Inside NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Combat Center
thememoryhole2.org
thememoryhole2.org
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
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.)
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_...
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".
Part of what you quoted does seem to be in conflict with the article's assertion that NORAD dropped the ball:
"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."
So, if anything, that means the FAA dropped the ball, not NORAD.
From: 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!"
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.
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.
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.
> You can certainly make the argument that the FBI, CIA, and NSA ...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.
If you wanted to excuse NORAD, you should have appealed to the FAA's actions, not their "primary mission".
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.
Or maybe this was all part of the plan to make the nuclear deterrent credible.
https://legionmagazine.com/en/2014/11/the-brotherhood-of-und...
http://www.prosieben.de/tv/galileo/videos/2016257-exklusive-...
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...
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!
You can easily find docs on it: https://youtu.be/lQPGJSIq3ys