- they do exercises over my house rather frequently. Usually at night. The local paper normally lets us know when so we don't wonder what all the noise is about. I'm outside of D.C., BTW.

They completely overhauled Norad. In fact it's been in a constant state of overhaul since its inception.

Going Ballistic!

A hacker tourist explores the deep recesses of fabled Air Force stronghold Cheyenne Mountain, where the Cold War never stops.



By Phil Patton
Wired
Nov 1999

-snip-

The US Air Force, which runs Cheyenne Mountain, invited me here because it wants to show off its new computer system, the result of a $1.8 billion overhaul that may be the most expensive and nightmarish upgrade ever attempted. One general compared the process to changing the engines of a jet in flight. Another likened it to turning a black-and-white TV into a color one without switching the set off.

The upgrade was outrageously tough because Cheyenne Mountain was burdened with a formidable legacy problem. Its Systems Center, in charge of the complex's hardware, networks, and software, maintains more than 12 million lines of code on 34 separate systems written in 27 languages. The site's array of machines, many of which survived this upgrade, encapsulates a history not just of the Cold War but of modern computing. Bearing old nameplates from companies like Honeywell and Data General, hardware that uses the hoary technologies of core memory and magnetic tape is still whirring away in there.

-snip-

This last upgrade is only the latest in a parade of past-due improvements. By May 1966, only a month after Norad first brought its operations to the mountain, the generals were already telling higher-ups the computers would need a complete overhaul. In 1971, an upgrade intended to bring the mountain in sync with other military systems tapped David Packard of HP for help. Packard's work ended in 1979, when the mountain's system was declared to have "equivalent operational capability" to what had come before. In other words, the new system finally worked as reliably as the old one did in 1966.

In 1980, a multiplexer chip failed in a Nova 840 computer and sent a false missile warning to the national command center. It was the second such incident in less than a year. In the first one, fake data from a war-sim was mistaken for the real thing, and the Pentagon was notified that a Soviet missile strike was under way. It took about eight minutes to determine that the end of the world was not, in fact, at hand. As the military's pricelessly deadpan postmortem concludes, "This aroused widespread public and congressional interest."

Much more: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/cheyenne_pr.htm

It happens at least once on almost every trip the President takes. It was the same with W. Pilots go flying without getting a briefing or checking NOTAMs and inevitably get busted.

I watched an f16 or whatever slow down to piper cub speed above tampa bay. that was an amazing sight.

* was fund raising at the time.