The Colorado Springs Gazette May 09, 2008
NORAD marks 50 years with wary eye on sky
By Pam Zubeck
America in 1958 was in the grip of the Cold War.
School children went through nuclear attack drills, diving under desks and covering their heads.
Suburbanites built concrete bomb shelters stocked with canned food in which they could wait out Armageddon.
That was the atmosphere of fear bred by the specter of mutual destruction in which the North American Aerospace Defense Command was born 50 years ago with the idea that being forewarned might tip the balance in North America's favor.
It led the United States and Canada to sign an agreement on May 12, 1958 to create the command that would later be located inside Cheyenne Mountain southwest of Colorado Springs.
Since it began, the command has gone through several generations of technology, survived the Cold War, fell short in responding to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, shifted focus to internal threats and added maritime oversight.
The command has run through billions of dollars rigging and rerigging the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station command center.
It's mission - to warn of attacks and send jets or missiles to intercept the threat - gave rise to futuristic films and put Colorado Springs on the map as a defense stronghold.
NORAD has been a magnet for space-related business in the city and the state, said Elliot Pulham, president and CEO of the Space Foundation, founded in 1983.
As threats changed, the command reinvented itself, he said.
"Out of that changing paradigm emerged this entire space community, which is now one of the largest employers in the state with $10 billion in revenue that never existed before NORAD," Pulham said.
As the intellectual capacity and economic impact grew, Colorado Springs took its place as a space capital of the world, Pulham said. "This became a place where space deal-making was done," he said. "It's had a huge influence."
NORAD's recent partnerships with NorthCom and the Homeland Security Department have sparked additional impacts by attracting permanent offices of other agencies, he said.
This month, day-to-day operations will transfer from the mountain to NORAD and NorthCOm headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base.
While critics say the security and protection of an above-ground office can't compare to Cheyenne Mountain's 2,000 feet of granite, NORAD's future might be clouded by more compelling questions.
"It's no longer the centerpiece of American defense, because the threat to our security has changed dramatically," said Christopher Hellman, military policy fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, Washington, D.C.
NORAD's commander Gen. Gene Renuart said the mission remains relevant and its duties may expand.
"The nature of the threats we see," he said in an interview, "traditional and nontraditional, potential terrorist organizations or rogue nations, the importance of having a command that focuses on the threats out there and the ability to find them and warn of them continues to be critical for the United States and Canada."
NORAD BEGINS
Caught up in the space and arms races of the Cold War, the U.S. found itself behind the game. The Soviets had launched the first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957, and the U.S. Airborne Early Warning aircraft was sent to the Pacific, leaving the Arctic Circle unprotected.
Americans responded by sending Explorer 1, 2 and 3 into orbit and intensified work with Canada, setting up radar stations to detect an attack over the North Pole. The Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line), a network of 58 stations along the 69th parallel, gave three hours warning of attack.
The need to centralize control of such systems led to the creation of NORAD on Sept. 12, 1957, at Ent Air Force Base, now the home of the Olympic Training Center, in a town of 70,000. A formal agreement followed in May.
Colorado Springs was chosen largely because of its location. It was beyond the reach of Russia's short-range, inaccurate missiles. Even bombs of the era couldn't have penetrated the 9,565-foot mountain off Colorado Highway 115. When the command center opened in 1966, though, the Soviets were developing long-range missiles with multiple nuclear warheads that could leave a crater where the mountain once stood.
In May 1961, blasting began on a command center estimated to cost $66 million. When it opened in April 1966, the cost had grown to $142.4 million.
It wasn't the last cost overrun. One technology upgrade, started in 1982 and finished in 1998, was 11 years late and cost twice the estimate of $968 million.
Again in 2001, NORAD undertook modernizing and integrating its warning systems. By 2006, the project was behind schedule and, at $707 million, 51 percent over initial estimates, the General Accountability Office said.
NORAD equipment and personnel aren't foolproof and led to two failures that could have caused nuclear war.
On November 9, 1979, a NORAD technician loaded a test tape but didn't switch the status to "test," triggering false warnings to command posts worldwide. NORAD assessed no attack was under way within eight minutes, but the incident caused public and congressional concern.
On June 2, 1980, an equipment malfunction caused warnings to flash at Air Force command posts that a nuclear attack was under way.
In both cases, Pacific Air Forces launched planes armed with nuclear bombs, but Strategic Air Command didn't, for which it was criticized. How close nuclear war was is debatable. Both commands received direct reports from radar, satellite and missile detection systems, which didn't match readings sent by NORAD, making commanders suspicious the warnings were real.
A NEW ERA
On Sept. 11, 2001, former NORAD/Northern Command chief Gen. Ed Eberhart lost contact with the White House while driving to Cheyenne Mountain.
As terrorists piloted planes into buildings in New York and Washington and a Pennsylvania field, NORAD fighter jets flew out to sea from Atlantic Coast bases. The attacks surprised NORAD, whose mission was to monitor incoming threats, not attacks from within.
Since then, seats have been created in NORAD's command center for the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies pertinent to its mission.
NORAD's sister command, Northern Command, was created in October 2002 in response to the attacks. Together, they work with the Department of Homeland Security, another agency born of the attacks, as well as the newly created Canada Command, that country's version of NorthCom.
NORAD also expanded its reach geographically to encompass coastal and ocean monitoring.
In short, Gen. Renuart said, NORAD has adapted.
"The maritime domain has become increasingly important," he said. "When you look at the quantity of trade that comes through our ports, if you look at 200 million containers moving around the world at any given time, NORAD has continued to become more and more agile as we see the threats move around."
Eberhart's successor, Adm. Timothy Keating, decided that such agility would grow by moving out of the bunker.
Although Keating said it would save up to $200 million a year, he couldn't document the figure, GAO investigators said. Nor had the command assessed the move's operational impacts, the GAO said.
The shift has cost $41.7 million so far, not including additional security measures that may be needed, NORAD officials said.
In a May 2007 report, the GAO quoted NORAD officials saying allocation of the money needed to meet high-level security requirements could take 24 months.
In the meantime, the GAO's classified analysis of Peterson's security issues goes to Congress on July 3 and will look at security weaknesses, the level of security needed and how to achieve it. The new center is in an office building near the base's border and open fields.
The GAO also will evaluate the security costs and how to protect computer terminals against electromagnetic pulse, already provided at Cheyenne Mountain.
Michael Perini, the command's public affairs director, said the center opens this month but refused to address how it's protected and related questions.
"We would like to assure you that we have made every effort to improve the physical security of Building 2 in accordance with applicable laws, policies, directives, procedures, and proven risk-management and security strategies," he said in a written response. "And there are plans for continual improvements as the threat could change over the years."
Since Keating's decision to move out of the mountain, parts of the mission have scattered. Air Force Space Command moved its space control center that tracks orbiting objects to Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Strategic Command will move missile warning to Schriever Air Force Base east of Colorado Springs.
Of the roughly 800 people who work inside Cheyenne Mountain, it's unclear how many will stay. As of early May about 200 NORAD and NorthCom personnel worked there but only "a few" will remain to keep systems up and running and conduct training, NORAD officials said.
"We are not abandoning previous investments made in Cheyenne Mountain," Perini said, adding it will serve as an "alternate command center, ready for use at short notice."
IS IT NECESSARY?
Although NORAD is a joint command, the U.S. pays most of the tab, and a Canadian has never served as commander.
The headquarters alone will spend $33.3 million this year, not including costs of support installations - Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, Canadian Forces Base, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida.
Although Canada has refused to participate in portions of the missile defense function, NORAD Deputy Commander Lt. Gen. Charlie Bouchard said Canada is committed to the partnership.
"Canada and the U.S. through NORAD enjoy a relationship that is the envy of the rest of the world," he said in an interview. "While there could be disagreements between two countries, NORAD has been the way through which we have found commonality."
He also said what began as a military entity has evolved to an intelligence mission imperative to the national security of both.
Renuart said NORAD's future is bright, if it can secure funding for new technology and take on added duties, when necessary.
"It's important to partner with our civilian agencies and other military organizations to decrease our vulnerability in a cyber world by increasing security measures on our networks, find better ways for communications and take advantage of developments in secure data management," he said.
"We can no longer afford to think of the networks that we take advantage of as just military, just civilian, just financial. They are integrated in every way of interest for our country."
He didn't elaborate on what role NORAD would play.
Hellman, with the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said the FBI, not a border-force command, is more suited to oversee cyber protection.
He also said the move from the stone bunker signals NORAD's decline in importance. "They're saying that level of security is no longer necessary," he said.
While other nations possess nuclear weapons, they can't match the threat the Soviets once posed with 5,000 ICBMs and 400 bombers, Hellman said.
NORAD, he said, like all commands, is struggling to be relevant as threats change. Military services are increasing presence in the Pacific, ramping up focus on Africa, pumping resources into special operations and special forces and beefing up Army occupation strategies.
"That's where the money flow is going and rightly so," he said. "The truth is, the last five wars we've fought were against countries that had no air force - Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq Two. Those are the threats that confront us today."
John Pike, executive director of the defense think tank GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va., said while the vice president and Congress secure underground bunkers back east, the nation's premier protector is moving to an office building. "It makes it sound like they think they're not worth attacking," he said.
But defense expert Loren Thompson with Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank, said NORAD's relevancy is increasing, not declining, because threats are growing.
"There's too many opportunities to attack the United States from the north that would be hard to detect much less counter without Canadian cooperation," Thompson said.
"When a command survives for a half century during which time every other command in the joint system has been reorganized or renamed, it tells you something of the durability of their mission," he said.
"NORAD lives on, because of the centrality of the mission to our national survival persists."
© Copyright 2008, Freedom Communications
