He’s the poster child for the U.S. Navy – although he laughs when he hears that and says there is probably someone else who would look better on a military poster.
U.S. Navy Captain Newt “Bomb” McKissick was the commanding officer of Naval Base Coronado for just over a year before he moved into his next assignment at the end of January 2024.
While commanding officer, he also worked closely with the city of Coronado and was instrumental in allowing the city to count a portion of on-base housing. This housing specifically consisted of units in enlisted barracks planned for construction by the Navy during the existing housing cycle, which ends in 2029.
McKissick received his Masters of Business Administration from Naval Postgraduate School and his Masters in Strategic Studies and Public Policy from Naval War College.
He is now the military lead for the Department of Defense’s (DOD) energy portfolio unit.
And he owes it all to the Navy, he says.
Commanding Officer
McKissick is only 47, but his LinkedIn profile reads like a book, and he’s not done yet.
Right near the top of the page is his command at Naval Base Coronado.
That’s not just one base, but eight Navy installations stretching from NASNI north to Naval Auxiliary Landing Field on San Clemente Island and east to Camp Morena in the Mountain Empire region of San Diego County.
McKissick’s job as commanding officer was to oversee all eight installations, the units operating at each site, and logistics – including care for the families and mental health professionals.
“Our mission is the fleet, fighter and family,” McKissick says.
In addition to managing the eight installations, McKissick had a role in managing fighters in the fleet and the families behind them.
“All of that is put on the base and we coordinate with the different commands to help facilitate that,” McKissick explains.
McKissick praised the 150 tenant commands he worked with, comparing the overall operation to how a college campus would function with the commanding officer’s role being the president, and the tenant commands being the professors.
“I don’t want to take too much credit,” McKissick laughs lightly. “I’m not deciding how anybody gets educated.”
But he’s moved on and has turned over the command of Naval Base Coronado to Captain Ladislao Montero.
New assignment at energy portfolio
McKissick says he’ll remain living in Coronado, but his assignment is now in greater San Diego with the energy portfolio.
What that means is testing emerging technologies such as electric vehicles (EV) – including electric subsurface vehicles, surface vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles, and figuring out how to make cleaner energy and different energy sources for Navy bases.
[This is] potentially the greatest job in all of DOD.
Captain Newt McKissick
“[This is] potentially the greatest job in all of DOD,” McKissick says.
The energy portfolio’s mission is operational energy and installation resilience, according to McKissick.
“There’s tactical EV’s that we do, and every single one of those requires a power source. We’re looking at ways to do that in the best way possible,” McKissick says.
The other part to his new mission is installation resilience, which he says he’s able to draw from his time as commanding officer at Naval Base Coronado.
Making an installation more resilient means giving it multiple avenues of making sure things are taken care of and giving it multiple options for protection, according to McKissick.
He worked personally with the eight separate installations of Naval Base Coronado and knows the ins and outs of what they need.
“Coming from an installation command, I really understand all the facets of the environmental impacts, the climate change, the public policy, the permissions that you need within the city government and state government, federal government,” McKissick says.
He says the DOD is about making sure that they are defending and protecting their way of life.
We want to be better neighbors, better stewards of our assets, our facilities, our country.
Captain Newt McKissick
“We want to be better neighbors, better stewards of our assets, our facilities, our country,” McKissick says.
And the unique part about his new assignment is the speed at which the team is able to see the fruits of their labor.
McKissick says they try to release new emerging technologies within several months of developing it, which he says is rewarding for him because he gets to rapidly see the success of the effort, or the failure of the effort.
This brings him fulfillment, he says, and so has the entirety of his career up to this point.
“The Navy has given me different opportunities, and one thing’s for certain: I have never been bored; there’s no monotony in this career,” McKissick says. “I don’t feel like I’m done yet, so I’m really excited about this next opportunity as I branch out of the Navy and work with the whole of the Department of Defense.”
Correction: The previous version of this story included misleading information on the nature of the housing that was counted on the base. It has been corrected in this version.
