Photo By Ryan Smith | Rear Adm. Keith Hash, commander, Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, presents a...... read more read more
Ridgecrest, California, April 1968.
The Hideaway grilled ribeyes while longnecks sweated in the desert heat. DJ's filled in after dark, boots scuffing the floorboards. The place had country western history. Before the hits, Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens played there. Across town, the China Lake Tavern ran poker games deep into the desert night.
Dr. Gary Hewer arrived from Washington State University in Pullman. The 26-year-old mathematician from Letcher, South Dakota, drove past the bars and into the desert, stepping through the gates of the Naval Ordnance Test Station.
Banks wouldn't touch Ridgecrest with a loan application then. So Hewer moved into base housing. The base provided everything: a grocery store, a gas station and a theater.
"I got to know a lot of people. I enjoyed the community," Hewer said. "I very seldom ever ventured out into Ridgecrest."
Home was where the missiles were. Each morning he walked across the base to work. No traffic, no radio.
It was here Hewer would show up every Monday for nearly 3,000 weeks.
A flag-raising ceremony Sept. 25 at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake honored Hewer's 57 years of federal service.
His last official day will be Oct. 1.
"I didn't expect to spend that many years here in China Lake," Hewer said. "I enjoyed interacting with many smart engineers, mathematicians and other professionals."
As the Naval Air Systems Command senior scientist for image and signal processing, Hewer leaves a deep body of published research, much of it transitioned to Navy applications.
From farm to formulas
Hewer grew up raising hogs, corn and oats with his family in South Dakota.
"I spent a lot of time with my grandpa working on the farm, but I didn't want to stay in farming," Hewer said.
He followed his father to Yankton College, then earned a master's and Ph.D. in mathematics at Washington State University. A fellow WSU graduate student, Lee Lucas, opened the door to China Lake.
Lucas had spent a summer with geophysicist Pierre Saint-Amand at "Pierre's Palace" on the range, where China Lake's weather-modification and cloud-seeding research flourished.
Lucas told Hewer about the challenging problems he worked on at China Lake and the freedom he had to choose how to approach them.
Even the father of the Sidewinder missile picked up the phone and called the grad student in Pullman.
"Dr. William McLean was the one who called me and talked to me, if you can imagine him taking time to call up somebody at Washington State," Hewer said.
That intellectual freedom, combined with McLean's personal call, brought Hewer to Ridgecrest.
First significant research
Three years into his Research Department tenure, Hewer published "An Iterative Technique for the Computation of the Steady-State Gains for the Discrete Optimal Regulator."
"This paper addressed how to solve the fundamental equation for Kalman filtering and optimal control and has garnered over 400 citations," Hewer said.
Kalman filtering is a mathematical method that had the potential to help missiles track targets. The mathematics helped missiles distinguish real targets from noise, improving accuracy in combat.
"I realized that the application of Kalman filtering, correctly computing the steady-state gains, could make a difference and should be done as well as they could be before they were used in missile guidance systems," Hewer said.
That 1971 paper still travels: a University of California, Santa Barbara, chemical engineering master's thesis cited it 54 years later.
Proof that good math doesn't retire.
In 1974, Hewer moved to the Weapons Department under Bill Porter.
He supported the Agile missile in its early development and vetted contractor Kalman-based radar-tracking algorithms for the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile to reduce miss distance.
The Office of Naval Research recognized his expertise, making him interim scientific officer for applied analysis in its Mathematics Division in 1986-87.
In 1987, he received the Naval Weapons Center Technical Director Award for his groundbreaking work in control theory.
From wavelets to evidence
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was falling. And so did the walls between analog and digital. Shoulder-mounted video cameras spread. And with them came a new question: What could better math do with video imagery?
Hewer and colleagues Larry Peterson, Wei Kuo and Albert Oglaza took up the challenge.
The team mounted a video camera beneath a helicopter and collected imagery from the Los Angeles Basin to Santa Barbara. Using wavelets and partial differential equation methods, they denoised images, registered objects and geo-registered frames to fix locations.
Hewer and his team had been working with Cognitech Inc., a company that specialized in forensic video analysis and image enhancement for law enforcement.
During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a group pulled Reginald Denny, a truck driver, from his vehicle and beat him. News helicopters recorded the event, but the footage was blurry and shaky. One of his attackers later said he wasn't there.
His arm told a different story.
Cognitech applied the mathematical enhancement techniques to the image: frame by frame, pixel by pixel, they processed the blur until a distinctive tattoo emerged on the suspect's arm. It matched the suspect's tattoo perfectly.
The math helped secure a conviction.
The software suite combining the China Lake and Cognitech work soon reached the Pentagon.
"It wasn't just me, but I had a lot to do with both writing the proposals and also directing the projects," Hewer said. "But I had a great team that saw my vision and helped me."
Bosnia and the cockpit problem
Between 1992 and 1995, the Bosnian conflict changed what aircrews needed in the cockpit.
Pilots enforcing no-fly zones and providing close air support needed better cockpit displays. The old analog dials couldn't handle the information overload.
"We had a program here called Imagery in the Cockpit, developed by Frank Armogida and his team," Hewer said.
They discovered pilots training for combat missions kept getting lost. Desert canyons all looked identical. Pilots would fly down the wrong canyon and miss their targets.
The team took it to Naval Air Station Fallon for testing.
Imagery in the Cockpit enhanced pilot capabilities in fundamental ways. The program gave pilots visual information to navigate terrain and find targets.
"It was that kind of activity that got us interested in image processing and saw what its use could be," Hewer said.
His continuing innovations earned him recognition: the Michelson Laboratory Award in 1994 for his work on wavelet research; the Navy Meritorious Civilian Award in 1998; and the L.T.E. Thompson Award in 2000 for image processing achievements. He became a Naval Air Systems Command fellow in 2002 for signal and image processing.
Each award recognized different facets of work that kept evolving, kept solving new problems.
Research and autonomy
He returned to the Research Department in 2004 as a senior scientist and kept innovating.
In 2010, he and Dr. Katia Estabridis co-founded the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division Autonomy Research Team. Today Estabridis is the principal investigator, and Hewer continues as mentor and researcher.
"We assist in the development of multi-vehicle trajectory planning and collision avoidance algorithms. Autonomy is a complex and multidisciplinary area of research that has since become a strategic focus area for the Department of Defense," Hewer said.
Their technology let drones coordinate without human control, avoid collisions and swarm targets.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competitions at Yuma proved the concept. Four vehicles launched from different coordinates and reached one target at the same time. They succeeded five nights straight, exceeding expectations.
Today, the way Ukraine uses drones highlights their importance.
In recent years, NAWCWD bestowed its highest recognition: Esteemed Fellow.
The research multiplier
Over 57 years, Hewer mentored more than 100 scientists and engineers, published nearly 100 technical papers and presented at conferences worldwide.
"The biggest breakthrough is actually the ability to take different new ideas in applied mathematics, especially those from universities, and then combine those together and apply them to given problems," Hewer said.
Hewer partnered with several universities, including UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Duke, USC, UC Berkeley, Brown and Auburn.
"I have appreciated the freedom that I've had here. The support from the management. And the people I've been able to work with," Hewer said.
The morning after
Oct. 2 brings his first morning of retirement.
"Well, I'm going to do my usual thing. Get up at five in the morning. Have coffee with my wife. And go for a walk in the desert, which we do for a mile every morning. And then read some technical papers and enjoy myself," Hewer said.
The routine remains unchanged.
| Date Taken: | 09.29.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 09.29.2025 15:00 |
| Story ID: | 549597 |
| Location: | POINT MUGU, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Hometown: | LETCHER, SOUTH DAKOTA, US |
| Web Views: | 238 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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