It's not even that. When you're coming to a military base, you're expecting a fence, a checkpoint, a bunch of bored dudes on guard duty, et cetera. When you're coming to an air base, you should be expecting at least a pair of fighters armed and fueled at the ready for immediate takeoff, <5 minutes.
You came and there is no aforementioned fighters present? Well, then you're visiting some sort of chucklefucks, no questions asked.
This also requires the flying squadrons at a base to have fighters.
Hill Air Force Base in Utah or Seymour Johnson in North Carolina could and probably do since they have fighter wings at this bases. Somewhere like Minot in North Dakota wouldn't since the units there are a missile wing that oversees Minuteman missiles, and a Bomb Wing equipped with B-52 bombers. Unless fighters from another base just happened to be stopping by or in the air in transit, or unless there's some sort of odd training exercise that sees units from other bases coming in, you're not going to see fighters there.