Yahoo NewsWashington (AFP) – 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.”
“And so, there’s a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there,” Gortney told reporters.
“My primary concern was… are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody who wants to move in there, and I’m not at liberty to discuss who’s moving in there,” he said.
The Cheyenne mountain bunker is a half-acre cavern carved into a mountain in the 1960s that was designed to withstand a Soviet nuclear attack. From inside the massive complex, airmen were poised to send warnings that could trigger the launch of nuclear missiles.
But in 2006, officials decided to move the headquarters of NORAD and US Northern Command from Cheyenne to Petersen Air Force base in Colorado Springs. The Cheyenne bunker was designated as an alternative command center if needed.
That move was touted a more efficient use of resources but had followed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of modernization work at Cheyenne carried out after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Now the Pentagon is looking at shifting communications gear to the Cheyenne bunker, officials said.
“A lot of the back office communications is being moved there,” said one defense official.
Officials said the military’s dependence on computer networks and digital communications makes it much more vulnerable to an electromagnetic pulse, which can occur naturally or result from a high-altitude nuclear explosion.
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.
http://news.yahoo.com/us-aerospace-command-moving-comms-gear-back-cold-015320113.html
Raytheon. I live right down the street from them. Every time I drive by, I give the people exiting that place the middle finger. They all think they’re bigshots going in and out of there and stupid Pizza Hut down the road gives them discount lunches. I hope they fill their pizzas with GMOs and soil them. I can’t believe people just drive by that place like it’s nothing. Sheeple.
“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.”
Sure….I’m sure that’s their primary reason. 🙄 Yea, tell me another one.
““My primary concern was… are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody who wants to move in there, and I’m not at liberty to discuss who’s moving in there,” he said.”
Seriously? You guys have been expanding those underground tunnels for decades now and you say, you don’t have enough room? BULLSHIT!!!
Underground it NOT going to be the place to be when the earth changes begin to happen. Buh-bye!
. . .
“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.”
Trust me, EMPs are going to be the least of your worries soon.
With the way things are going in this phoney, “War on Terror”, I think they should be more worried about “Bunker-busting” bombs than EMPs.
I hope you guys know that you are on the red list now.. I trust the government, and will vote for obama, the police are here to protect us. We need to support Israel,. it is God’s plan. Gotta go, Mr Hagee is on tv now, and I still have to watch msnbc to keep up with current events. 🙂
Sun Tzu says a few things about this moving of equipment and troops but it says much more about an enemy that shows you they are moving…
Big ol’ red flag. Something is up. They just moved out of there and now turn right around and go back in? We’re not supposed to know about all the tunneling they’ve been doing to expand it and all the other underground facilities; half acre indeed! The expressed concern more and more focuses on an EMP event. I suspect something really big is on the horizon.