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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