Cat and Mouse : Point Mugu Naval Engineers Play High-Tech Hardball in Test of Weaponry

On the ocean’s edge at Point Mugu, a giant metal door slowly rolled open in a secret laboratory where the Navy tests its most advanced warplanes.

As heavy surf pounded a seawall four stories below, a test model of an F-14 Tomcat poked its nose out and began scanning the horizon for a target.

Behind the Tomcat, in a room with metal walls and roof to block electronic eavesdropping from Soviet spy ships, a high-level team of Pentagon observers watched as $20 million worth of computers went quietly to work.

On this Friday morning, the Navy was beginning one of the thousands of tests it conducts each year at Point Mugu on the missiles, planes and Space Age laser weapons providing its current and future air-strike capability.

There was a high-tech glamour to the morning’s test. But on other projects of equal sensitivity at the Pacific Missile Test Center, there were contrasting scenes of nuts-and-bolts practicality.

Sgt. York Tanks

Elsewhere at the test center, Navy engineers were working on projects involving discarded $32-million Sgt. York anti-aircraft weapons picked up at Army salvage and even one homemade device designed to help U.S. pilots duck enemy missiles.

As the Tomcat peeked out from its high-security perch, however, the Navy’s focus was on a new infrared tracking system designed to locate enemy planes by the heat of their engines. It is scheduled for installation on all U.S. fighters in the next decade.

Scanning the test center’s vast ocean range, the Tomcat homed in at random on military and civilian aircraft flying along the Southern California coast.

The new system--a backup for times when heavy electronic jamming makes radar tracking difficult--stayed with every target. For the Navy, the test was one with a happy ending.

Normally, the details of such matters at Point Mugu are never publicly revealed. But last week the Navy provided a rare glimpse of what goes on inside its most advanced air weapons test center.

Much of the secret work is on the cutting edge of U.S. and Soviet technology, and many of the most sensitive projects involve electronic warfare--the countermeasures and counter-countermeasures that dominate modern military strategy.

In a sense, Point Mugu is the setting for an endless military game of cat and mouse--where the Navy’s top civilian engineers spend lifetimes devising war scenarios continuously testing U.S. weapons against Soviet capabilities.

One of those engineers is Allen Dahl, 42, who arrived at Point Mugu as a high school graduate in 1964 and literally grew up working on the computer software programs of the F-14, the Navy’s primary air-to-air combat plane.

Dahl, who now heads the computer software branch for the F-14D, an advanced version of the Tomcat just emerging from the development stage, is assembling the engineering team that will be responsible for the new plane during the next decade.

Sent by the Navy to the UC Davis for his engineering degree, Dahl says most of his education has come from on-the-job training. “Unfortunately, all you can get from college is an engineering degree,” he said. “You can’t get an education in weapons systems or warfare.”

Nicholson Painting

The father of six, Dahl keeps a daughter’s giant painting of actor Jack Nicholson in his office, where he and others will map war scenarios testing the more than 30 on-board computers on the newest Tomcat fighters.

With Nicholson looking demonically down from the wall during a recent interview, Dahl outlined some of the war games played by Point Mugu’s Electronic Warfare Directorate in the center’s high-tech Systems Integration Test Station, known as the SITS lab.

Already inside the lab are two test models of the original F-14A Tomcat, Dahl said. Construction is under way on an adjoining $50-million laboratory where additional F-14D models will be placed.

Hooked up to the most sophisticated electronic gear and military computers available, the planes can be made to perform inside the labs just as they would in actual flight conditions, Dahl said. The planes in the labs, in other words, are often made to think they are in actual combat.

“The most sophisticated stuff we do, where the rubber really meets the road, is associated with electronic counter-countermeasure testing,” Dahl said. “That would be where we have a jamming simulator and two or three attacking targets.”

Modifying Plane

The primary role of the F-14 is defense of Navy aircraft carriers in combat, Dahl said. About 500 F-14As are in use throughout the Navy, and about 300 of those will gradually be redesigned to meet F-14D configurations.

In one typical combat scenario anticipated by Pentagon planners, Soviet bombers flying outside the Tomcat’s range could turn on powerful jamming devices, allowing planes and missiles to be launched down the jamming path toward Navy ships, hoping to blind U.S. radar during the attack.

Confronted with such an attack, one option for the Tomcat would be to maneuver itself into a fresh angle on the attack area so its radar or other tracking sensors could lock in on enemy planes and missiles, enabling the F-14 to destroy as many targets as possible.

“In real combat, there could be dozens of planes and hundreds of targets coming in, including bombers, fighters and cruise missiles,” Dahl said. “In our jamming scenarios, we use very controlled tests. Maybe one bomber. The point is to study how the plane performs and pass that along to pilots.

“Nobody really wins most of these tests,” he added. “That’s where the glamour goes away. You don’t have an easy way of scoring.”

Constant Updates

Engineers at Point Mugu run electronic jamming tests on their F-14 models about twice a week, Dahl said. At the same time, they are constantly updating the computer data that go into the F-14. Near the end of every such update, a full-scale, multitarget combat scenario is played out.

“That’s the most glamorous stuff,” Dahl said. “You fire 20 closely spaced targets at the Tomcat and see if you can overload the computer, watch the computer degrade. In actual combat, under ideal circumstances, the Tomcat might take out six incoming missiles or planes. Others could take the rest.”

While Dahl’s work at the missile center represents a high-adventure, high-tech side of the Navy’s various research projects at Point Mugu--complete with theoretical dogfights and missile battles--there is another side to the weapons testing work that at times can be decidedly lackluster.

Not far from Dahl’s sophisticated lab, for example, is another building that houses Point Mugu’s Electromagnetic Systems Division. While the work that takes place there on ultraviolet rays, gamma rays and lasers is at least as sensitive and sophisticated as the programming of Navy jet fighters, the surroundings in some respects resemble little more than a military salvage yard.

Just behind the building is a fenced area holding what appears at first glance to be some abandoned Army tanks. In reality, they are four Sgt. York mobile air defense units, built for the Army in the early 1980s at a cost of $32 million each and then given away when the Sgt. York program was junked because of cost overruns and other problems.

Simulating Soviets

The Electromagnetic Systems Division was attracted to the Sgt. Yorks because they resemble Soviet antiaircraft weapons capable of shooting down Navy planes and they came with a stabilized optics package and laser equipment that could be used at Point Mugu.

Acquiring four of the Army’s 82 Sgt. Yorks two years ago for $5,000 each--the cost of moving them from Alabama--the Navy now uses them routinely at Point Mugu in training helicopter and fighter pilots during air-to-ground combat simulations and has made considerable highly classified use of the laser and optical equipment on board.

Unlike Dahl, who seemed happy at the chance to discuss the capacities of the F-14D in war games, the head of Point Mugu’s Electromagnetic Systems Division, Milton Olson, was reluctant to talk about the most important research programs now under way in his area of command,

“We do some work with lasers,” he said. “That’s all I can say.”

In addition to showing off the Sgt. York, however, Olson was willing to discuss another piece of military hardware recently developed by his engineers for use in training U.S. pilots to avoid being hit by heat-seeking missiles during combat.

Tracking Flares

In a workroom not far from the Sgt. Yorks, Olson pointed to a long, white tube faintly resembling an elongated water heater with a rotating top.

The giant pod, called the Airborne Turret Infrared Measurement System can be attached to airplanes. The system, the only one of its kind in the world, has become operational in only the last two weeks, Olson said.

Known as ATIMS III, it is used in testing one of the first and simplest of all U.S. aerial warfare countermeasures--the dropping of highly volatile chemical flares by jets to decoy heat-seeking enemy missiles.

Equipped with radiation devices and television cameras, the ATIMS III records the dropping of flares, which helps Navy engineers determine which flares are most effective and is useful in developing tactics that pilots can use when being chased by an enemy missile.

Standing beside his new ATIMS III, Olson made the point that--despite the super-sophisticated technology involved in much of the work at Point Mugu--some of the most important programs still come in relatively simple packages.

“In Vietnam, heat-seeking missiles were responsible for 90% of the kills on both sides,” Olson said. “They are a very formidable weapon. Flares have been one of the most important countermeasures. They may seem to be a pretty simple solution. But they are also very important.”