Visitors often think of San Diego as sunshine, beaches, and palm trees.
They’re not wrong.
But they are only seeing half the city.
San Diego has always been a military town.
Long before biotechnology, software companies, and craft breweries became part of its identity, San Diego grew alongside the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The harbor, the shipyards, the training ranges, and the bases didn’t simply arrive—they shaped the city itself.
For generations, military service has been woven into everyday life here.
Children grow up watching gray warships glide beneath the Coronado Bridge. Fighter aircraft are as common overhead as commercial airliners. Sailors in dress whites stand in line at neighborhood restaurants. Marines fill the freeways on Friday afternoons headed toward Camp Pendleton.
It’s ordinary.
Until you leave San Diego and realize it isn’t ordinary at all.
I know because I grew up there.
Some of my earliest memories are of ships.
The harbor was never far away. Neither were the people who served aboard them. Friends, neighbors, teachers, and relatives often had some connection to the military. It wasn’t something separate from the community.
It was the community.
Later, as a journalist covering the military for more than thirty years, I was fortunate to see another side of San Diego.
I walked the decks of Navy ships.
Visited commands where new technologies were quietly changing how wars would someday be fought.
Interviewed sailors preparing for deployment and Marines returning from combat.
Spent time with engineers, researchers, aviators, and commanders whose work rarely made headlines but quietly shaped the future of national defense.
Those experiences stayed with me.
When I began writing The Whitlock Protocol, there was never any question where it would take place.
It had to be San Diego.
Not simply because of its strategic importance, but because the city offers something no fictional setting ever could.
Within a few miles, you can move from Barrio Logan to Naval Base San Diego, from the USS Midway to Point Loma, from world-class research laboratories to neighborhoods where Navy families have lived for generations.
It’s a place where military history, cutting-edge technology, and ordinary civilian life exist side by side.
That combination became essential to the story.
In The Whitlock Protocol, the city isn’t just the backdrop for the action.
It is one of the characters.
The geography matters.
The harbor matters.
The shipyards matter.
The research centers matter.
Even the neighborhoods matter.
Readers familiar with San Diego will recognize the streets, the waterfront, the bridges, the trolley lines, and the places where the story unfolds. Those who have never visited will, I hope, come away understanding why the city has long been one of America’s most strategically important ports.
But beyond its military significance, San Diego is also a city of remarkable contrasts.
A Marine in camouflage can stop for coffee beside a software engineer developing artificial intelligence.
A Navy captain might share a restaurant with students from UC San Diego.
Scientists, sailors, entrepreneurs, dockworkers, and surfers all call the same city home.
Few places bring together innovation and tradition quite like San Diego.
That intersection fascinated me as a reporter.
It fascinated me even more as a novelist.
Technology is advancing at extraordinary speed. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cyber warfare, and robotics are no longer distant possibilities. Many of those conversations are already happening in laboratories and defense facilities around San Diego.
That made the city the natural home for a story about the future of warfare.
Every novel asks its readers to believe in a world.
I didn’t have to invent this one.
I simply built upon a city I knew.
One that has spent generations standing watch over the Pacific.
One that has welcomed home countless service members after long deployments.
One that understands, perhaps better than most American cities, both the necessity of military strength and the cost of using it.
That is the San Diego I wanted readers to experience.
Not the one on the postcard.
The real one.