What John Allred couldn’t tell his father for 35 years
He still has his 1985 yearbook.
“I look like a complete dork,” he said, pointing at his picture.
In junior high, kids picked on him. At 14, he would have dropped out, but the law wouldn’t allow it.
“I wouldn’t want to go back to those days for anything,” he said.
Home wasn’t any better. His parents fought, and money was tight. He couldn’t decide which he hated more: school or home. So he turned inward and read.
His parents tried piano lessons to motivate him, but it didn’t work.
“I survived junior high,” he said. “Every step of the way after that was like a step up.”
In high school, the bullying had stopped, and his home life got better. But he cared about little besides TV shows like “T.J. Hooker” and “The A-Team.”
The TV only talked at him. Then for his 16th birthday, he got a machine that listened.
People called the Commodore 64 the breadbox because of its wide case.
With a programmer’s reference guide, he taught himself machine language, the lowest level of programming. He hung around the computer lab with the other geeks.
Allred used the breadbox until it broke.
“That was the first thing that totally changed me,” he said. “It was that computer.”
Four decades later, computers still have his attention.
On Sept.28 at Point Mugu, Allred received his 35-year Length-of-Service Award.
His 35 years run through three aircraft: the F-14 Tomcat, then the Navy’s jamming jets, the EA-6B Prowler and the EA-18G Growler.
He works in the Integrated Warfare Test and Evaluation Division. There he leads systems engineering for the Growler Block II upgrade and runs development projects for the Jammer Technique Optimization program.
These days, he talks most about what comes next: a way to load new jamming software onto a jet as easily as you download an app to a phone.
He wants each capability to reach the fleet in about a week instead of two years.
But long before he wrote software for Navy jets, he had to learn the math he’d missed in high school.
That meant Moorpark College, a community college down the road from home.
His father served four years as a Navy signalman during the Korean War. Later, he went to a two-year college and became an elementary school teacher.
“He was a worse student than I was,” Allred said.
His parents didn’t push him toward college.
“I pushed myself to do it,” he said.
He started with pre-algebra and worked his way up to calculus and physics. A few math classes took more than one try.
Allred earned a C in physics, then a B and finally A’s.
After three years at Moorpark, he transferred to California State University, Northridge. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.
In April 1991, during his senior year, the phone rang at home.
Allred picked up.
Robert Lerma from F-14 flight test was calling with a job offer at the Pacific Missile Test Center at Point Mugu.
Lerma started with the downsides. First, naval aviation might shrink. The Cold War was ending.
The second warning caught Allred’s attention.
“Unfortunately, we have to use these computers,” he recalled Lerma saying.
Allred remembers thinking, “Are you kidding? This is a whole new kind of computer.”
He took the job. Then a hiring freeze hit June 1 and lasted until the mid-1990s.
“I made it just before the door closed,” he said.
The test center became part of Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division in January 1992.
He thought he’d stay for six months or a year. Six months turned into almost a decade of F-14 flight test.
At first, he worked with radar data. Someone brought him tapes from the jets. He fed them into the VAX computer on his desk and dug through the data for the aircraft’s speed and every target it tracked.
In the mid-1990s, he helped test a new sensor for the F-14. From a lab on the ground, he could run it as if he were flying the jet. He knew every step by heart.
The Navy sent him to Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia to teach the squadrons how to use it.
One commander even wrote him a thank-you letter. The work and the thank-yous made him decide to stay.
Near the end of the decade, with the F-14 headed for retirement, he found a gap. The jet had trainers, but they didn’t cover the new sensor.
That kid who was OK with a C was writing C++.
With it he built a computer trainer that recreated the F-14 radar operator’s controls and displays. He taught a couple of fellow flight test engineers to help him program it. The trainer went to the fleet, where aircrews used it to learn the new system.
And then word got around.
In 2000, the phone rang again.
This time, it was the electronic warfare group.
“Hey, man, we heard about you,” they told him. “We’ve got this project over here called USQ-113.”
It was a communications jammer on the EA-6B Prowler. No one was paying a contractor to support it. Everyone else wanted well-funded work with a future.
Inside the lab, the whole system sat ready.
“Are you kidding me?” he recalled. “All the source code is here.”
Navy testers had found problems with the jammer. For a while, he kept the F-14 job and chased them part time. Alone in that lab, he fixed what the testers flagged and called them back.
Then 9/11 happened. Less than a month later, the war in Afghanistan began.
The Prowler jammed enemy air-defense radars to protect other aircraft. U.S. strikes took out those radars in two or three days.
“So what are all these Prowlers going to do?” he asked. “They don’t have a job.”
The enemy talked on walkie-talkies and phones. Now the Prowlers had a new job: find those signals and jam them.
“All of a sudden it became important,” he said.
The jammer had a flaw. When too many signals crowded the air, its software would restart. He fixed it before Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003.
Allred remembers a meeting months after Baghdad fell. People went around the room naming their projects. He named his.
Outside that room, the war had changed.
The weapon was a bomb buried beside a road and set off from a distance with a cellphone, a pager or the remote from a toy. In one 90-day stretch, insurgents launched more than 700 of those attacks. From the invasion through November 2004, blasts killed more Americans in Iraq than bullets did.
At the break, a Marine colonel walked up to him.
“I want to thank you for what you’re doing,” Allred recalled the colonel saying. “What you’re working on has helped save lives where I’d just been.”
By 2008, the Prowler was aging out. Allred moved to its replacement, the EA-18G Growler.
Its ALQ-227 Communication Countermeasures Set intercepts enemy radio signals. It also finds their direction and jams them.
He ran the lab tests and later led its development once the Navy took it over from the contractor.
For about 10 years, Growler crews flew the same radio-jamming mission. Some calls came from maintainers overseas with a jet in trouble at 2 a.m. their time. He walked them through it.
“It’s almost like I’m in the military, but I’m a civilian,” he said.
The warfighters are why he stays.
“I want to help these guys as much as possible,” he said. “And I feel good knowing that I was able to do that.”
He also tries to talk young engineers out of leaving for bigger paychecks in the private sector.
To make his case, he tells them about two high school friends who both studied aerospace engineering. One took a government job at Edwards Air Force Base and rode in the back seat of an F-16. The other drew little hinges. He did it all day at a big company for good pay, and he hated it.
“Look at all the things the government does,” he said. “They’ll let you move and work on other things. You want to learn new things? They’ll let you do that. That’s the best thing about working for the federal government.”
Some of those young engineers once sat in his classroom.
Before teaching at Moorpark, Allred went back as a student for a Windows programming class that taught him how to build the F-14 trainer. His teacher saw him helping the other students.
In 2001, on a whim, he called the college and asked if he could teach.
“You’d be perfect for it,” the teacher said.
He taught computer science at night until 2014.
Along the way, he steered his sharpest students toward NAWCWD. About a dozen of them now work for the command or its contractors, and some have a name for him.
“They call me The Professor,” he said, “but I was just an instructor.”
Back on base, parts for the Growler’s radio jammer were going out of production.
In 2021, his team took its replacement from start to flight test at China Lake in 90 days. It flew on his software. And the test brought NAWCWD $3 million for eight more units.
Today, he helps develop new electronic attack capabilities for the Growler and other Department of War platforms.
“I love working here,” he said.
Allred closed the yearbook. He had one more thing to show.
“That’s the ship my father served on in the Korean War,” he said, pointing to a photo.
His father died earlier this year. Much of Allred’s work was classified, so he could never tell his father the details.
“I think he’d be proud,” he said.
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