Naval Support Activity Panama City (U.S. Navy Mine Countermeasures Station)

Naval Support Activity Panama City is a United States Navy shore installation in Bay County, Florida, adjacent to Panama City, on St. Andrew Bay with waterway access to the Gulf of Mexico. It falls under Navy Region Southeast. The installation is not a fleet base but a host activity for research, development, test and evaluation work and for diving and explosive ordnance disposal training, operating several miles of intracoastal waterway for at-sea access.

The principal tenant is the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, the research and development arm of the base and part of the Naval Sea Systems Command network of surface warfare centers. NSWC PCD works in littoral warfare, with disciplines covering optics, acoustics, mine warfare and robotics, and employs about 1,100 scientists and engineers. Past engineering programmes include the Swimmer Delivery Vehicle, the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems and the Landing Craft Air Cushion; current work covers the bulk of U.S. hovercraft research and weapons integration for the Littoral Combat Ship.

Other tenants are the Center for Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Diving, the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, which is the evaluation facility for Navy diving, and the Navy Diving Salvage and Training Center. The latter trains Navy divers, Reconnaissance Marines, Army engineer divers, Air Force pararescue and special tactics personnel and Coast Guard divers in wreckage recovery, mine disposal and reconnaissance. Also present are a Deployable Joint Command and Control System element, an Explosive Ordnance Disposal detachment, the Coastal Operations Institute and Coast Guard Station Panama City. Total civilian and military strength is about 2,800.

The site covers 657 acres (2.66 km2) with 221 buildings. Alongside waterfront port facilities, it has a hangar and a paved heliport of roughly 300 by 400 feet, sized for naval helicopters up to the MH-53E Sea Dragon; the Navy airfield identifier is NBV. The Littoral Warfare Research Facility, a $10 million research and development building completed in 2006, is the newest laboratory on the base.

The installation was established on 20 July 1945 as the U.S. Navy Mine Countermeasures Station, formed by transferring the test station at Solomons, Maryland. It was redesignated the U.S. Navy Mine Defense Laboratory around 1955, the Naval Coastal Systems Laboratory in 1972 and the Naval Coastal Systems Center in 1981, later becoming the Coastal Systems Station under the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The present name and the tenant command structure were adopted in 2007.