
Inside NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center - quakeguy
http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/inside-norad
======
sgnelson
The author states that NORAD "... dropped the ball on 9/11.."

Let's be clear, NORAD did not drop the ball on 9/11\. You can certainly make
the argument that the FBI, CIA, and NSA (and other US intelligence services)
dropped the ball on 9/11, but NORAD did not. NORAD's primary goal has never
been to stop terrorism/hijacking from occurring on passenger planes within the
United States, but rather to warn of enemy planes and missiles from _entering_
the US. (this did change somewhat after 9/11, but that's after the fact...)

Frankly, I stopped reading the article after this line, because clearly the
author doesn't know what they're talking about.

But if you're interested in this sort of thing, I'd recommend starting here:
Strategic Air Command:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Air_Command)

I just finished reading Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, it's a pretty
decent primer on early US nuclear deterrence and such things as SAC and NORAD.
(though there are better books specifically about SAC/NORAD, this is an
overarching general/popular history.)

~~~
jessriedel
> Let's be clear, NORAD did not drop the ball on 9/11...NORAD's primary goal
> has never been to stop terrorism/hijacking from occurring on passenger
> planes within the United States, but rather to warn of enemy planes and
> missiles from _entering_ the US.

I have no idea whether NORAD deserved any blame, but Wikipedia suggests
NORAD's mission includes scrambling jets to deal with hijacked airplanes:

> Standing orders on September 11 dictated that, upon receiving a request for
> assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the North
> American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) would normally order escort
> aircraft to approach and follow an aircraft that was confirmed to be
> hijacked in order to assure positive flight following, report unusual
> observances, and aid search and rescue in the event of an emergency.[1] The
> 9/11 Commission determined that on the morning of September 11, the FAA
> deliberately did not adequately notify NORAD of the hijackings of Flights
> 11, 77, 93, or 175 in time for escort aircraft to reach the hijacked
> flights.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._military_response_during_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._military_response_during_the_September_11_attacks)

I mean, I guess you could argue that's not their "primary mission", but then I
don't think that is in conflict with the OP's assertion that they "dropped the
ball".

~~~
sgnelson
Yeah, just no.

From:
[http://www.history.com/topics/9-11-timeline](http://www.history.com/topics/9-11-timeline)
and the above linked Wikipedia article,

"8:40 am – The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alerts North American
Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) about
the suspected hijacking of Flight 11. In response, NEADS scrambles two fighter
planes located at Cape Cod’s Otis Air National Guard Base to locate and tail
Flight 11; they are not yet in the air when Flight 11 crashes into the North
Tower [at 8:46, the second plane hits at 9:03]."

The first report of Flight 11 being hijacked seems to be at 8:19am, given a
lag of 21 minutes before the hijacking was reported to NORAD, and thus giving
the F15's coming from Cape Cod to intercept and (possibly/probably shoot
down?) the planes in 6 and 17 minutes respectively. And because planes don't
magically leap into the sky, The F15's were not in the air until 8:53 (at
which point Flight 11 had crashed 7 minutes previously, and it was just 10
minutes until Flight 175 hits the tower).

So yes, I don't believe there is any _reasonable_ proof that NORAD "dropped
the ball".

If you really feel (like the OG author) that NORAD deserves some blame, great.
But considering all the institutional failures of our intelligence services
that occurred before the hijackers ever stepped foot on the planes, it's
strange/weird/stupid/asinine/missing the point/whatever to blame NORAD for
9/11 (at any meaningful scale).

"Damn you NORAD for not having fighters capable of Mach 10 in the air knowing
those planes were going to be hijacked at that specific day and already having
a plan in place that gave a single fighter pilot the ability to shoot down a
US flagged civilian airliner with the knowledge aforethought to know those
airliners would be used as physical weapons rather than the traditional
hostage taking that had occurred in the past!"

~~~
nl
There's plenty of blame to go around.

But NORAD is responsible for aerial defense of the US. The fact that they
didn't have fighters available was their responsibility, and I'd note that
they have changed deployment so that that won't happen again.

I'd argue they didn't drop the ball on 9/11 - they dropped it years earlier
when those deployment plans were agreed.

~~~
sgnelson
Do you also blame every police officer for failing to stop every murder, due
to the police not being at the exact right place at the exact right time,
knowing exactly what is about to happen, who is going to be the murderer, who
is going to be the murdered, and the technique/weapon that is used to commit
the crime? Because based on your reasoning, you should.

Edited to add:

The reason this argument bothers me so is that I'm not some great big fanboy
of NORAD. But rather because the actual reasoning that goes behind blaming
NORAD seems rather poor and includes a lack of understanding in regards to how
we know things. If we then use hindsight to judge, we must be careful about
the knowledge we have now, and our past and present assumptions. Sometimes
these judgeents can make sense, sometime they don't. This is one of those
cases.

9/11 was such a vastly different event in the history of the US, it seems
quite unfair to blame NORAD for not predicting how things turned out. An
argument that blames NORAD (imo) seems to blame NORAD because they were not
omniscience and omnipotent.

We're looking back at a historical event where we have an incredible amount of
information about exactly what happened. How could we assume that NORAD would
have planes flying to cover NYC and Washington DC, two very important cities
in the US. Do we also know exactly what their targets in those two large
cities are going to be? That's a rather ridiculous argument.

This is especially true, because almost no one had used Airliners as guided
missiles before. (And the reason that Flight 93 is so special, it shows that
once the passengers were made aware of how the plane was no longer a
traditional hijacking, they may have forced the terrorists to crash the plane
without greater casualties.)

How do you stop these events? Let's assume that we know the hijackers were
going to target those two cities, (and those 3 buildings) but couldn't the
hijackers have targeted two other cities that didn't have air cover (and
again, the fighters had de facto permission to shoot down hijacked civilian
airliners). Do we give air cover to every minor city in the entire US? Do we
put SAM sites in every US downtown? Let's just militarize the entire US, it
wouldn't be the first time we had "Fortress America."

We can't always look back at an event knowing what we know now and judge it
based on our knowledge at this moment versus knowledge at that moment. (This
could quickly descend into a philosophical argument about knowledge,
epistemology, etc., but I'm not going there.) But I will say that when
analyzing things such as this, we have to be careful about our own assumptions
and how we have learned the things we know, and then apply those to a
historical event.

And that's all I'll say about that.

~~~
nl
I don't blame NORAD for not predicting 9/11\. I blame them for not having
planes close enough to be useful.

There's a difference. NORAD assumed they would always get early warning of an
attack, and there weren't even enough operational fighters to do anything
about it. Both of those things were bad assumptions.

------
sverige
When I lived in Colorado Springs, my wife was friends with the wife of one of
the military security guards at Cheyenne Mountain. We went on one of the last
public tours of the facility in April of 1996 (IIRC).

None of the doors in the buildings had any indication of what went on behind
them, just numbers, or maybe number-letter combinations. We followed our guide
through a maze of these featureless corridors with the anonymous doors all
closed, then were ushered into the command center.

It's pretty small, maybe holds 20 people around a conference table in close
quarters. The folks who monitor everything in the world were right next door.
One wall is a glass partition between the two rooms, but they pulled a curtain
over that because there was some incident going on right then that we were not
authorized to see.

Then we got a walking tour of much of the rest of the underground complex. The
tunnels are wide and high, and there are big reservoirs of water and diesel
fuel along the sides.

It was really fascinating. Of course no photos were allowed, but I still have
a fairly good mental picture of parts of it 20 years later. The photo of the
gigantic blast door took me right back - we walked through that very spot.

Edit: Thinking about it more, the most surprising thing was the scale of the
place. It's a quarter mile from the tunnel entrance around the bend (meant as
a way to diffuse the energy from a nuclear blast) to the big steel door. We
all rode a bus back to that point. We walked about a half mile or maybe more
to near the bottom of the other end of the main tunnel. If you look at the
diagram in the story, it doesn't do justice to the sense of how much work went
into carving out the middle of that mountain.

The conference room where command decisions were made might have only held 12,
not 20. It was very small and spartan. I remember thinking, Shit, the fate of
the world might be decided in a room smaller than our conference room at work.

Also, it might have been April 1998, not '96.

~~~
DavidSJ
To me what's surprising is that they allowed tours at all, and sometimes even
let you see the command center.

Or maybe this was all part of the plan to make the nuclear deterrent credible.

------
mast
The Canadian equivalent was in North Bay Ontario. I worked there briefly in
the '90s. It was an interesting experience. I remember the guards and the bus
ride to the bottom always made me nervous.

[https://legionmagazine.com/en/2014/11/the-brotherhood-of-
und...](https://legionmagazine.com/en/2014/11/the-brotherhood-of-underground-
mushroomers-deep-inside-a-cold-war-nerve-centre/)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?autoplay=1&v=HRvPPnHMsyE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?autoplay=1&v=HRvPPnHMsyE)

------
chrissnell
I used to live in Colorado Springs, just outside north fence of the Cheyenne
Mountain Complex. It's not in active use these days--the USAF has moved their
command center out to Peterson AFB east of town. If you're sneaky about it,
you can actually hike to the top of Cheyenne Mountain, staying just outside
the fenceline. You're crossing private property but once you get past the
neighborhood, nobody will bother you.

------
stesch
Cheyenne Mountain? I thought they just have deep space telemetry there!?

~~~
rhizome
That, and an IMSAI 8080 named "Joshua."

~~~
packetslave
Joshua was the WOPR, which was created by Hollywood. The IMSAI 8080 was
David's home computer.

[http://www.imsai.net/movies/wargames.htm](http://www.imsai.net/movies/wargames.htm)

~~~
rhizome
Doh.

------
sgnelson
Two great websites that you can learn more about the Cold War and Nuclear
weapons are:

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/)

[https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/](https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/)

------
trias
there has been a documentation / feature on german tv about this complex. It
didn't appear to be very secretive anymore. They film the control room at
14:00

[http://www.prosieben.de/tv/galileo/videos/2016257-exklusive-...](http://www.prosieben.de/tv/galileo/videos/2016257-exklusive-
einblicke-in-die-us-militaerbasis-cheyenne-mountain-clip)

------
frostburg
I recall people arguing that in strategic thinking, Cheyenne Mountain was/is
basically a missile sponge, not a necessary control hub.

~~~
sgnelson
I don't think that was true, though it could have been possible at the very
beginning when the Cheyenne Mountain complex was being built in 1960. But I'm
skeptical for a few reasons.

One is the infamous "missile gap," which Kennedy arguably used to help win the
1960 election. This was a belief that the Soviets had many more warheads and
missiles than us, and was completely untrue. If this was the belief (at least
as of 1959/1960), then it doesn't make too much sense to design an expensive
"missile sponge" such as this.

With the introduction of long range bombers, sub launched missiles and land
based ICBM's, each side had so many nukes by the 60's, that the Soviets could
have dropped a hundred nukes on the mountain and they would still have enough
warheads to drop on every decently sized American city. (in 1965, they had
over 6000 warheads, by 1970 they had over 11,000 [1], it grew from there.)
It's also worth noting that nuclear warheads/missiles both became much more
powerful and more accurate during this time.

Another thing that makes me question this, is the book Command and Control
that I mentioned earlier in the comments. From reading it, the author's thesis
is that there was no true command and control up until the 1980's (and even
then...) That's to say, it existed, but it had many problems such as
difficulty of communications between each missile site/air base/sub, slow
speed in communications, various organizations that were involved, lack of
adaptability, and then have all of this happen while the country is being
nuked. (Many of the things that modern telecommunications were designed
specifically for, and have arguably solved, less the very important human
element.) All of this is to say, a centralized place and system for a control
hub was very necessary to both determine if an attack was occurring and how to
respond to said attack.

I don't think it would have been a very effective warhead sink.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_sto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_nuclear_weapons_stockpiles_and_nuclear_tests_by_country)

btw, with the Missile Gap, also check out the Bomber Gap. Yay American
Military Industrial Complex, nothing like using a little bit of fear to make
some money building unnecessary weapons of war and getting politicians elected
to office! It's a win win!

~~~
frostburg
It's not a claim that can be easily substantiated, but the USSR did have
special ICBMs with single high yield warheads instead of MIRVs earmarked for
that kind of target.

------
jorblumesea
The Cheyenne complex isn't some classified thing anymore.

You can easily find docs on it:
[https://youtu.be/lQPGJSIq3ys](https://youtu.be/lQPGJSIq3ys)

~~~
teh_klev
A five minute PR video on YouTube doesn't really amount to much.

------
blahi
Nothing about col. O'Neill (two Ls) or Daniel Jackson?

------
manav
Where's the Stargate?

