KEKAHA, Kaua'i — "The work we do here is vitally important to the nation," Navy Capt. Aaron Cudnohufsky said of the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua'i's western shore.

"We do a lot with a little," Cudnohufsky said during a recent interview preceding planned tests of ship-based anti-ballistic missiles tomorrow and land-based missile defenses later this month.

As facility commander, Cudnohufsky oversees 65 Navy enlisted personnel and 120 civilian workers and coordinates with up to 650 contractor employees who also work at the facility.

"The people we have are some of the best in the world in telemetry, radar and optics," Cudnohufsky said of the support personnel who measure what happens during a missile test.

But missile tests, although the most visible aspect, aren't the only missions for folks at the Pacific Missile Range Facility.

For anti-ballistic missile testing, the facility clears up to a 2 million-square-mile area of the Pacific Ocean of nonparticipating aircraft or boat traffic for several hours per test, range spokesman Tom Clements said.

But other missions at the facility can go unnoticed. Submarine commander training happens in a 1,100-square-mile instrumented underwater range. Clements equates that three-week course with taking a driver's test.

About half of the work at the facility is training and about half is testing of developing weapons systems, he said.

Last year there were 320 days of training or testing going on at the facility as part of 41 different operations. Though the number of operations is down from 52 in 2005, the days of use is up from 307, Clements said.

Payroll for government and contractor employees at the range total about $135 million a year, Clements said. But each time there's a major test, hundreds of additional military and contract workers come in for a few days to a few weeks, at an economic impact to Kaua'i of up to $20 million per event and raising the range's annual economic impact on the Garden Island to about $160 million, he said.

Clements and Chris Taylor, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, both use football metaphors to describe what the range does.

"We're like the stadium," Clements said. And varying teams — be they Army, Navy or military contractors — rent out the facility and use its highly trained workers to accomplish their training or testing goals.

Clements describes the radar, telemetry and optics equipment as providing an "instant replay" of what happens in a missile test.

Taylor describes a strike on an enemy ballistic missile in its boost phase as like getting to the ball carrier on the line of scrimmage. Hitting the missile in its midcourse flight "is like using the linebackers," and stopping it in its terminal descent is "like the safety getting it."