Garcia speeds the Navy's electronic warfare fight

A framed napkin hangs in Michael Garcia's office.

He sketched on it years ago while helping build a new Navy lab as one of the youngest engineers in his branch. The napkin showed a phased-array wall for a hardware-in-the-loop facility, a lab that could test missiles against simulated threats.

Garcia kept the napkin. It still marks the way he works.

He studies the problem, breaks it into smaller parts, finds the people who know what he does not and starts building.

That method has carried Garcia through 40 years of federal service at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. His work has touched missile testing, Marine Corps electronic warfare support, the EA-18G Growler and advanced systems tied to the Navy's future fight.

Garcia's career started in the mid-1980s, when the Navy recruited him from the University of Texas at San Antonio. He was 22 and had never taken a commercial flight before. He landed at Los Angeles International Airport at night, picked up his first rental car and drove north with a paper map.

The city lights gave way to farmland. The road narrowed. Garcia wondered where he was going.
He had planned to stay a year or two.

Four decades later, he is still here.

Garcia started college studying architecture, where he learned to think in structure, space and shape, then moved to electrical engineering after finding he liked the logic of electronics. That mix never left him. The engineer still thinks like a designer.

When Garcia arrived at Point Mugu, he knew little about Navy weapons or flight test. Layton Griffith, one of his early mentors, helped him find his footing inside a small test team.

Garcia still carries one of Griffith's early lessons: do not try to solve the whole problem at once.

"You do not have to eat the elephant at one time," Garcia said. "Make your problems simple and just start solving the simple problems and work through it."

His first job put him in missile test and evaluation. The Navy was flying F-14 Tomcats and testing air-to-air weapons over the Pacific. Garcia worked on the Sparrow family of missiles at a time when newer weapons drew more attention and funding.

That taught him discipline.

With limited money, the team had to pull maximum value from every test event. The work tied engineers directly to the fleet. Pilots, flight officers, test teams and analysts worked toward one goal: give aircrews weapons they could trust.

The tools looked nothing like today's digital test systems.

Garcia analyzed data from a room-sized analog computer filled with relays, patch panels and cables. Missile telemetry came back as paper strip charts. To most people, the lines looked like noise. To trained analysts, they told a story: how the missile moved, how it tracked, how close it came and whether a countermeasure fooled it.

The fleet still depended on the Sparrow. Its replacement was years away.

Garcia remembers early mornings on the range, live missiles over the Pacific, aircraft engines running and the smell of jet fuel in the air. The work pulled him in fast.

"I remember whistling to work," Garcia said.

Griffith noticed. When the Navy set out to build a new hardware-in-the-loop lab for the Sparrow and Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile families, he chose Garcia to help lead the design. Garcia sketched the concept on the napkin.

The lab became one of his proudest achievements. It let the Navy test missile performance against simulated threats without relying only on live-fire events. Garcia said the lab later ran about 1 million simulations a year.

That effort pushed Garcia deeper into modeling and simulation, work that grew more critical as threats became faster, smarter and harder to copy in live tests.

His next major step moved him from missiles to Marine Corps electronic warfare.

Garcia led systems engineering work for transportable shelters used by Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler squadrons. His team delivered four mobile electronic warfare suites that could move with the unit. The work introduced him to electronic intelligence: where enemy radars were, what they could do and what aircrews needed before they flew into danger.

The data helped Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force aircrews plan real missions. That connection shaped Garcia's view of government service.

He carried that mindset into the airborne electronic attack community, following the mission from the Prowler to the EA-18G Growler. His work helped build test methods, data tools and digital environments used to evaluate electronic warfare systems before they reached the fleet.

Garcia later moved into science and technology work with the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. That assignment opened a new question: could machines sense a threat, understand it and react faster than a human-led process allowed?

The Navy called that idea cognitive electronic warfare.

Garcia has spent about 15 years chasing it.

One of his early projects showed unmanned aircraft could share information, coordinate and respond to threats with less direct human input. For Garcia, it proved the idea had a future.

Today, that future sits much closer to the fight.

Garcia now supports advanced airborne electronic attack systems and the Navy's next-generation carrier-based aircraft. The focus has changed from analog traces on paper to software that can help machines make better decisions at combat speed.

"If you're flying an unmanned system, we don't want to fly it with a stick anymore," Garcia said. "We want to give it a general command and let it think."

Steven Yim, Garcia's supervisor, said Garcia's defining contribution is "transitioning AI-driven Cognitive EW and Autonomous Manned-Unmanned Teaming from concept to tactical reality."

The electromagnetic spectrum is a battlefield. Radar, jamming, sensing and software can decide whether aircrews reach the target or turn back. Garcia gives the Navy more speed in that fight.

Many of the people Garcia started with have retired. He is the last of his cohort still on the job. Younger engineers now stop by his office to ask questions, test ideas or find the right person to call.

Garcia tells them to stay curious. Build a network. Ask questions. Break the hard problem into smaller ones.
John Koch, who leads a NAWCWD Integrated Product Team, started his career in 2008 working directly for Garcia. Nearly two decades later, Koch still sees Garcia as the team's steadying force.

"In environments of instability or uncertainty, his presence brings a profound level of trust and confidence," Koch said.

That may explain why Garcia stayed.

He could have retired and returned as a contractor. He knew he could likely make more money outside government. He chose to stay because he wanted to represent the government and protect the fleet's needs from inside the room.

"This is my form of giving back to my country," Garcia said.

Forty years later, the napkin still hangs in his office. It marks more than a lab design. It marks a way of serving: simple sketch, hard problem, mission first.

Colleagues still ask when he will retire.

"When the journey stops, I will retire," Garcia said.

So far, the journey has not stopped.