Push For New Weapons Transforms China Lake
Aviation Week's DTI | David A. Fulghum | September 24, 2009
This article first appeared in Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.
CHINA LAKE, Calif. -- The need for non-kinetic, more-kinetic, directed energy and electronic weapons is changing the complexion of research at the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center here.
"We have an interconnected battlespace for electronic warfare, high-power microwave and kinetic weapons as well as an electronic combat for airborne electronic attack," says U.S. Navy Capt. Mark Storch, acting commander of the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. "From the high desert to offshore [Pacific Ocean] islands, we have outdoor ranges that represent anyplace we might want to fight. [Moreover,] we're scaling up facilities and adding more and more nodes [both real and synthetic] to the system."
"The terrain of high mountains and deep valleys is to our advantage," says Matt Boggs, chief engineer of the land ranges, range control facility and inner ranges.
For example, Etcheron Valley, fabled as the site of classified stealth development in past decades and electronic attack and directed energy projects today, is protected from electronic encroachment by ridges up to 7,000 feet high. Another nearby range offers cool mountains and forest at one end and desert heat and dry lake beds at the other.
"The valley floor has our weapons ranges. G range is for air-to-surface, air-to-air and ground-launch weapons," Boggs says. "C range was abandoned after the Vietnam War but is now in use for [unmanned aerial vehicles] and short-range weapons. B range is an iron-bomb range with a rebuilt [high-speed] sled track."
The ranges are linked by hundreds of miles of blacktop roads, high-bandwidth communications and high-speed cameras. They are often involved with a variety of remotely controlled moving targets.
The country's largest aircraft turntable, built for the Navy's A-12 program, is part of a radar cross-section (RCS) range that has been turned to systems engineering and directed energy testing of high-power microwave, laser and GPS jamming devices. The rising land helps contain and control the effects of electromagnetic tests.
A GPS anti-jamming facility for radiation pattern measurements and a 10,000-pound turntable helps capture the effects of large vehicles on antenna patterns. The turntable can be changed in vertical aspect from 35 degrees above the horizontal to 5 degrees below to solve antenna integration problems.
Photo: Credit: US Navy
