The 751st Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron was assigned to Mount Laguna in September 1951, part of the Cold War buildup of radar detection infrastructure across the American interior. The ridge's elevation — among the highest in San Diego County — made it an ideal location for radar coverage of the surrounding region. The station's radar could see over the obstacles that blocked lower installations, providing the long-range detection capability that early warning doctrine required. At its peak, the facility housed approximately 400 military personnel, supporting the radar operations, communications, and administration necessary for continuous 24-hour coverage.

In 1961, Mount Laguna Air Force Station was integrated into the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, better known as SAGE — the Cold War's massive networked air defense system that linked radar stations across North America into a unified detection and response network. SAGE represented the era's cutting-edge approach to air defense: computers (enormous by mid-century standards) processed radar data from multiple stations simultaneously, theoretically providing national coverage that no single installation could achieve alone. Mount Laguna's integration into SAGE made it part of something larger than a local radar post — one node in a continental web of vigilance.

The station operated continuously until September 30, 1981, when it was decommissioned. The FAA assumed responsibility for the air traffic functions the military had performed, transitioning surveillance of the southwestern airspace from a military to a civilian mission. The handoff was clean in operational terms, but what it left behind on the Laguna ridge was less tidy: a collection of Cold War-era military buildings — barracks, operations centers, support facilities — that had been built for a specific purpose that no longer existed. The structures sat, increasingly deteriorated, in the state park that surrounded them.

Empty military buildings in remote locations attract a predictable sequence of visitors. First the curious, then the vandals, then the thieves stripping copper and fixtures, then the graffiti that accumulates in layers on every available surface. The Mount Laguna station buildings went through this progression over the decades following closure. Reports described them as gutted and graffiti-covered — structures that had housed a functioning military community reduced to shells that were becoming hazardous as well as unsightly within Anza-Borrego Desert State Park's viewshed.

The resolution came in 2009, when $18.2 million in federal stimulus funds were allocated to demolish the abandoned Cold War structures. The number represents the cost of properly disposing of buildings that contained asbestos, lead paint, and decades of accumulated contamination — the legacy of mid-century military construction practices that didn't account for eventual cleanup. The demolition erased the physical evidence of thirty years of Cold War vigilance from the Laguna ridge, leaving the site to be reclaimed by the surrounding forest and chaparral. The radar is gone, the barracks are gone, the network they served is history. What remains is the view the station was built to watch over.