Somewhere between the Pacific breakers and the Coast Range foothills, the Oregon National Guard has been training soldiers since 1927. Camp Rilea sits on the Clatsop County coast near Warrenton, close enough to the ocean that sea fog rolls through the training grounds and salt air works on anything metal. It started as Camp Clatsop, a modest summer encampment where guardsmen drilled between fishing seasons and harvest time. Nearly a century later, it houses radar installations, a mock city for urban combat training, and a heliport - but the fog still comes in the same way it always has.
The Oregon National Guard established Camp Clatsop in 1927 as a summer training area, choosing this stretch of coast for the same reason the military always gravitates toward remote shoreline: room to maneuver without bothering civilians, and terrain that teaches hard lessons about weather, mud, and endurance. For thirteen years, it remained a seasonal facility. Then Pearl Harbor changed everything. In 1940, with war looming, the federal government took control of the camp. Oregon's guardsmen became U.S. soldiers, and the summer training ground became a year-round military installation. The coast they had drilled on for recreation now needed defending. The camp wasn't returned to state control until 1947, two years after the war's end.
In 1959, the camp was renamed for Major General Thomas E. Rilea, who had served as Oregon's Adjutant General - the state's top military officer. The renaming marked the camp's transformation from a temporary training ground into a permanent Armed Forces Training Center. Under its new name, Camp Rilea expanded its mission and its infrastructure. What had been tent platforms and rifle ranges grew to include permanent barracks, communications facilities, and the kind of institutional architecture that signals a military base built to last rather than one assembled for a season.
Today Camp Rilea is home to the 116th Air Control Squadron, a deployable airspace command and control unit equipped with radar and communications systems. The 116th ACS has carried its expertise overseas - to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2006, to Qatar in 2011, and to Southwest Asia in 2015. Between deployments, the squadron trains at Rilea alongside soldiers from the Oregon Army National Guard, the Oregon Air National Guard, and personnel from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. The base functions as a hub where different branches and units converge for exercises that the Oregon coast's unpredictable weather makes more realistic than any simulation.
One of Camp Rilea's most distinctive features is its MOUT site - Military Operations on Urban Terrain - a mock city constructed specifically for urban warfare training. Streets, buildings, intersections, and alleyways replicate the environment that modern soldiers are most likely to fight in. The concrete structures absorb blank rounds and training grenades while instructors observe from catwalks and rooftops. Beyond military use, the base serves as a training ground for civilian law enforcement and SWAT teams who need the same close-quarters skills. The Civil Air Patrol conducts exercises here. Even the Boy Scouts of America have used Camp Rilea's facilities. The base also hosts Starbase, a Department of Defense education program, and its campgrounds remain open to military families - a callback to the camp's origins as a place where service and the outdoors intersected.
Camp Rilea's location defines its character. Warrenton sits just south of the Columbia River's mouth, where the river meets the Pacific in one of the most treacherous bar crossings in North America. Fort Stevens, the Civil War-era coastal defense just to the north, was shelled by a Japanese submarine in 1942. Camp Rilea occupies the same strategic coastline - a stretch where military presence has made sense since before Oregon was a state. The heliport allows rapid deployment along the coast for both military and disaster response operations. When the next Cascadia earthquake or tsunami strikes - and seismologists consider it a matter of when, not if - Camp Rilea will be one of the first staging areas for the response. A base built for summer drills in 1927 has become essential infrastructure for a coast that lives with the knowledge that the ground beneath it can shift.
Located at 46.13°N, 123.94°W on the Oregon coast near Warrenton, in Clatsop County. From altitude, Camp Rilea appears as a cluster of military buildings and training areas set among coastal forest, south of the Columbia River mouth. The MOUT site - the mock urban training village - is visible as a grid of concrete structures. Camp Rilea Heliport (15OR) is on site. Astoria Regional Airport (KAST) is approximately 5 miles to the northeast. The camp sits between US-101 and the Pacific coast. Fort Stevens State Park is visible to the north. The Columbia River bar, where brown river water meets gray Pacific, is prominent from altitude. The Coast Range rises to the east, and the long sandy beaches of the Clatsop Plains stretch southward.