Just in case … with an unpredictable Putin who recently threatened with use of nuclear arms. Good thing US Armed Forces are moving equipment and personnel into Baltic states and Poland to protect NATO’s frontier in the shadow of the Kremlin. European nations need to up their investment in military readiness, buying NATO compatible US goods from its military-industrial complex.
Just heard an appeal for donations from the International Red Cross for Yemen. The US Armed Forces too are offering goods to the Yemen “military”, perhaps they can share logistics and transport.
He has lived here more than 50 years, and in all that time, he swears, he has never learned what goes on inside the mountain, what lies behind the Warning: Restricted Area signs and the heavily guarded gates and the tall fence topped with barbed wire. Never wondered about the two obvious tunnel entrances across the valley from his front porch. Or about the helicopters thundering in and out of the area at all hours. Or about the elaborate antennas on the mountaintop.
Inside Raven Rock, as the otherwise unremarkable little mountain is called, lies a vast underground complex that was meant to replace the Pentagon — as well as shelter the president — in case of nuclear war. Straddling the Maryland-Pennsylvania border in the Catoctin Mountains, Raven Rock is 12 miles from Gettysburg, 65 miles from Washington and about 6 miles from Camp David. Officially known as the Alternate Joint Communications Center, the “Underground Pentagon” was built in the early 1950’s and has been waiting for Armageddon ever since.
Outside the immediate area, Site R, as it is referred to by locals, is still almost unknown, especially compared with the three other key cold-war bunkers. The most famous is Cheyenne Mountain, home to Norad, just outside Colorado Springs. Then there is Mount Weather, the federal bureaucracy’s nuclear retreat, hidden in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia; its existence was inadvertently revealed when a jetliner crashed into the mountain in the 1970’s. Congress had its own underground hideaway, a relatively luxurious complex beneath the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, but when The Washington Post Magazine revealed its existence in 1992, an embarrassed Congress quickly put it in mothballs.
At the height of the Cold War in the late 1950s, the idea of a hardened command and control center was conceptualized as a defense against long-range Soviet bombers. The Army Corps of Engineers supervised the excavation of Cheyenne Mountain and the construction of an operational center within the granite mountain. The Cheyenne Mountain facility became fully operational as the NORAD Combat Operations Center on Feb. 6, 1967.
Over the years, the installation came to house elements of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), U.S. Strategic Command, U.S. Air Force Space Command and U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM). Under what became known as the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center (CMOC), several centers supported the NORAD missions of aerospace warning and aerospace control and provided warning of ballistic missile or air attacks against North America.
NORAD’s focus and facilities have both evolved to meet the asymmetric threats of the 21st century. On July 28, 2006, the Cheyenne Mountain Directorate was re-designated as the Cheyenne Mountain Division, with the mission to assist in establishing an integrated NORAD and USNORTHCOM Command Center within the headquarters building at Peterson Air Force Base.
U.S. aerospace command moving comms gear back to Cold War bunker
The US military command that scans North America’s skies for enemy missiles and aircraft plans to move its communications gear to a Cold War-era mountain bunker, officers said.
The shift to the Cheyenne Mountain base in Colorado is designed to safeguard the command’s sensitive sensors and servers from a potential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, military officers said.
The Pentagon last week announced a $700 million contract with Raytheon Corporation to oversee the work for North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and US Northern Command.
Admiral William Gortney, head of NORAD and Northern Command, said that “because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain’s built, it’s EMP-hardened.”
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Under the 10-year contract, Raytheon is supposed to deliver “sustainment” services to help the military perform “accurate, timely and unambiguous warning and attack assessment of air, missile and space threats” at the Cheyenne and Petersen bases.Raytheon’s contract also involves unspecified work at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
