United States Strategic Command

Air Force One lands at Offutt Air Force Base at 2.50pm. Like at Barksdale, the entire complex is under lockdown.

Offutt is the headquarters of the United States Strategic Command, and has been considered a potential target after the attack on the Pentagon.

At 3.06pm, President Bush passes through security and enters the base's secure command centre, escorted by Admiral Richard Meese.

The men and women dutifully working at consoles are surprised to see the President walk into the room, and Admiral Meese will later recall, "...it was tough for the military folks.

And being in a Navy school, I thought I could contribute more in a joint world.

So I went back to Omaha, and they were just in the process of turning SAC into STRATCOM.

So it used to be an Air Force Strategic Air Command, and it became a joint command.

And they were just standing that up.

He couldn't get television reception, um, so he landed initially at an Air Force base in Louisiana.

And then they decided the safest place to go, smartest place would be, um, Offutt Air Force Base, our Strategic Command headquarters.

There they've got great communications, and they've got an underground bunker.

It's in the center of the country, far from any overseas threat.

Well, and we-- of course, we have the benefit of hindsight.

Yeah, for sure.

Um, I-- in my book, I, I could tell you the exact time, but, um, at one point, General Myers turned to me and, and said, "Matt, call, um, Offutt Air Force Base Strategic Command and have them launch the NAOC," the, the National Airborne Operation Center.

That's the big-

At 2 51 PM, the US Navy responds by dispatching missile destroyers to both New York and Washington, DC.

At 4 0 6 PM, President Bush passes through security at STRATCOM, which is the United States Strategic Command's underground command center at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Now here's what I want people to realize.

At this point, President Bush, under the guise of poor communication with senior leadership and staff due to the technological limitations of Air Force One's communication infrastructure, has actually visited both bases that are responsible for Operation Global Guardian, which again, was an Armageddon level exercise being conducted at both Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska and in cooperation with NORAD and Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.

So he basically polled his combatant commanders and said, which of these three options do you prefer? Option one, reducing the strength by about two thirds of the personnel dedicated to conducting the Chimer operations in your base.

in your headquarters number two eliminate it entirely within your headquarters and we create a centralized office the smaller in the dod or number three eliminate it entirely and uh most of the combatant commanders voted for option one which they saw as the least intrusive or at least the one that would diminish the effects the least and two of them um Central Command, the one that, number one, conducted the strike in Kabul, and number two is fighting the war against Iran right now, and Strategic Command, the one that runs our nuclear armaments, both came back and said, basically, we see it as necessary to retain as it is.

Even though that wasn't one of the options, they basically wrote in a choice and said, we need to retain this capability.

It actually makes us more effective and more lethal against the enemy by having greater fidelity on what's going on on the ground to be able to enable those decisions and call for strikes.

So my view is they don't have 1,550 or 1,800.

They have well over 2,500 warheads, I think, now deployed, and their head of STRATCOM thinks it's about 2,600.

And the other thing, John, is...

The Russians and Chinese build systems called dual capable, meaning they don't have to do very much to put nuclear weapons on what we think are only conventional weapons.

After World War II, you know, they came up with a five-star, the fleet admirals, and they had a number of four stars.

Well, when they created the combatant commands, the COCOMs, CENTCOM, NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM, AFRICOM, SPACECOM, or, you know, now it's SPACEFORCE, but it used to be STRATCOM, and U.S. cyber, all these combatant commands, there's four, three, two, one stars in them.

They don't marshal any force.

They don't even command any forces.