Personnel at Point Mugu, California, have been trying to sink the Navy fleet since 1946, and the fleet is better for it.
The Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division's threat target systems department continues the legacy founded eight decades ago by building, fielding and operating the targets that give Navy's ships and aircraft a credible enemy to train against.
This year, the department marks 80 years of aerial target operations at Point Mugu. The threats it builds today would be unrecognizable to the engineers who launched the first drones and pilotless aircraft in 1946.
The mission would not.
A Legacy Forged in War
World War II delivered two lessons the Navy could not ignore.
Germany's V-1 buzz bombs proved unmanned weapons could strike at scale. Japan's kamikaze attacks proved guided threats could reach ships faster than gunners could respond. The Navy needed to develop its own pilotless aircraft and guided missiles. More urgently, it needed to train crews to defeat them.
In late 1945, the Navy established a pilotless aircraft unit at Naval Air Station Mojave, California, and began operating at a makeshift range at Point Mugu. The range location was selected from a survey of 26 candidate sites. Its advantages were precise: an unobstructed over-water range, reliable weather, proximity to Southern California's aerospace industry and nearby islands for instrumentation.
On Oct. 1, 1946, the Naval Air Missile Test Center activated 5 miles south of Oxnard, California. The pilotless aircraft unit consolidated there to develop and test pilotless aircraft, drones and guided missiles over the Pacific Ocean.
The first test weapon was a direct answer to the threat that prompted the program. The Republic-Ford JB-2 Loon, a derivative of Germany's V-1 buzz bomb, launched from Point Mugu's beach ramps throughout 1946 and 1947.
In early 1947, the submarine USS Cusk fired a Loon, becoming the world's first missile launched from a submarine. The technology being studied at Point Mugu had become a weapon within a year of the center's activation.
Early target drones followed.
The KDD-1 Katydid, powered by a pulsejet engine, gave the Navy one of its first purpose-built aerial targets — a platform designed not to strike but to be struck — at Point Mugu.
The principle embedded in that first drone has driven the program ever since: to train the fleet to win, you have to give it something worth defeating.
As the Threat Grows, So Does the Target
As adversary capabilities advanced, Point Mugu's targets kept pace.
Surplus F6F Hellcat fighter aircraft, converted to remote-controlled drones, flew as test targets for early air-to-air missiles. In 1952, an AIM-7 Sparrow missile shot down a Hellcat drone above the sea range, marking the first recorded guided air-to-air missile intercept. The result validated the weapon. It also validated the method — give the missile a realistic target and you learn what it can actually do.
The jet age raised the bar. QF-86 Sabre jet aircraft flew in pilot-optional mode as subsonic targets. Later, QF-4 Phantom IIs returned to Point Mugu as unmanned supersonic targets capable of unmanned operations that pushed missile systems to their limits. The same aircraft that had defined a generation of fleet air combat came back to be shot at.
That is the arc of this mission.
The program also flew supersonic targets. The AQM-37 Jay Hawk drone, air-launched from fighter aircraft, simulated high-speed threats at Mach 3 and altitudes above 60,000 feet. It debuted in the 1960s and flew for the final time during Exercise Gray Flag in 2025, after roughly six decades of service.
Behind each target profile are engineers, technicians, operators and range teams who turn intelligence about emerging threats into something the fleet can fly, track and engage.
Today, the warfare center's threat target systems department operates from three California locations at Point Mugu, Port Hueneme and Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, with teams that deploy worldwide to support fleet training and live-fire exercises. The aerial target fleet spans the full threat spectrum, from small commercially derived drones to Mach 2.7 missiles.
A DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2 drone supports counter-unmanned aerial system training from surface vessels, testing shipboard defenses against the class of small drone threats now common in littoral operations.
For larger low-speed presentations, the systems department received 20 former MQ-1B Predator aircraft and redesignated them as NMQ-1B aircraft, giving the Navy a more capable target that can support threat-representative test events beyond the small UAS class.
The BQM-34S Firebee aerial target system remains the fleet's heavy-lift aerial workhorse. Its payload capacity supports advanced weapons development, including serving as a surrogate launch platform for China Lake's solid fuel ramjet missile.
The BQM-177A, the newest aerial target, replaced the BQM-74 Chukar and carries advanced electronic warfare payloads and wingtip pods that replicate subsonic cruise missile profiles. In a recent demonstration on the Point Mugu Sea Range, the BQM-177A flew as a test bed for the Experimental Platform for Intelligent Combat project.
Two Naval Air Systems Command program offices sponsored the demonstration, which used an artificial intelligence system to validate autonomous flight control. The BQM-177A made tactical decisions and executed maneuvers without a remote operator. The capability is still in development.
At the high end, the GQM-163A Coyote provides what no other U.S. target can: supersonic sea-skimming flight at Mach 2.6, with an advanced emitter signal simulator that replicates the electronic signature of an antiship cruise missile. The Coyote replaced the MQM-8G Vandal.
Beyond the Skies
The team's mission does not stop at the water's edge.
The High-Speed Maneuverable Surface Target drone replicates fast attack and fast onshore attack craft. During surface warfare advanced tactical training exercises, ships and embarked aircrews use the drone to validate anti-surface warfare tactics, techniques and procedures against a target that moves and maneuvers like the threat.
The next test ship, a 260-foot vessel designated Mobile Ship Target 2301, arrived at Port Hueneme in January. NAWCWD teams are outfitting it for operational use, installing a government-developed remote-control system that will allow the vessel to operate safely during live-fire events.
Its reconfigurable superstructure can be shaped to match specific adversary ship profiles, with installed emitters replicating that ship's electromagnetic environment. This ship is the primary platform for surface-to-surface and air-to-surface weapons testing.
The newest seaborne addition is the Low-Profile Surface Target. The unmanned surface vehicle replicates the small adversarial ships that are increasingly encountered in littoral waters. One operator controls the lead vessel with up to seven others maintaining formation, presenting coordinated attack scenarios that mirror threats in contested maritime environments.
"The targets we build and augment serve two missions. They act as the threat representative surrogate to test and evaluate the weapons and warfighting systems designed to defeat it, and they train the crews who will track, identify and pull the trigger," said Tom Dowd, Point Mugu Sea Range group director. "A ship or aircraft that hasn't faced a realistic threat in both contexts deploys with unanswered questions. [The threat target systems department] makes sure they get the answers right."
The Teams Behind the Threat
The targets are only as capable as the people who build, launch and operate them.
TTSD teams deploy to every major range in the U.S. and abroad. They launched GQM-163A targets from Hebrides, Scotland, during NATO's Exercise Formidable Shield, operated across Atlantic training ranges and supported missions at the Reagan Space and Missile Test Range on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands and ranges in Australia.
During those exercises, allied navies use TTSD targets to test their own combat systems and train their crews alongside U.S. forces. At home, an operating procedures standardization program at Point Mugu trains target operators from commands across the Navy to common standards.
The collaborative framework that drives target requirements is the Target Stakeholder Requirements Action Group. Through this group, the fleet and NAWCWD technical staff define and refine requirements together, ensuring the threats presented in training track with the evolving operational environment. The Low-Profile Surface Target emerged directly from that process: a specific answer to the Navy's training against small-boat threats.
For the fleet, the value of that work is measured in seconds.
"This training is indispensable for exercising a ship's layered defense, enabling personnel to achieve the technical mastery required to sense, synthesize and decide fast enough to win in an era where the speed of [decision-making] ruthlessly punishes delay," said Navy Capt. Matthew W. Foster, Naval Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center deputy commander.
The Threat That Holds
Training against a realistic threat builds something that a classroom cannot. A crew that has tracked an incoming Coyote at Mach 2.6 knows where its procedures hold and where they break, before that knowledge costs lives.
That is what TTSD has been building for 80 years.
The platforms and the threats have changed over the years. Every generation of threat required a new generation of target. Every generation of target required the same thing: people at Point Mugu willing to build a more dangerous adversary so the fleet could learn to survive it.
"Eighty years ago, this place existed for one reason: make sure we don't lose a warfighter to something they could have learned here. That mission doesn't change when the threat goes autonomous. It gets harder," said Dan Carreño, NAWCWD executive director. "And the people here have never backed down from a hard problem."
That is the work TTSD inherited, and the work carries forward every time the fleet asks for a harder threat.
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