Template:(6:30 a.m.) September 11, 2001: NORAD on Alert

(6:30 a.m.) September 11, 2001: NORAD on Alert for Emergency Exercises
Lieutenant Colonel Dawne Deskins and other day shift employees at NEADS start their workday. NORAD is conducting a week-long, large-scale exercise called Vigilant Guardian. Deskins is regional mission crew chief for the Vigilant Guardian exercise.

Vigilant Guardian is described as “an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide”; as a “simulated air war”; and as “an air defense exercise simulating an attack on the United States.” According to the 9/11 Commission, it “postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union.” Vigilant Guardian is described as being held annually, and is one of NORAD’s four major annual exercises. However, one report says it takes place semi-annually.

Accounts by participants vary on whether 9/11 is the second, third, or fourth day of the exercise. Vigilant Guardian is a command post exercise, and in at least some previous years was conducted in conjunction with Stratcom’s Global Guardian exercise and a exercise called Apollo Guardian. All of NORAD is participating in Vigilant Guardian on 9/11. Vanity Fair reports that the “day’s exercise” (presumably Vigilant Guardian) is “designed to run a range of scenarios, including a ‘traditional’ simulated hijack in which politically motivated perpetrators commandeer an aircraft, land on a Cuba-like island, and seek asylum.” However, at NEADS, most of the dozen or so staff on the operations floor have no idea what the exercise is going to entail and are ready for anything.

NORAD is currently running a real-world operation named Operation Northern Vigilance. It may also be conducting a field training exercise calling Amalgam Warrior on this morning. NORAD is thus fully staffed and alert, and senior officers are manning stations throughout the US. The entire chain of command will be in place and ready when the first hijacking is reported. An article later says, “In retrospect, the exercise would prove to be a serendipitous enabler of a rapid military response to terrorist attacks on September 11.”

Colonel Robert Marr, in charge of NEADS, will say: “We had the fighters with a little more gas on board. A few more weapons on board.” However, Deskins and other NORAD officials later are initially confused about whether the 9/11 attacks are real or part of the exercise