San Diego County had the nation’s largest defense industry workforce in fiscal 2023, with nearly 113,000 people serving as everything from sailors and Marines to civilian ship repair welders to engineers who design next-generation drones, according to a new U.S. Defense Department report. The Pentagon spent $18.6 billion on personnel and contracts, accounting for nearly one-third of the $60.8 billion the agency awarded statewide. Only Texas and Virginia rank ahead of California in defense spending. Most of the state’s Defense Department workforce is concentrated in and around San Diego and Camp Pendleton, which are home to the largest Navy and Marine bases on the West Coast, respectively. The civilian and military workforce in Coronado is so large many residents avoid driving near Naval Air Station North Island between 2:30 and 4 p.m. on weekdays, when thousands of workers head home for the day. The flow causes backups all the way to the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. The county is home to 80,352 active-duty sailors and Marines, 990 National Guard, 7,987 reservists and 23,316 civilian defense employees, the report said. “Within California, San Diego plays a disproportionate role in both personnel and spending,” said Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego, pointing out that the 112,645 people employed here far eclipses the 15,939 in the California county with the next-largest defense presence, San Bernardino County. “Not only does San Diego have an important role with the DoD in terms of personnel and spending, that spending supports a large portion of the local economy,” he added. To a degree, the report does not clearly describe the landscape in terms of funding. The Pentagon ranks San Diego first in payroll spending, ahead of Honolulu and Norfolk City, Va. But Norfolk is flanked by Newport News, Hampton and Chesapeake. Collectively, they represent one of the largest defense regions in the world. Sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt stand at attention while crewing the rails on their arrival into San Diego Bay. The Roosevelt is returning back to NAS North Island after a nine-month deployment. (Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune) But San Diego is nonetheless huge, serving as the home port of 56 surface warships, four fast-attack submarines and a number of auxiliary ships — all heavily subsidized by the Defense Department. So are local unmanned aircraft developer Northrop Grumman and the General Dynamics-NASSCO shipyard. In September, the Pentagon said it would pay General Dynamics-NASSCO in Barrio Logan up to $6.75 billion to build as many as eight Navy fuel ships — money that is expected to keep the shipyard operating at a high capacity for years. NASSCO employs nearly 3,400 people. Its neighbor, BAE Systems, will get at least $213 million to upgrade and repair a single destroyer, the USS Halsey. Many San Diego-based destroyers have or will be outfitted with the latest version of the Tomahawk land attack missile (TLAM), which cost $2.4 million apiece, the Navy says. The airwing of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln — currently on patrol in the Middle East — includes a squadron of new F-35C strike aircraft, which each cost about $102 million. Millions more will be spent to service and upgrade the Lincoln when it returns from deployment. The work will provide money for parts suppliers across San Diego County. The enormous cost of maintaining the Navy and Marines might come into particularly sharp relief next year. It is possible that the Navy will homeport its newest aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, in San Diego. The ship cost $13 billion to build and will cost millions each year to operate. Far less visible are the Global Hawk drones developed by Northrop Grumman in Rancho Bernardo, which cost $104 million each. The unmanned aerial vehicles are routinely used to gather intelligence and imagery that broadly helps the U.S. military.