WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, NM –
Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division (NSWC PHD)’s White Sands Detachment (WSD) launches simulated threats at U.S. Navy ships before adversaries can fire the real thing at them.
The New Mexico-based detachment, which marks its 80th anniversary this year, has for decades been designing and launching new variations of its targets that mimic the latest real-world missiles to ensure that warships are equipped to defend against them.
“We come up with low-cost, threat-representative targets that we can put in front of the fleet to trigger their combat systems,” said Troy Gammill, chief engineer for WSD.
The detachment has produced more than 100 targets since the early 2000s to test an array of capabilities.
The targets started as simple one-stage, unguided rockets but have evolved with features such as multiple stages to increase range and guidance systems for more precise flights. In recent years, the detachment has homed in on developing hypersonic targets to keep pace with adversaries’ advances in hypersonic weapons.
“That’s where the testing requirements are headed, and many resources are already there,” Aaron Cowman, suborbital vehicles division manager, said of hypersonics.
Through the decades, WSD has built a reputation for quickly delivering affordable targets that meet customers’ requirements, according to Mark Perea, branch manager for suborbital vehicle test officers.
“That’s why people come to us,” he said.
Representing threats
WSD’s suborbital vehicles program draws its lineage from the V-2 rocket experiments that brought the Navy to White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in southern New Mexico in 1946, just after World War II.
The Navy detachment at WSMR started facilitating research-oriented sounding rocket launches for NASA in the 1960s. That experience eventually sparked the idea to employ similar rocket vehicles as targets for naval Test and Evaluation (T&E).
John Winstead, a longtime WSD engineer, former site director and now technical adviser, led a team that developed a solid-fuel rocket target called the Aegis Readiness Assessment Vehicle, or ARAV, in 2005.
“When we first started doing ARAV targets, we borrowed heavily from the NASA sounding rocket approach, processes and procedures,” Gammill explained.
The ARAVs and other targets that WSD has conceived — such as the Integrated Air and Missile Defense-Terminal (IAMD-T) — emulate adversaries’ weapons to test the combat systems of U.S. and allied ships in a realistic environment, before they encounter the actual threats.
Initially, the ARAVs only assessed combat systems’ ability to detect and track the targets, but not intercept them. That changed in 2006 when the Navy’s Operational Test and Evaluation Force, known as OPTEVFOR, certified that the ARAV-A met operational test (OT) requirements. The ARAV-B attained the same status the following year. This meant that Sailors operating combat systems on ships could get credit for shooting down ARAVs during T&E events.
“OPTEVFOR said this is an OT-representative target — hitting it counts toward OT T&E certification,” Gammill said. “That was huge.”
In the ensuing years, WSD has developed other variations of its targets with different motor combinations and capabilities, such as the ARAV-C, the ARAV Terrier-Terrier-Oriole and the Single Stage Orion.
The detachment also upped the realism of test events by launching multiple targets within minutes or even seconds of each other. These stream raids, as they are called, better prepare the fleet for what it may face in the real world, according to Gammill.
“That’s critical for our ship combat system development,” he said. “These targets have made a really big impact on where Aegis is.”
Gammill added that launching multiple targets, often for multiple test events per year, would be much less feasible if it weren’t for WSD’s focus on affordability.
Low-cost launches
WSD keeps its targets affordable in large part by repurposing military surplus rocket motors, such as the Terrier, Talos and Lynx.
The detachment obtains decommissioned rocket motors essentially for free, other than paying for shipping, storage and maintenance, Cowman explained.
“That represents a considerable cost benefit by not having to go with some very high-priced commercially developed rocket motor,” he said.
For comparison, the average price of WSD’s suborbital vehicles is less than a quarter of the price of a comparable commercial version.
Another key factor in keeping costs down is using common components in different combinations of motor stacks. Those components include rockets’ aviation electronics — known as avionics — and telemetry systems that collect flight data.
“We don’t reinvent all the avionics that go inside it — that could be very expensive,” Gammill said.
Even while mitigating costs, WSD has maintained a high success rate: 96% of its launches, including targets, sounding rockets and hypersonic experiments, have successfully taken off, flown their intended trajectory and met their major mission requirements.
This consistency reflects a structured and pragmatic approach to launches that is rooted in decades of working on NASA research rockets, according to Cowman.
“We have a thorough process for development and testing — thorough but also agile,” he said. “We work with sponsors to help them develop requirements that are meaningful, feasible and cost effective, all the way back to the conception of the event.”
Broad range
WSD supplies not only targets, but also the infrastructure to launch them.
“We have a wide variation of launchers, both permanent and mobile, that can range from launching small single-stage rockets to our largest, which can support a 100,000-pound vehicle,” Cowman said.
WSD’s permanent launchers are stationed at test sites around the world, including WSMR, Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands in Hawaii and the Hebrides Range in Scotland.
The detachment worked for three years to stand up the Hebrides launch site, setting the stage for groundbreaking tests for the U.S. military and NATO allies in the biennial Formidable Shield exercises, according to Gammill.
“There had never been a ballistic missile intercept over in the European theater prior to Formidable Shield,” he said.
In the latest edition of the exercise, in 2025, WSD personnel launched five targets, including IAMD-Ts, an ARAV-B simulating a medium-range ballistic missile and a supersonic sea-skimming GQM-163 Coyote.
Pacific Dragon, held around Hawaii, is another biennial fleet exercise that relies on WSD’s targets expertise.
The 2022 edition of Pacific Dragon was the first to tap the IAMD-T, designed to trigger and engage terminal ship defense systems. In the 2024 exercise, an updated IAMD-T demonstrated its guidance capability and carried a qualified flight termination system — which enables range control to disable the vehicle remotely.
WSD’s plans for Pacific Dragon 2026 in August include launching two ARAV variants and one IAMD-T.
Cowman said the guidance capability of the IAMD-T, which is still in the development phase, brings the benefit of minimizing impact dispersion — in other words, decreasing the area in which the target could land — which allows for more intimate test events for the fleet.
“It tightens the dispersion considerably so that participating ships and their sea-based sensors can be much closer to that area of interest,” Cowman explained.
On that front, WSD is also working on a fully guided version of the ARAV. The ARAV-G, as it is called, uses the Thrust Vector Control (TVC)-equipped Oriole GEM-22 rocket motor that the detachment developed with the Missile Defense Agency around 2017 to 2018.
The TVC system changes the Oriole nozzle orientation to direct thrust where needed, providing direct control of the flight path angle and drastically minimizing down-range and cross-range dispersions, Cowman explained.
“That in turn enables much higher positional accuracy for presentation to a system under test,” he said.