WASHINGTON, 13 September — Search and rescue operations continue at the Pentagon, Washington headquarters of the US Department of Defense, nearly two days after an unprecedented terrorist attack Tuesday morning that also targeted the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center.
As many as 200 Arlington County firefighters and police, assisted by a number of other jurisdictions, struggled to extinguish fires yesterday as rescue teams picked through five floors of charred rubble created by the crash of a commercial airliner which authorities believe hijackers deliberately flew into the western edge of the five-sided building.
The area of the Pentagon struck by the aircraft, an American Airlines jetliner originally bound from Washington Dulles Airport to Los Angeles, sustained catastrophic damage. Officials at the Pentagon crash site believe anyone who might have survived the initial impact and collapsing debris could not have survived the fire that followed. When the aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, it reportedly was carrying 30,000 gallons of jet fuel, which caused an intense fire in the immediate crash area.
Throughout the crisis, operations continued without interruption at the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center (NMCC), the facility that serves as the eyes, ears, and communications switchboard for the Secretary of Defense and the President.
The NMCC, which during the Cold War was sometimes referred to as the “War Room,” is responsible for the Pentagon’s mission to monitor threats to US national security — particularly warnings of missile threats — gathered by surveillance systems on land, in the air, at sea, and orbiting the earth.
In addition to its “strategic watch” role, the surveillance network overseen by NMCC is responsible for the worldwide monitoring of reports and messages from military commands, US embassies, consuls, and American defense attaches worldwide.
The national military command system provides President George W. Bush, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the means to make accurate and timely military decisions, while also providing America’s defense decision-makers with the communications necessary to rapidly transmit commands.
If the terrorist attack on the Pentagon had indeed disabled the heavily-fortified NMCC, America’s worldwide monitoring and strategic watch responsibilities would have been instantly transferred to two alternate National Military Command Centers: “Site R,” an underground bunker deep within a mountain several miles north of Washington in Pennsylvania, and the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), a converted Boeing 747 aircraft.
NEACP can perform nearly all the functions of NMCC’s land-based Command Centers, and offers the advantage of being mobile. Each NMCC is manned by communications officers, automatic data processing specialists, intelligence officers, area specialists, language translators, and desk officers – all working to provide communications and decision-making support to our nation’s military leadership.
However, the NMCC located at the Pentagon is the site of the Washington-Moscow Direct Communications Link, MOLINK. Sometimes known during the Cold War as the “hotline.”
