A Look Inside NORADs Mountain Home
[Original headline: Eye on the sky -- inside a mountain]
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN OPERATIONS CENTER:
Nerve center of the binational North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the U. S. Space Command (USSPACECOM) and the U.S. Air Force Space Command.
Serves as the binational central command for a global system of sensors designed for early warning of air, missile or space threats to North America or troops overseas.
A series of 15 independent two- and three-story buildings, each with its own tunnel.
7,100 feet above sea level.
Mounted on more than 1,300 half-ton springs, allowing the complex to sway up to a foot horizontally in any direction, in case of earthquake or nuclear blast.
The two main blast doors are each 25 tons of baffled steel, at least 3 feet thick. A third blast door is 18 tons.
Employs about 1,100 people. Most are U.S. Air Force personnel. About 10 percent are from Canadian forces.
Features include a chapel, medical and dental ward, convenience store, and a restaurant called the Granite Inn. Even the barber has secret clearance.
CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN -- Deep inside the granite belly of this bored out Colorado mountain, Air Force Lt. Col. William Glover has got a situation.
The FAA reports a non-operating radio on a domestic commercial flight.
Glover oversees the Air Warning Center, the focal point for North America's air defense radar and intelligence network. He calls up the plane's flight plan. The din grows louder in the crowded room.
At his right rests a plain, eggshell-colored telephone with no dial or keypad. Grab it, and officials with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) join him in a classified "Noble Eagle conference." That could lead to F-16 fighter planes being "scrambled" to a suspect aircraft within minutes.
Glover, a 46-year-old father of three who wears an Air Force jumpsuit to work, keeps the phone in its cradle and holds tight for more information.
"We've had a proliferation of instances reported to us that wouldn't normally be reported to us," he explains. "We're not bothered at all by it."
The flight would land safely Monday -- one of many false alarms that illustrate the degree to which the nerve center of the nation's air defense system has abruptly launched itself into a new role: defender of attacks launched from within.
Prior to Sept. 11, such reports never would have penetrated this 35-year-old complex, built during the Cold War to defend against a Russian attack. Now, such reports come several times a day under an improved link between the FAA and NORAD.
"Generally speaking, our role was to keep a wary eye and make sure (a hijacked plane) wasn't going to land in a sensitive area. The key word is 'land,'" said Canadian Air Force Brigadier General Jim Hunter, vice commander for the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center.
"Everybody's twitchy right now," he said. "Now, something remotely out of the ordinary gets FAA attention, and through that, our attention. Now we assume nothing."
The nation's air defense command, which entered Cheyenne Mountain in 1965, looks outward across the oceans and over the poles. Its radars encircle North America, facing outward. Any aircraft taking off from within American or Canadian borders was considered friendly, Hunter said.
Following the attacks, the military deployed mobile radars looking inward.
Before Sept. 11, NORAD could call on 14 fighter jets in the continental United States. The number now exceeds 100.
F-15s and F-16s fly round-the-clock combat air patrols above the New York and Washington, D.C., areas, with spot patrols in other sensitive areas across the country, officials said.
In the NORAD command center, where crews gather data and interpret threats to space and sky, a bank of four big-screens faces the dimly lit theater. Crew members scan banks of smaller screens. A bright red digital clock keeps Afghanistan time.
Since Sept. 11, officials here have added a new screen to the panoply of computer-generated maps and radar images. It looks like a cinnamon cookie in the shape of America, with green sprinkles showing thousands of flights throughout the U.S. The FAA program allows NORAD to track the flight paths of suspect airliners.
Command Director Jerry Hatley, an Army colonel, sits front and center in the hot seat. His charge: Paint a picture of a pending threat for four-star Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of NORAD and the U.S. Space Command. Since Sept. 11, Hatley said, he has awakened Eberhart a half-dozen times in the wee hours.
"Tracking aircraft in the middle of the night flying over a nuke plant, something the FAA says 'We don't know where it came from,' it's very intense," said Hatley, a calm, tanned 50-year-old distance runner from Oklahoma City.
"I would say (more) so because it's American citizens. It's brought it home."
Hatley said he yearned for the hot seat last month when terrorists hijacked four East Coast planes. His Echo Crew ended its shift 15 minutes earlier. He heard it on the radio down the mountain.
"Sitting in the chair, I would have felt like I was contributing," he said.
"We told the (next) crew it was pretty quiet," said Lt. Col. John Donovan, a 42-year-old missile officer from Stockton. "I would have been honored to be on duty that day."
In the nearby Air Warning Center, where a sign on the door reads "Loose lips sink ships," Glover and others were in the middle of a twice-yearly NORAD-wide exercise when American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston veered off course toward the World Trade Center.
The command sealed shut its 25-ton steel blast doors. And the men and women charged with guarding against a foreign attack watched in horror as hijacked domestic planes hit the Pentagon and World Trade Center as Air Force fighter jets scrambled to catch them.
"We were correlating our reports with what we were seeing up there, and it's just disbelief," Glover said. "I wouldn't say it was unnerving. We just set about doing our business."
Right then, a room normally staffed by three to five military personnel became a round-the-clock Battle Management Center, with 30 officials from four U.S. military services and Canadian forces. Glover said he paused only when he left the mountain.
"You're driving home, thinking about family, relatives," he said. "There's a certain amount of second-guessing that went on when I got home."
NORAD scrambled fighter jets 129 times last year to unknown aircraft entering North America. The command has responded to domestic threats, too, including the runaway plane that carried U.S. Open champion golfer Payne Stewart to his death.
Hunter, the brigadier general, said he doubted the added patrols would have thwarted the Sept. 11 attacks without the new posture that NORAD was forced to adopt.
"The change is a different attitude," the general said. "We know now if a plane is hijacked, it's a potential bomb."
Hunter called NORAD's role in a long-term homeland defense strategy "nebulous," saying much would depend on the strategies being forged under new Homeland Defense czar Tom Ridge.
Canadian Army Major Douglas Martin sees a greater, lasting role for this mountain stronghold.
"What we're witnessing is the festering of a worldwide cancer, and the cancer is terrorism," Martin said. "The working together, the allied mission, the people of NORAD are chemotherapy. This facility has the ability to beat cancer."
• Story originally published by:
Contra Costa Times / CA | John Simerman - Oct 17.01
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