capable of projecting a Marine rifle battalion from over the horizon onto any beach on earth. The bay that launched all of it is right here, its swells running the same westerly fetch they always have. You could be out on it tonight.