The ongoing federal government shutdown threatened to cancel San Francisco’s annual celebration of the United States military. But with the aid of international allies, Fleet Week prevailed.
Over Italian Heritage Weekend, four military jet fleets and one commercial airline team roared across the Bay Area skies. Rather than the traditional parade of ships that grace the waters under the Golden Gate Bridge, this year’s scaled-back festivities featured a tour of Colombia’s towering Navy vessel, the ARC Gloria. Along Pier 39, military and veteran services booths lined the waterfront, along with food trucks and military bands.
Brought to the city 45 years ago by former senator and San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein, Fleet Week is an exciting week for locals, tourists, and business owners along San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf.
The annual military celebrations attract flocks of visitors and locals to the Bay Area waterfront with air shows and educational programming, filling restaurants along the piers and bringing customers into small businesses. According to the Fisherman’s Wharf Community Benefit District, Fleet Week attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors every day of the festivities, “making it one of the most important revenue generating weekends for our merchants and small businesses.”
Despite the excitement surrounding the week of festivities, the overt display of military might has not been without controversy. For locals, the thundering jets are a bellowing nuisance that fills the city with roaring rumbles. The growl of jet engines can be heard from all corners of the San Francisco Peninsula, potentially frightening pets and triggering those with post-traumatic stress disorder. For both those living in and out of the city’s borders, the excessive use of jet fuel, which costs taxpayers $36 million each year, raises significant environmental concerns. However, it should also be noted that the amount of jet fuel burned during Fleet Week demonstrations is small relative to the amount of carbon emitted in San Francisco, with the average of 1600 gallons of jet fuel used per demonstration being equivalent to a Boeing 737 round-trip flight between San Francisco and the East Coast.
While the parade of war ships and navy jets has been nothing more than a propagandized display of military force and prowess since Fleet Week’s conception, to celebrate the military as the government shutdown deprives millions of an income is a blatant misallocation of resources.
At its core, Fleet Week is a military public relations event that seeks to create a bridge between the country’s armed forces and citizens with attractive performances and educational events. Its showcases, like the two-day emergency preparedness expo, give people the opportunity to interact with military equipment and ask active-duty personnel about their roles in the military. Fleet Fest features booths of veteran and active-duty support organizations along with local organizations along Pier 39. In 2025, American Legion Cathay Post 384, a veterans service organization, hosted a block party where locals could mingle with first responders, veterans, and active military.
As one of the world’s leading armed powers, the United States, lacking mandatory conscription, requires positive military advertisement to maintain its 2.86 million active military personnel domestically and abroad. Nevertheless, this massive military has often been an international agent of heinous crimes and destruction, inciting chemical warfare in Vietnam, carpet bombing Cambodia, and dropping atomic bombs in Japan. Whether it is in the United States’ current political context or in the last 40 years of the festivities, Fleet Week perpetuates a glossy image of the military that glorifies its brutality — celebrating pilots, sailors, and active-duty combatants with block parties and military boat tours, and showcasing military equipment that has been used historically to bomb, nuke, and shell civilians and enemy combatants alike.
The United States military cowers behind Fleet Week, masking its complicity in atrocities behind musical performances and local food stands. In Vietnam, the United States military deployed the deadly herbicide Agent Orange over the jungles of the Southeast Asian country, killing over 400,000 Vietnamese people between 1961 and 1972 and leaving generations of Vietnamese children with birth defects. In Cambodia, Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon, ordered the dropping of 500,000 tons of United States bombs between 1969-1973, an effort that was kept largely a secret from the American public and killed about 150,000 Cambodian civilians. In Japan, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians and leaving generations of Japanese citizens exposed to harmful levels of radiation. Even in the last couple of months, the United States military killed a total of 64 people in at least 15 known strikes against boats alleged to be smuggling drugs. Following a recent attack, United States Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the deployment of an aircraft carrier to Latin America, which carries more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft capable of bombing and launching missiles — an evolution of the machines that the United States used to carpet bomb enemy cities during the Korean War and World War II. San Francisco, home of the anti-war movement, should be ashamed of glorifying an institution that has committed such heinous offenses against civilians.
On top of the military’s nature as perpetrating violence, the very government shutdown that threatened to cancel Fleet Week is the same government shutdown forcing the 90,000 federal workers in the Bay Area — and 8,000 in Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district, which represents almost all of San Francisco — to work without pay. Unless legislators agree to pass a budget soon, SNAP benefits, which provide about 98,000 low-income San Franciscans with money for groceries, will be cut off. Additionally, the debated budget causing the shutdown threatens to strip millions of Americans of Medicaid coverage, which provides 17.7 percent of San Franciscans and 39.8% of children living in San Francisco with their health insurance. While Fleet Week prevailed amidst the government shutdown, thousands of San Franciscans are working without pay, about to lose their SNAP benefits, and worrying about the possibility of losing their healthcare coverage. Simply, Fleet Week is a waste of money: money that would’ve been better spent ensuring that San Franciscans are paid, fed, and receive necessary medical care.
Featured Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
