Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division

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Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division

Official NAWCWD page. NAWCWD represents excellence in weapons RDAT&E Welcome to the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division page.

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08/28/2026

"Physics doesn't change. Things will do what things do."

Paul Fonua learned early that the hardest part of weapons testing was communication and trust, not the science.

This week he received his 35-year Length-of-Service Award at Point Mugu. Across 12 assignments, one habit never changed.

Fonua uses one Hawaiian word to explain why.

⬇️ Full story in first comment

08/27/2026

The first LRASM ever to fly found a moving ship and punched a hole in it.

in 2013, a B-1B released the Navy's new Long Range Anti-Ship Missile over the Point Mugu Sea Range. Halfway out, the missile switched to its own brain. A China Lake F/A-18 from VX-31 chased it down the range, recording everything. The missile found a 260-foot ship underway and hit it with an inert warhead.

4 years later, same range: LRASM picked its target out of a group of ships and hit it. NAVAIR called it the missile's first end-to-end test.

Today LRASM arms Navy Super Hornets and Air Force B-1s. The fleet's smartest weapons learn to hunt over our water before they reach the warfighter's hands.

08/26/2026

Rocket propellant starts in a mixer bowl.

At China Lake, the bowl holds 150 gallons, and the next one up holds 300.

Nobody had to explain that to Dan Pines. He leads munitions industrial base work for the Navy's top acquisition office and came up through the Navy's energetics lab at Indian Head, Maryland.

Last week, he visited ours.

Pines and others walked the floors where they line warhead cases and refurbish Sidewinders. The next day at Point Mugu, the Ready Missile Test Facility team showed him what happens to a missile before it reaches a magazine.

Indian Head and China Lake are both Navy energetics labs, one on each coast.

And China Lake has been making its own rocket propellant since 1944.

08/21/2026

The world’s most widely used air-to-air missile missed its target on its first 12 test shots.

in 1952, future astronaut Wally Schirra fired a Sidewinder over China Lake with its guidance system live for the first time. A growl in his earphones told him the missile had detected the target’s heat. Then it veered left and missed.

He kept firing, “totally convinced that the program wouldn’t exist if I left [China Lake].”

After a year of hand-built fixes, shot 13 passed close enough to kill on Sept. 11, 1953. They called it a success.

More than 110,000 Sidewinders followed.

Schirra became the only astronaut to fly in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

Here at NAWCWD, you fire, learn and fire again until the missile is ready for the warfighter’s hands.

08/20/2026

Nov. 16, 2013, a target heads toward a guided-missile cruiser off Point Mugu.

In the control room, the numbers look normal and the voices stay steady. Nobody knows control has already slipped to another console.

The target tears a hole in USS Chancellorsville (CG 62) and injures two Sailors.

One man served on the mishap investigation. What he built next changed how every naval aerial target operator qualifies.

It starts with a recording. It ends with four words over the radio that no one wants to hear again.

⬇️ Full story in first comment

08/19/2026

It took him 7 years to build his own house from the ground up.

Walter King built his career the same way. He walked into Michelson Lab as a senior at Burroughs High School. From there, he wrote tactical flight software for the F/A-18, tested systems on the Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler, and led test and evaluation on the AARGM program.

40 years later, he's still at China Lake, still building, still delivering lethality to the warfighter.

⬇️ Full story in first comment

08/11/2026

A high school student helped build a warhead.

Ron Schiller cut the parts as a machinist at China Lake's Salt Wells Machine Shop in 1990.

Then he watched it go through a live test in the desert.

"From that moment, I was hooked," Schiller said.

He spent the next 27 years at the Weapons Survivability Laboratory. His team built METS. Its high-pressure gas gun fires a real, modified shoulder-launched missile into a test aircraft. With the engine running, air rushes over it as if it were flying.

That work put protection between aircrews and the weapons hunting them.

35 years in, he still has more to give.

Today, he's paying the command's early investment forward by mentoring the engineers coming up behind him.

⬇️ Full story in the first comment.

08/07/2026

The Navy named its top scientists and engineers at the Pentagon. 3 of our people brought the hardware home to NAWCWD

Joshua Williams, Dr. Mason Paulec and Alejandro Valle earned 2026 Etter Awards for work that keeps the fleet's radars honest, its aircrews alive and its missiles ready.

⬇️ Full story in first comment.

08/05/2026

He turned wrenches on jets. But his eyes always went to the helicopter.

It flew a slow circle off the ship while the crew stayed aboard. Down on the deck, a young mechanic from a mountain town watched it go.

Durango, Colorado. The river. The peaks. The whole world somewhere else.

Bob Burrows got out after his first contract. In 1989, he went back in and climbed into the back of a Navy helicopter. He stayed there 14 years. Today, he leads the NAWCWD team behind a signals intelligence sensor that rides on small unmanned aircraft.

It supports fleet users worldwide.

⬇️ Full story in first comment

08/03/2026

The E-2D Advanced Hawkeye is how the fleet sees the fight coming.

, in 2007, Delta One, the first E-2D, flew for 1.3 hours from St. Augustine, Florida.

A first flight proves an aircraft can fly. It doesn't prove a fleet can trust it.

That proof came over the Point Mugu Sea Range.

In 2016, USS Princeton shot down a target its own radar couldn't see. The target was beyond the horizon. But eyes in the sky found it, fed the ship the track, and an SM-6 did the rest. That's the E-2D's job in the kill chain: fly high, see far, and point the fleet at targets no ship can find alone. NAVSEA called it the Navy's longest-range anti-air intercept.

Today, West Coast Hawkeyes fly from Point Mugu. VX-30 tests E-2D integration with aircraft, ships and weapons.

19 years later: test the system. Prove the kill chain. Put a proven Hawkeye in the warfighter's hands.

Address

1 Admin Circle
China Lake, CA
93555

Telephone

+17609393511

Website

http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcwd

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