But now that I've broken my silence and am in here yakking - I'm Seriously not trying to JAQ off here, these are my best questions freely offered to be killed for good.
Thanks for the questions, it has been a while since anyone has offered anything to think about.
As someone who once believed in NORAD not-quite-stand-down-but-something-askew theories, I always did find the war games occuring that day as rather odd coincidences. VG and IIIRC Global Guardian at least are known to be happening, perhaps Northern Vigilance too. The level of suspicion I invested was out of whack, but in your opinion of wargame scheduling, is this unusual to have that many on a given day and how unusual? Are we way crazy for ever thinking that odd, and what are the odds? (on any given day...)
I think on first blush it's reasonable to arch the eyebrows at several major air defense exercises occurring right when 9/11 was happening. But there's a few factors to take into account.
Firstly, to address one, Northern Vigilance was an operation, not an exercise, and was the standard response to such Russian activities. The press release NORAD issued for the operation commented that NORAD had conducted a smaller operation recently in response to a different Russian exercise.
In addition, Northern Vigilance occurred within Alaska and Canada NORAD Regions, which are of course equipped with their own fighter squadrons (off the top of my head I think the US has about eight and Canada has two up there). As such the operation was never going to involve continental Region fighters, let alone the alert fighters. Perhaps some AWACS and other support units may have deployed northward from CONR, but they were not in play on 9/11 anyway.
This protocol, where one nation would conduct an exercise and the other would "shadow" it with an operation was standard throughout the Cold War, and continues to this day. Aside from the excellent opportunity that it offers, it's also just sensible - an "exercise" would be the perfect cover to forward deploy units for a surprise attack. By countering that exercise with a real world deployment of your own, you encourage the other nation to think twice about attempting anything.
That does, however, still leave two major exercises, occurring at the same time, and that might raise suspicion, but if you look a bit closer, you'll see why it's a non issue. The clue is in the name, and there's a third exercise that's seldom mentioned, called Apollo Guardian, and that should give away the clue. They're all called Guardian.
That's because they're all part of the
same exercise. Guardian is a multi-agency "doomsday" exercise. In the event of a major nuclear attack multiple US DOD agencies have to cooperate to protect the US, and so they exercise together, and of course each have their own nicknames for their part of the exercise.
To explain, most people refer to the military operations of the Persian Gulf War as "Desert Storm", but that was only the name for the US contingent - every other nation had its own nickname. Operation Granby was the UK contingent, Operation Friction was the Canadian contingent, Opération Daguet was the French contingent, Operation Damask was the Australian contingent, and so forth.
So, with regards the Guardian exercises, "Vigilant" was NORAD, "Global" was US Strategic Command, and "Apollo" was US Space Command.
In that regard it was not suspicious or noteworthy that these exercises occurred together, but both
normal and
necessary.
Also, on ADIZ and domestic response over continental airspace, I never did figure out what lead pilot Duff meant about suiting up to scramble when he heard a trans-continental flight was hijacked. Most agree there was no normal protocol for such a scramble, only if incoming off the oceans. So did he just misremember for dramatic effect or what?
I think the explanation there is it's a bit more than just a pilot overhearing a hijacking report. Timothy Duffy took the original call from TRACON asking for Otis to scramble fighters. He was an alert pilot, but he was also Director of Operations (or some other similar command role) on the day. Protocol or not, the military are all about contingency, being prepared, and trying to keep options available. If no scramble was made, all he and Nash would do by getting ready was waste some of their own time - hardly an issue given their job is basically to sit around and wait all day to be scrambled.
But if a scramble did occur, they'd be one step ahead of the game, and able to respond faster.
Also to clarify, there was a standard protocol for a trans-continental hijacking scramble, but it was slow and ungainly, and it wasn't successful on 9/11 because the key link in the chain was missing (hijack coordinator at FAA headquarters).
I like to put this in the context of my own job, and perhaps you can do something similar to better understand it. One of my jobs on the film set is to bring actors on and off the set as requested by the First AD. If some other crew member comes up to me and says "hey I think they want the cast on set now" obviously I'm not going to herd em all in there. The First AD is going to make that call, when they're ready. But I can do a check and make sure I know where all of my cast are, and be standing by, so if the First AD
does ask for the cast I can get them on set all the quicker. Worst case scenario I stand tense and ready for ten minutes when I could be having a coffee. Best case scenario I do my job just that little bit better than I otherwise would.
