School of War - NORAD and Protecting America From Nuclear Attack, With Lance Blythe

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Lance R. Blyth, command historian of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), joins School of War to discuss the evolution of North America’s air defense. How has NORAD adapted to shifting threats over the decades? Are today’s threats manageable? Are we in a new Cold War? And what can the command, with operations deep inside a Colorado mountain, teach us about defending the continent in an era of renewed great-power competition? Times: 02:04 History of NORAD 07:02 Threats of the 1950s 13:50 Sensors, effectors, and connectors 15:15 Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) 19:45 SABRE travel system 21:14 Aerospace missile warning systems 22:07 Cheyenne Mountain Complex 24:13 NORAD in films 27:56 False missile launches 31:31 Adapting to new threats 34:23 New joint surveillance system 35:19 Importance of Canada 36:21 September 11 40:21 Operation Noble Eagle 43:00 Today’s threats Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more at The Free Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Sensors, effectors, and connectors. This is the basic architecture of any air defense system. And today we're going to talk about one of the earliest and most elaborate systems, NORAD, the plan to defend North America from Soviet attack, developed in the early Cold War, an organization that is still with us and still very relevant today. I think you'll find, as I did in the course of this conversation,

that the past is very much present. Let's get into it. The world is to walk the invasion of Hawaii. The day which will live in India. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face a great kind of military. The world is changing fast. Conflict and instability are spreading across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

If you listen to school of war, you know we try to cut through the noise with sober, honest analysis that helps make sense of it all. On May 19th, we're taking that conversation live. Join me and historian Neil Ferguson for a special live recording of School of War at the iconic New York Historical. We'll be talking about the war with Iran, great power competition, China, military deterrence, and where all of this is heading. To learn more and get your tickets, visit thefp.com slash events.

If you read the headlines about Israel, you're only getting a tiny slice of a long, complicated story without depth, context, or sometimes even the basic facts. I'm Norm Weissman, the host of Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that dives into the fascinating and sometimes controversial events and figures that have shaped Israel's past and present each week on unpacking Israeli history. I explore the layers of Israeli history. debates around the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, the cultural forces at play, drawing from a variety of sources and perspectives. So if you're looking for a nuanced, thought-provoking take on Israel, one that avoids the oversimplifications and political spin, I think you'll really appreciate the show. Find unpacking Israel's history wherever you listen to your podcast or on YouTube. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining in School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today, Lance Blythe. He is the command historian of North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as

NORAD, also of United States Northern Command. He served as a United States Marine as an infantry officer. He's the author also of an excellent history of the 10th Mountain Division, Ski-Clime Fight, which, of course, you can read. You can also hear Lance and I discuss it here on School of War. When was that, Lance? Like a year ago or so? Something like that. April time frame? A year ago, yeah. A lot of water under the bridge since last day. Never a dull moment here. But thank you so much for coming back, and I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. Well, thank you so much the opportunity to having me.

And as I am doing this in my official job, I'll make the standard disclaimer that anything I say here is not official position of Department of National Defense, Department of War, NORAD, or U.S. on the command. They are just, they are the thoughts of one historian. Understood, understood. So we're going to talk about NORAD today, which I've been fascinated with. at least since I saw the movie War Games as a young man, which may be others in the audience, this will be their first point of contact with your organization.

You know, this is the Matthew Broderick film about nuclear Armageddon where a lot of the action takes place inside Cheyenne Mountain, inside the Norad headquarters, and you have, you know, the big board and the constant tracking of everything, and it was a, you know, it's a great flick. And, you know, the scenes in there are very cool. We're going to talk to the real history of the place now. So maybe let's start at the start.

The United States has fought in one World War II, along with the Soviet Union, but the two have gone Splitsville. Things are tense? What are the Soviets doing and what is the threat picture that inspires the creation of NORAD, which I guess was actually KONAD in its very early stages? Yes. And it's early stages there was a realization from 1953, really, which, for my first, our perspective really was a bad year of the Cold War. Not that there was any good year in the

Cold War, but basically we're starting to see, you know, in August of that year, the Soviets test their first thermonuclear bomb. We know they are flying what will become the T.U. 95 bear bomber is also out there. So you're seeing a capability and a capacity building that is holding the U.S. at risk. Soviet intentions are unclear. Stalin has died in early 53, but there's a revolt in East Germany that's quickly put down by the East Germans

and the Soviets. And so it doesn't look like there's any moderation coming out of Moscow. So by 19, early 1954, President Eisenhower, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, really puts together a National Security Council report, basically

calling for an increase of what they called continental air defense. The realization of United States could be at risk from the air. And that's really where it begins is to do that, is to build a program of continental defense. And so to execute that program, they create a joint continental air defense command or connet. It is built upon the U.S. Air Force's air defense command that was originally created on Long Island after the war, but realizing that if you gave a V2 a little extra oomph, they could get to Long Island, they moved it here to Colorado Springs in early 1950s. There it was joined by the United States Army's Air Defense Command, a radcom as it was known. And then with the creation of Con Ed in the summer of 1954, there was actually Naval Forces

Connett for the picket ships. There was one Marine colonel part of that. I'm assuming he had the whole place around it. And I know about this because in the paper at the time, this was, of course, it still is a tourist town. These people had come into town and there is a full center spread and a Sunday paper on all the naval officers and their families and everything else. So as they're doing this, Connett is looking across this continental scale, but how to defend Everest? We know how to do integrated your defense at the lower levels. Think Battle of Britain. Now how do you do at the continental level. And so with that, we began to look at to the north, at Canada. And Canada, as one Canadian deputy commander put it once, is like when you're doing air defense, Canada has a lot of good

real estate. And so when we're looking at that, there's like, oh, we'll start to put sensors, radar lines in Canada, push them ever northwards to the 1950s. These would be augmented by naval forces at sea. But as we're figuring out how to connect those sensors to the effective either be fighters or air defense systems, realize that we're going to need a joint command. And it actually correct, not joint. Today we would call that a combined command, a bi-national command of Canadian Royal Canadian Air Force Air Defense Command

and U.S. Continental Air Defense Command, being that being con ad, being the U.S. element of that. And the Canadians would basically, it was understood, would bolt onto those headquarters and join in. So when the chief of the Royal Canadian Air Force steps down in the summer of 57 to become the first deputy commander NORAD, Norad begins operating in September of 57, but is an exchange of notes on the 12th of May, 1958, that is the actual NORAD agreement and the official birthday of NORAD. I think where this is to do math and public, I think we're hitting our 68th year this year.

Amazing. So let me ask a couple of their strategic questions. or war-fighting questions, but just sticking with the 1950s in these very early days. So you mentioned V-2s, you know, the Nazi rockets used in 45, I think 44-2, right? V-2s are a thing in 44. Towards the end of the war. Regular listeners to the show will know that I'm kind of obsessed with this book called There Will Be No Time by this early nuclear strategist, who's a bit of a villain in the movie.

in the book he observes that, you know, making nuclear-tipped V-2s, and this 1945, he's observing it, making nuclear-tipped V-2s will change everything, will change the world and will change the nature of war. But, you know, in the 50s, as this is actually getting up and going, what is the mixture of threats? Do we have ICBMs yet in the early 50s? Is it primarily a bomber threat? If so, what can the bombers do? Like, what are we actually defending against at the start of all this? It is the bomber threat, the nuclear-armed bomber threat, to where one bomber with one bomb equals one city. And the threat is not quite there yet in the early 50s and to mid-50s, but the concern is it will be there. This is all a generation of officers

who are doing this, who grew up before Pearl Harbor, and remembered that. sudden surprise attack. It's very hard from looking at this, take that away. And also how opaque the Soviet Union was to us at this time. The U-2s don't get going for a while. There's no satellite. We have no idea what's really going on. So a lot of the Air Force and the Air Defense Command and Con Ed have to be put along in harness with strategic air command, which really creates a fight-to-night attitude, the idea there will be no, effectively no warning. Norad's initial plan for warning of a nuclear attack was a suite of detectors across the country to basically say, yes, that big boom was a nuclear weapon. I mean, that's almost how blind we were. And I think that is, you know,

pushing those sensors out by the time of 1957, you get the due line. You now have warning in terms of hours. But there was always this expectation of we had to be able to go within a few hours. One of the reason U.S. Air Force bases are so nice, especially to Marines who visit them, is the goal was to keep as many of the people on base as they could. So when the balloon went up in the next 30 minutes, you would have a lot of people on base. You know, they could be playing golf or shopping or or at the bowling alley. That was the new fangled thing in the 50s. This sounds like an elaborate ex post facto explanation for why Air Force stuff is nice, but I'll entertain it. I'll entertain it.

I see where you're going. Yeah. So that is the, it's not an imminent threat, but it's a growing threat. And I think the lack of intelligence is what really drives these senior leaders in this day to really say, okay, we need to invest. Now, let's also put the largest strategic element on this. And that is the Eisenhower administration is in the midst of doing their new look. The strategic deterrent will be the primary weapon system. Everyone else will either downsize or support that.

And to protect that, to guard that nuclear deterrent, you don't want them to be thinking they can sneak bombers in and hit our bomber bases. So you set up in their defense that says, if you think you can, maybe you can't do to the great extent you want. And the last point I'll make on that is that this really goes on through the, this actually goes back to the late 1940s. Once the Soviets get their first bomb in 1949, the realization they had reverse engineered B-29s, and the concern was they would occupy the air bases used on the Great Northern Route to send them aircraft and supplies of World War II. They might use their standing airborne forces. They kept a very large airborne army after the war, probably for internal security. but that, again, opakness, we're not sure,

seize those bases, put the bombers there, and now they can, they could attack, attack the U.S. and Canadian heartlands, which, by the way, are the same thing. Most of the Canada lives within a few kilometers of the U.S. border. So there was, there would be no, no difference there. So both the United States and Canada,

maintaining relatively large airborne forces with the idea that the Soviets are thinking about taking a base, we'll send our airborne forces there first. to the extent the Canadians keep three battalions out of the Korean War and send the second battalion of each regiment to fight in Korea. And today the Canadian Army is the heart of the Canadian Army are those battalions that fought in Korea, not the battalions that stayed home as part of this deterrent effect. Wow. And, you know, just to emphasize the seriousness of the mindset at the time, there

really is, at this first phase of the story that we're discussing, there really is no clear conception of a second strike capacity, which, you know, of course, is the logic of, sure, you can nuke American dismissarines, but out there, there are nuclear weapons, for example, in our submarines that you're just not going to be able to get no matter how hard you try. So no matter how good your first strike is, you're going to get nuke to. And both the reality and the sort of theorization of that, you know, changes the game completely. Before you have that, which is to say, you know, late 40s, early 50s, mid-50s, I think, right?

I can try to remember when, was it the delicate balance of terror? What is that? There's the famous paper that comes out. Yeah, we usually point to the triad is I usually teach it early 60s. Early 60s. Okay, so we're squarely before that. So the notion that this is probably going to happen and we're going to duke it out. Like, they're going to try to nuke us.

We're going to shoot down as much of their stuff as we can, but we're trying to nuke them. And like it's going to be a kind of a linear fight that is as likely to happen as not, maybe more likely. to happen than not is just very much part of the mindset, which I think it's hard, it's hard to, it's hard to put yourself in that mental place in 2026, as dangerous as the world is today. It's just hard to put yourself in that place today, in part because of the nature of second strike. And I want to, in a second, I want to get to how things start to evolve. But these early days, you have, you know, these incoming bombers in this aerial battle that you're

anticipating. Talk a little, you keep talking about pushing the sensor line north and then just this idea of, It's really interesting actually because this actually hasn't changed conceptually of sensors, effectors, and connectors, your C2. Say a bit more about all that and how it originally evolves. And like this notion of the sensor line marching slowly north in Canada is actually really interesting to me. Yeah, the first, there is a pine tree line, 1951, it's called, then a Mid-Canada line in 56.

And then in the summer of 57, in a very quick, dirty and ultimately environmentally destructive move, created the distant early warning line or the doot line, which many people often will have heard of that. And that's a radar system all the way at the top end of Canada. And that will buy you the time to detect the bombers, get forces in place, and begin to move there. Then inside that you had what they call Gapfiller radars.

These were U.S. Air Force or Royal Canadian Air Force manned radar sets that would basically fill in. So you have to take all that information and run it to someone who can use it. Anyone who's seen the Battle of Britain, the big board with ladies moving things around. I actually got to meet one of those. She had retired here with her husband to O'Karoff Springs.

And before she passed, this was 20 years ago. Absolutely loved the person. But how critical that was. And so to do that, that, we turn in the 50s, this is actually going on under Kahn-F, nearly 50s, to computerizing it, creating a thing called the semi-autonomous ground environment, or Sage. And Sage was basically a series of building-sized computers. I mean, literally, you

walked into the building. The building was a computer, the control room was in the Sun rather, that would flow everything in. And it was actually the MIT's Lincoln Labs that developed this. And if anyone's any interest in this Google, Sage, MIT, Lincoln Labs, and they have a wonderful website with a lot of good information on how they did it. But they basically invent the computer as we know it. All this information is going to flow down phone lines because those are preexisting. We have phone lines. We just need to hook them up. So they invent a thing called the modem. At least I'm old enough to remember the anticipation of a dial-up, the sounds that you're going to get it hooked in.

And to basically make sure these computers do what you need, they create the ability to program them to change what they do, feed it in with punch cards. And then to display that information, they put it all on screens. And with the screens, they create a light pen, but that light pin is the precursor to the mouse that we use today. So they did quite a bit with that, doing that sage. And those connected you down to your basic, your effectors, to your, to your fighters and to your service to air missile sites were the primary things there. And, of course, the thing was you have to do this at continental scales. You're going to need a lot of that. And NORADD's heyday had almost a thousand fighters on alert or available at any given time.

most of those were Air Force squadrons, about half of them were our National Guard squadrons. There was one Navy squadron down in San Diego that flew for NORAD, and during the keeping missile crisis, one Marine fighter squadron would fly F-4s over Key West as well. So they would do is you would take all this information, you would feed in, and I got to talk to one of the controllers one time, all the information would be fed into SAGE, and you do it through Punch card. So all the airline routes would be fed into this. And whenever the computer noticed something out of whack, out of what it was expecting, it would notify a controller. Controller could select the pip on the screen. It would pull up the information, give all the heading. Now, mind you,

when it's doing this, it's sharing this with all Sage computers at the same time. So that's, that's, that's the critical thing here. Now you can keep track of the tracks. They don't get lost or handed off because it's continental scale again. Then Sage would bring. up on the left-hand side, you know, what units, what effectors could affect that. And you would then select. Say you selected a fighter. It would send instructions down to the fighter unit. It would print out punch cards. The crew would feed those into the fighter. The pilot would take off, the 102-106 series, turn it over to the computer. The computer would fly the aircraft to the launch point, launch the weapon system, which was a nuclear-tipped air-to-air rocket, the genie, and then turn away

and head for the recovery base assigned by Sage and just give control back to the pilot upon entering the air pattern. And this is all, you know, late 1950s. All done with vacuum tubes and punch cuts. You know, if you went and did a sort of structural analysis of, say, Ukrainian air defense right now, you would have sensors, effectors, connectors.

And that sense nothing has changed. What's have changed, of course, are all the details, you know, what the sensors are, what the effectors are. And then, of course, the architecture is digital and automated largely. You know, you have AI playing a huge role in all this stuff now. But the basic logic is the same.

And something you just said is fascinating. I tend to, I sort of too easily or too casually am in the habit of saying all military technological revolutions are downstream of just technological revolutions as such. And I think in a very 30,000 foot level you can defend that. But some of the examples you just gave are actually military necessity driving technological innovation that will then proliferate out into civil life. Yeah, one of the interesting things that come out of Sage as well is what today we call

the Sabre travel system. Anyone who's used DTS at the defense travel system? Yeah. You know we ultimately. Alas, I have. Yes, I just got done doing two vouchers. We have great people that they do a wonderful job. But yes, at the bottom of that is the system developed for Sage. because a guy from Lincoln Lab

set next to an executive from Delta Airlines who was trying to figure out how they could employ housewives in Utah to do reservations. Now, they didn't want to leave homes, so they're going to have to work from home. Of course, the problem was databasing. How do you, if you

reserved a seat on one flight, how did every other person know that? And that's, of course, Sage could do for you. Sage kept track of that type of stuff. And so today, your travel agents are using a system that descended from Sage. That's amazing. All right. So let's start tracking forward from the 50s to the 60s.

As we just said, there's, you know, the development of the triad second strike capability. I just looked it up while we were talking. So Walsetter publishes The Delicate Balance of Terror in 1959. So it really is right at the turn of the decade or so that the game starts to change. And then, of course, we have ICBMs coming to the fore as a major player. how does that affect, I mean, it must affect everything. How does that affect the way NORAD does business? It does because you go from this air defense NORAD that's really of the 50s,

and you get into the missile warning NORAD in the 60s, really from the 60s into the 70s. And this is what, of course, we end up with war games. Norad is ultimately tasked what we call this aerospace warning mission, which we still have today. And one of the first time is 1968. The Noride Agreement was until 2006 renewed every few years. And so in 68, they added that, that mission. And so we, but you still have the same setup,

or you have the sensors, you have the connectors. Effectors, what will touch on. Sensors, you're getting space-based infrared systems that can now detect launches. You're getting the, I have to double check this ballistic missile early warning system or beam use that are out there, around the world, Flyingdale's in the UK. So now you have these sensors. Now, of course, what do you do with their information?

Well, you have the ideal place to put it in that is NORAD. And NORAD, starting in 1960, begins to construct a combat operation center inside Cheyenne Mountain here on the outskirts of Colorado Springs. Now, what they had thought to do was to dig a deep hole and put it down there and just cover it, but we have a thing called Kiliche, very thick clay, not too far down from all these stuff runoff from the ancestral Rocky Mountains.

This is the Rocky Mountains you see are the second Rocky Mountains. And so you can't really dig like that. So they put it into the side of the mountain. It took them a while. They had several issues, but they got it up and they got it going. And a fully operational capability comes in 1966 when they add in the space warning center into the into the end of the Shaiy Mountain operations. Center. So that comes fully effective. So now what you can do is you can pick up these launches. They can be broadcast shared on the screens and then you can then notify the

layers of both the United States and Canada. They're both in the loop here. Canadians are at the screens here that there is an attack coming and then allow decision makers to go ahead and enable that second, enable the strike, get the strategic. deterrent deterrents going as well. Lance, sir, just to interject, I know you have more to say, are you, are you underground now? I know you're at Norad, are you speaking to us from, from, from, from, from, from, from, Cheyenne Mountain. No, no, Shion Mountain is our alternate to jock.

We still use it quite regularly, to be honest. The headquarters was always either here at a place called int Air Force Base, which is now the US Olympic Training Center or here I'm sitting to Peterson Space Force Base out by the, by the airport. Being in Shyamount is like being on board ship. And I have 11 months and 23 days of ship time. I am happy not to be on, not to be reminded of being on ship.

At least it's not an LST in pitching, so I'll give it that much. There's actually a second movie that it features heavily on, right? Because it's also a big plot point in Christopher Nolan's interstellar. That's meant to be Shine Mountain. And it also plays the big role in Stargate.

I'm embarrassed to say I've not seen Stargate. I'll have to check that out. My mental image is still from the 1980s in war games. How much does it look? Sorry, nerd digression fan impression. How much does it actually look like that? So when I got here, my previous, my predecessor Tom Fuller had just gotten here when they were looking at that. They take the producers into the mountain, into the operation center.

And according to him, they went, oh, no, this won't do. So they created their own. It was not as, now, as long as you, they're not as. that time it was undergoing because of this the war games incidents and we should chat with those um undergoing a tech upgrade and we still try to attack it but remember it's inside inside rooms it's really hard uh to upgrade it so what you see in in war games is not what it looks like in real life that's so funny um if you have anyone has it we did a um Colorado experience on norad and we're able to bring them in to the mountain about 10 years ago to get some good B roll so you can find that on

Google, you can see a much younger version of me, no better looking, talking on that. So yeah, Colorado experience NORAD. It was great fun to do, and the Colorado PBS, they're an awesome job with it. So, yes. Reality is so often underwhelming to filmmaking. It's really hard to just be yourself. My favorite, rather, example of this involves a casting decision, which you've seen the wire, Lance, the HBO show about crime involved in Baltimore from a twilight ago?

Yeah, I never watched it. There's a character in it called Jay Lansman, who is the sort of, you know, Detective Sergeant of the homicide division. And this is all downstream of the amazing work of this guy, David Simon, who is a journalist turned author, turned filmmaker, essentially. And Jay Lansman was a real person. He really was the detective sergeant of the Baltimore Homicide Unit when Simon was doing his reporting about that unit. And he was as portrayed in the series. He was a larger-than-life, wise-cracking, you know, real character. And when they did the show, Jay Lansman auditioned to play himself and did not get the part.

So the actor you see portraying Jay Lansman beat Jay Lansman for the role of Jay Lansman in HBO's The Wire because the real J. Lansman was not a sufficiently persuasive Jay Lansman on screen. And to me, that just sums up so much about filmmaking. And apparently Norad, Shion Matton, had the same experience. it did. Because the problem that we run into is with Shaiy Mountain and with the aerospace warning, is that you begin to see by the late 60s, you get detente. So that's the kind of the, we go through massive, we go through massive retaliation, we go to flexible response and by day taunt in the late 60s, early 70s.

And now the job of that missile is not just, hey, they're launching. You don't have to tell them, hey, we have to tell them, hey, we have. have a launch, it's coming from here, we think it's going to here, we believe it's this many missiles we have this much time. So you're taking these vacuum tube computers and trying to grind this information out of them, trying to keep adding on processors to get this. And you really have to train crews to do this. This is all manual. There's no computer doing it in the background. You're just getting raw data fed to you. So they have to train the crews quite extensively. And November of 1979, the ops floor was sitting there when suddenly there was a, they saw thousands of missiles being watched on their screens.

And three to seven minutes to impact. Like, holy cow, what's going on here? They quickly figured out that the training scenario had bled over onto the ops floor. There was a crew next door, training the part of the mountain, and it had blooded onto the ops floor. and they managed to turn it to get to basically say, okay, no, that there is not. Which they were pretty certain it was not a launch, but they couldn't be sure.

And it turns out it was a faulty processor. It happened again a few months later. And this time they knew what the problem was. And so they forgot to tell SAC, hey, stand down. And Sack, standing operating procedure, I understand the time was, hey, if Shireen Mountain doesn't call, you in 20 minutes, get looking glass in the air and get ready to go.

And so they're starting to launch looking glass when like, oh, hey, wait a minute. No, no, turn it off. So it was. Sorry, what's, say what looking glasses is the airborne nuclear command of control aircraft. Right, which the Soviets presumably have an eye on whether or not we're having that take off. So that then gets their hackles up once it's in the air. Yeah, anyone sitting in Omaha would know that sucker was going into the air. So they would have with that one.

So they, it was a realization that, that the Sage system was the best 1950s technology, $1960 could buy. So they began a big, reworking and a big tech upgrade to it. And in fact, they took the computers out of the buildings in Shaiyan Mountain

because they've hollowed out caverns and it put buildings and that's why it's like being on ship. And these buildings sit on springs to absorb if they're, is a nearby detonation. When they pulled those old sage computers out, the loss of weight caused the buildings to crush up against the top. So they had to go back in and put weights in

to bring them back down for the other computers. But one of the kind of fallouts of this emphasis on understandable missile warning is that air defense atrophies greatly. There is simply, you see parts of it go away. The naval forces Connett actually had to disestablish in early 60s. Their mission was complete. Radcom, the Army's Air Defense Command, had just establishes in 1974. The Conad goes away in 1975. We just take Air Defense Command and pretend that

it's a full command, call it Adcom. And there's only by the mid-76 U.S. squadrons and four Canadian squadrons remain. So we're down from nearly 1,000 to barely 100 by the mid-1970s. with that. And in 1981, we redo the Norahide Agreement. There is a, and there is a, it is referred to, the name has changed to North American Aerospace Defense Command from 1981 to, to acknowledge that this mission. However, it's important to note that in that aerospace, the Canadians took, put in a ballistic missile defense caveat, saying that the warning mission doesn't mean we're signing up for ballistic missile defense. And so that would, separate out any of that has separated out from NORAD into a U.S. only thing. But we will see if policy is changing on that or not.

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Terms apply. So even though air defense is diminishing as a proportional, you know, as a portion of the mission, actually, as the Cold War develops, you do get another big iteration, right, in the enemy threat picture, which are these supersonic bombers with cruise missiles. So how does that fact? It's not actually all ICBMs at the... end like that's a major part of the threat mix how does norad adapt to that yes that is that's the next wave of this is just what we described of the idea that you the soviets would be able to slip

low level flying supersonic bombers with nuclear tip cruise missiles under the do line or at least very hard to pick up over northern canada launch their missiles they have them impact before and anyone even knows anything is underway so it it would it might remove that decision space, that aerospace warning. So there is a, and there is a study from the mid-1970s, because we see these things starting, we, U.S. Air Force, NORAD, and the Canadians all begin to realize this is going to come online by the early 1980s, and that's 1981, 1982, as we first seen. So what it basically proposals what one scholar has called a thin area defense, but you would go north into Canada. And in 1985, at the Shamrock Summit, between

President Reagan and Prime Minister Mulmaruni, they sign what we call the North American Air Defense Modernization Agreement or called around here the Natum. And the Natum basically says, okay, we're going to upgrade our fighter fleets, F-15's, CF-18, basically CF-N-A-18 in Canadian colors. And we're going to push them farther north on the Ford operating locations, up on the Northern Shield, way up north. we will put them all way up there

in order to engage those bombers before they get within range and to support them will build a series of distributed operating bases that will hold tankers and a fleet of NORAD specific AWACS aircraft. Air Defense Command had figured out

back in the 1960s, the idea you could put fighters up, but the best thing to do is once you had them up was to give them some airborne command and control and also give them tanker support. because you lost most of your time by landing and refueling and taking off again. So it's ADC that creates really what has become the heart of any counterair emission by the U.S. Air Force today.

Part of that in that manner, we simplify the C2. We move into there's one Alaskan region. There becomes one Canadian region inside Canadian boundaries and one continental NORAD region. So Anner, Canter, and Connor is how we refer to them to this day. Sage is retired. There's a new joint surveillance system is put in. And instead of using military radars, both Connor, Anner, and Canner will use their national FAA on the U.S. side or Nav Canada north of the border.

Use those radars and get those radar feeds in order to carry out their mission. And so this is undergoing. We get some of the initial stuff. The few of the foals are constructed. The fighter fleets are swapped over. C2 changes out, but the Cold War ends. We never get to the AWACs fleet is not purchased. The Dobbs are only begun to do.

But this nat of the mid-80s is really what creates the NORAD that we have, really to this day, to the basic laydown and the basic force structure that exists right now. And one of the ironies of all this structure to include at the diplomatic political level is, you know, for all of the tension with Canada at the moment politically from the Trump administration, there is no Golden Dome, not to see, we're skipping here. I want to stick, I want to talk about 9-11 and some other stuff too, but there is no golden dome without Canada, unless I'm mistaken. There is no air defense of North America without Canada participating.

Is that fair? I believe if you would look at statement. by commanders NORAD would basically agree with that, that yes, you cannot, Northcom cannot do its Homeland Defense mission without working with NORAD and thus Canada. So the two are integral to each other's missions these days. Okay. To go back to the 90s, we've got, you know, presumably kind of retrenchment across the range of capabilities.

You can speak to that if you like, but what I really want to get to is 9-11, which, you know, So thank God, this architecture that we've just spent the last, you know, half hour plus discussing never really, never really got used. And 9-11 is one of the few days in which all this does sort of spring into action. What is the role of NORAD on 9-11? Yeah, through the 90s, there is a retrenchment, as you say. General Powell, when he is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 93, basically says, we don't need an air defense, large, dedicated air defense force.

So that really takes us down to that one. The air sovereignty mission becomes the most important piece. And this is kind of the third or the fourth epoch of NORAD, depending how one wants to count, is this air sovereignty to the 1990s. And the 1996 Norad agreement lays it out, and that it basically tells you that you're going to have aerospace warning and you're going to have what they call aerospace control. And aerospace control is the day-to-day surveillance of the airspace approaches to North America,

to safeguard sovereignty. So kind of a Coast Guard of the Air idea was behind that. And then there would be a defense mission on the other side. NORAD, actually from 1989, does participate in some counter-drug operations by tracking aircraft in and turning them over, you know, telling authorities where they land. They do do that. I've always there's the 1999, some people remember the Payne Stewart incident where the golfers Learjet took off failed to pressurized and flew an autopilot across North America to crash,

I believe in North Dakota, escorted by fighters the whole way just to keep an eye on, keep an eye on that one. So this does not require a lot of resources. Indeed, by 2001 NORAD is only really assigned two aircraft plus one spare at seven alert sites in the United States. alert sites in Canada and one in Alaska. And only two of those alert sites were in the Northeast, one at Otis and Massachusetts and the other one at Langley, Virginia. So when they are scrambled on 9-11, they head out to seat for that is where that was what they had long practice to do.

And again, NORAD never was able to get the tracks to engage. Norad learned of the first hijacking eight minutes and 30 seconds before the aircraft hit the World Trade Center. The second hijacking, Norad learned about it as it hit the World Trade Center. The second one hit the World Trade Center. The third one, Norahed discovered four minutes before it hit the Pentagon, and Narad was notified of the fourth aircraft being hijacked four minutes after a crash into Pennsylvania. So that was a very confusing and busy day. And the 9-11 commission report is worth, you can still find it online to this day. It's definitely worth anyone looking at to have a read on that. Now, what Nora does that day, it actually does two things that it had had planned for it. It actually grounds all with the FAA. It orders all civilian flights grounded. And it starts, this at 945 Eastern time by 1210, 4,000 flights have landed.

It turns all aircraft back who have coming from overseas that still have fuel to get home. Those that don't, Canada steps up and takes. The small town of Gander has an airfield and I want to say it's new from them, but it could be wrong on that. It's way out there. It's like, isn't it St. John Island or something like that? Yeah. way out there in the Northeast.

They had more passengers at their, they took in more passengers and the town had population. And basically everyone, every, number of the town drove to the airport, load up as many people as they could fit and took them to their homes for several days.

Got them a shower, got them a phone, let them call loved ones. So the second thing, Naur has is it issues in that day an order called Operation Noble Legal or O&E. And this in its big phase for the first, year or so sets up combat air patrols over every major city used US Air Force Air National Guard

Navy Marine Corps fighters NATO Airwax aircraft came over to augment the AAC's fleet here is steadily scale this back as the as the threat goes by 2005 there's only 24 there's 24 alert sites for this but remember we only had seven four-year-year prior so that the size has gotten bigger there. Just to pause you for a second here, just to reflect on this. I mean, I remember so vividly the combat air patrols after 9-11, like such a, it was so eerie, I think even by that afternoon to go outside. I was in college at the time in Annapolis, Maryland, not at the Naval Academy, ironically,

but across the street at the hippie liberal arts college across the street from it. And, you know, the time was crazy because the Marines had put out the sandbags and got out the machine guns. and everything for the gates at the Naval Academy, because I guess you never know when Al Qaeda's gonna hit next. But also there were these rumors circulating that the Maryland State House, which is this dramatic domed building,

was an Al-Qaeda secondary target. You know, I remember thinking to myself at the time, like, guys, I'm not totally sure that Al-Qaeda has ever heard of the Maryland State House. So I think we're probably going that front. But to what you're describing, I remember the eerie experience of, first of all, there being no air traffic.

So, you know, Annapolis is kind of under the flight pattern or the landing pattern for BWI. There's always jet liners flying above, and there was just nothing. And then, yeah, the fighters, you just hear the fighters go by every once in a while. And it was so, so eerie. Hard, you know, I realize now there are a lot of people who have no memory of this, but such an eerie few days. And I would, you know, we were talking about the early 50s, you know,

how it's hard to kind of understand that mindset. I think if we take that post-9-11 experience and reflect on it, that can give us kind of the mindset that was going on then. we've had some of many of us have had experiences of that that way that can also pause and reflect so and so I mean operational believable it's still going today in in slightly different form temporary fight restrictions over the over the super bowl for example there is still obviously a flight restricted area over Washington DC we put them over presidential anytime the president is somewhere that there's a typical operation noble legal as well but there's a

also one other interesting thing for Nora that comes out of that, and that is operational people have to establish the procedures by which a shoot down of a civilian airliner would be approved. And that has to be done by the appropriate authorities in both countries. In the United States, it has to be a civilian, has to be the one to give that. And it requires a two-star general or flag officer or above to be an assessor. So today, we have to be a. So today we have the general officers who are basically on duty to respond to these things to make those assessments. Thankfully, no one has ever made an assessment of a civil aircraft being used that way, and I think we hope to keep it that way. But if there's any civil pilots out there, please read

your no-tams if you're anywhere where you think a president might be you don't want to meet an F-16 head-on shooting flares trying to get you to turn, which happens more regularly than we would like. In the time we have left, let's talk about the present. I made reference to Golden Dome, President Trump's plan for missile defense earlier. But, you know, I'm just curious, in this new threat environment, Russia is still out there, has a lot of missiles. I don't know how many bombers they've got left. The Ukrainians took a good bite out of that fleet last summer, but they've got some.

But of course, now we have a Chinese nuclear buildup, very extensive missile program. You have North Korea, which I think can touch at least the West Coast now. And of course, you know, under the whole war with Iran we've had for the last six weeks or so, is this question of its nuclear program. So there are other potential threats out there on the horizon. I guess talk about, you know, what NORAD does today in a situation that increasingly, both from the narrow perspective of air defense, missile defense, but also from some broader perspectives, looks a lot like a new Cold War. And then I am just sort of curious on the, back to sort of the war fighting structure geometry of it all about, you know, innovations in the

sensor, effector, connector scheme of things, like what's the state of the art today? And then I guess last part of this is, does China affect the geography of it all? I mean, so much of what we've been discussing for the Cold War portions is northern orientation. Everything's coming in essentially through the Arctic over the North Pole. Does China affect the fact that China is below Russia, not to be too dumb about stuff, but it's under Russia? Like, does that affect this stuff? Is China's stuff going to go over Russian airspace and also over the Arctic?

Should the war ever come? Like, help me understand all of this. Well, I mean, the point of make on that is, you know, NORAD, right now, we, we, we don't do missile defense. That is a Northcom mission. So again, there is some, it's still in the policy realm, so it's not really in mind yet. We'll connect, will Canada be involved in ballistic muscle defense remains to be seen. With that, I think one of the things that, when I, so I got here in 2007, and what has been the story since I've been here now coming up on Lord 19 years is a steady proliferation of air breathing threats.

I mean, we saw the Russians start flying again in the late 20, you know, late 2000s, you know, newer, longer range cruise missiles, but conventional tip. And, and a, so you see these threats growing, but we're also seeing the critical difference that we're seeing is that many of these are below the nuclear threshold. They're not just nukes. and there is NORAD's looking out and saying, okay, are there

capabilities that adversaries could use air breathing ones that might inhibit the ability of the United States to respond? And, you know, we saw with the Russians, we thought we had there, are the Chinese learning, trying to learn from the Russians? You ask about China, there have been

combined Russian Chinese air patrols. you know, do the, you know, I've had commanders NORAD, previous commanders NORAD, you know, wondering, hey, what happens when, if the Chinese get Russian bases? Can they use those to strike? We don't, well, we don't know. Again, it's in the realm of speculation, but it does do with that. I will say for the, for the Chinese start, it is much like we were in the early 50s. It is, it appears to be as much potential, but is as not as much as much. actual from the NORAD, the air defense threat yet. And that will have to be, you know, that that's something that I know the command is looking at and thinking about of how to do that and the aerospace defense of North America with that change, the geometry. And yes, you know, how do we, how do we connect? How do we use the, you know, new technology coming on board to move information and data quicker to share with the appropriate people at the, you know, at the appropriate time in the appropriate manner so everyone knows them informed.

I mean, that is an ongoing drive in the command because if you go back to Battle of Britain, you know, to the present day, air defense is about the rapid sharing of one common picture and then taking the best effector and putting it against it. And that still is the task ultimately today, whether that is a low-flying, slow-flying drone or a cruise missile coming in, that remains the basic challenge of air defense. And that's what NORAT is still doing today. And I've had previous commanders, NORAD. I believe I have that it was General Chuck Jacoby, who was the first and so far been the only U.S. Army commander of NORAT,

who said back in early 2010, hey, if we didn't have a NORAD, we would need something like it today, just given the complexity and growing nature of the potential threat. Lance Blythe, command historian of NORAD. It has been a totally fascinating conversation, as was our discussion of the 10th Mountain and Mountain Warfare last year. Thank you so much for coming back to school of war, and I'm sure we're going to find other occasions for you to visit us again. Thank you so much for having me.

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