The War Zone U.S. Northern Command has dispersed essential command and control teams to multiple hardened locations, including the famous Cheyenne Mountain bunker complex in Colorado, as well as another unspecified site, and is keeping them in isolation. The command took these steps to help ensure these personnel can continue to watch around the clock for potential threats to the U.S. homeland as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to expand across the country and around the world, including within the U.S. military.
U.S. Air Force General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, head of Northern Command (NORTHCOM), who also serves as the commanding officer of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), detailed the changes during a virtual town hall on Facebook on Mar. 24, 2020. Under normal circumstances, the watch teams, which support both NORTHCOM and NORAD missions, would take shifts staffing a central command center at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.
“To ensure we can defend the homeland despite this pandemic, our command and control watch team here in the headquarters split into multiple shifts and portions of our watch team began working from Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station,” O’Shaughnessy explained. A portion of the watch team personnel remain in place at Peterson, as well.
Cheyenne Mountain is a hardened command and control site, the bulk of which is located inside the mountain of same name, which is part of the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range and is situated just outside of Colorado Springs. Between 1965 and 2006, the complex served as NORAD’s primary command and control center. It was also home to U.S. Space Command between 1985 and 2002. It has also been a central feature in, or otherwise referred to, in a wide array of popular media, perhaps most famously being a key setting in the 1983 film WarGames.
NORTHCOM and NORAD have continued to use Cheyenne Mountain for certain other functions since 2006, including monitoring for incoming ballistic missiles and tracking objects in space, and its facilities have received a number of upgrades over the past decade. In 2015, NORTHCOM and NORAD moved various communications functions from Peterson Air Force Base back into the complex over concerns about the potential threat of electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs.
“Because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain’s built, it’s EMP-hardened,” U.S. Navy Admiral William Gortney, then-commander of NORTHCOM and NORAD said at the time. “So, there’s a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there.
The complete complex is buried under 2,000 feet of solid granite and its individual facilities are contained within five acres of massive excavated tunnels tucked behind blast doors that weigh 25 tons. The U.S. government spent four years building the site, which it designed with the intention of it being able to survive a nuclear strike.
Establishing the continuity of government in advance of the go order.