Photo By Robert Peterson | Dennis Ramsey (holding the award), Electronic Technician and manager of the Targets...... read more read more
Dennis Ramsey's government career started at rock bottom.
In October 1974, Ramsey was promoted to GS-1, but he didn't know it.
"I didn't realize until many years later, when I reviewed my SF-50s, that I had received a promotion to GS-1," Ramsey said. "I have an SF-50 that shows my first promotion was to a GS-1 within those 3.5 months, which is probably not something many people can say."
That same teenager received his 50-year length-of-service award at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division at Point Mugu on June 18.
Ramsey learned as a baseball catcher to see the big picture. His 50-year career taught him even more. The best solutions come from small, close-knit teams that ask, "How can we?" instead of "Why can't we?" But first, he had to drop a bomb on his parents.
The Day Dennis Shocked His Parents
On Oct. 28, 1974, Ramsey came home with news his parents weren't ready to hear. He had spoken with a recruiter and visited the Los Angeles Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station.
"My parents didn't know," Ramsey recalled. "I asked to go home and tell my parents first."
They had less than 12 hours to process their son's decision. At 4 a.m., when headlights swept across the driveway, they watched their teenage son disappear into the dark. He carried nothing but a small duffel bag and a promise to write.
"That was my first taste of the Army," Ramsey said. "I was on a bus going to Fort Ord that same day."
Fort Ord was his first stop on a 50-year journey in electronics. After basic training and Advanced Individual Training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the Army sent him to Italy with the Southern European Task Force. There, he worked on ground-to-ground missile systems as an electronic technician.
But his electronics foundation started at home.
Kitchen Table Electronics
"One of the things that really got me interested in electronics was helping my father," Ramsey said. "My dad liked to build Heathkit systems."
These weren't toys. They were tomorrow's missile guidance systems, built on kitchen tables. Heathkit sold build-it-yourself electronic equipment — oscilloscopes, radios and other components that consumers assembled themselves.
"When I saw how things worked, I developed my interest in getting into electronics," Ramsey said. "We built a radio, which I had in my bedroom, allowing me to tinker with it."
His father, Ron Ramsey, worked at Point Mugu as an electronic engineer for Targets from 1967 until the early 1980s.
When he graduated high school in 1974, he landed in Point Mugu's Youth Opportunity Program in the safety department.
He found the warehouse in chaos.
"I spent the first month organizing it by national stock number," Ramsey said.
That promotion to GS-1? It came through in October 1974. But by then, he was already at Fort Ord.
From Sparrow to AMRAAM
After his Army service, Ramsey worked at Delta Microwave before discovering the Veterans Readjustment Act.
He put together his resume, contacted someone on base and interviewed. The Pacific Missile Test Center hired him in August 1978 as a GS-5 electronic technician to work with the Sparrow missile group.
"I supported the production, test and evaluation of the Sparrow missile system, including the second-source effort," Ramsey said.
The work on Sparrow meant ironing out technical problems and picking up steam as missile technology evolved from vacuum tubes to solid-state electronics to microprocessors. Ramsey learned with each iteration. He understood how the Navy's air-to-air missile systems worked at the component level.
In 1984, he transferred to what became the Airborne Instrumentation Division. He designed automated telemetry test systems and portable equipment for environmental testing. When the AMRAAM program needed someone to manage the AN/DKT-74 Warhead Compatible Telemetry System, Ramsey took the position.
"That's really where I learned the value of a small, cohesive team," Ramsey said of working with an engineer mentor.
What Ramsey didn't say: Those late nights in the lab, watching his mentor work through impossible problems, taught him something. The best solutions come from people who refuse to accept 'no' as an answer.
Dennis's Team Beat a $100 Million Company
Between 1996 and 1999, Ramsey led his career-defining project: the Goldenbird Captive Carry Missile Program for the Air Force.
The Air Force and Navy needed to test missiles without launching them. Goldenbird converted live missiles into flying test instruments that remained attached to the wings of aircraft, mimicking the behavior of launched missiles.
"We had to disassemble the seeker to obtain the data points we wanted to monitor for our telemetry system," Ramsey said. "In essence, it was a missile that you could actually launch. The missile thought it was launched."
The challenge: convince a missile it was flying while hanging motionless from a wing.
Two aircraft worked in coordination, one carrying the missile, the other providing radar illumination. The missile performed all its normal calculations while transmitting performance data to engineers on the ground. Both the Navy and Air Force needed to prove their systems could stop this threat.
A colleague told Ramsey another company built a similar system. It had taken them five years and $100 million.
"We did it in 18 months with a couple of million dollars," Ramsey said. The Power of 5
Ask Ramsey what he's most proud of across five decades, and he'll tell you about people.
"I knew even as a kid playing baseball that I was a catcher, so I could see the big picture," Ramsey said. "But learning how powerful a small, cohesive team can be was different."
He built a core team of five people who stayed together for more than 30 years.
"We were a team from the early '90s. Of the core five people, two are retired and another one is retiring later this year," Ramsey said. "That leaves two of the original team members, but we added five new team members."
The new additions bring the same drive and dedication that have continued the team's success in designing and fielding systems in support of test and evaluation of Department of Defense systems.
Working with Johns Hopkins, Georgia Tech and MIT Lincoln Labs, they acquire experimental hardware from these institutions and integrate it into target drones for testing.
"We can do it in months, not years," Ramsey said.
In 2017, the entire Target Prototype Team moved to the Target Systems Division, though they had been supporting targets since 2004.
September 2021: Dennis Returns to Sparrow
The Navy needed more supersonic targets. Someone suggested converting obsolete Sparrow missiles, the same system Ramsey had worked on in 1978, where he had learned the fundamentals as a young technician.
"The intent was to fly them and then launch them off a BQM-34," Ramsey said. "We launched it from a BQM-34, but we did it from the ground to verify that we could launch it."
The missile flew its scripted arc before plunging into the Pacific — proof that surplus AIM-7s could serve as supersonic targets.
"The full circle was going back to the system I had worked on at the beginning of my career here and integrating it with a target," Ramsey said.
The Future and Why He Stays
Today, Ramsey and his team work on projects including Chainsaw.
Chainsaw is NAWCWD's flying test lab for new rocket fuel technology. The program tests experimental jet propulsion systems to provide Navy weapons with longer range and increased power.
Ramsey also studies artificial intelligence and its applications to weapons testing. He recently watched two drones with AI autopilots launch from a runway. The first drone unexpectedly circled back to let the second catch up so they could fly in formation.
"That wasn't programmed. The drone just figured out that's what it needed to do," Ramsey said. "Which was pretty amazing."
After 50 years, why does he still come to work?
"This is where I want to be. This is what I want to do at this point in my life," Ramsey said. "The reason I really come in is that I love what I do, and I enjoy the people I work with."
His advice to younger engineers echoes what he learned organizing that safety warehouse in 1974:
"Look at how you can solve a problem, not how you can't do it."
| Date Taken: | 07.09.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 07.09.2025 14:44 |
| Story ID: | 542336 |
| Location: | POINT MUGU NAWC, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Hometown: | CAMARILLO, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 107 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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