Lockheed Martin major participant in 9/11 Global Guardian exercise

The American Monitor (TAM) is currently looking into many unreported details of the exercises that were underway during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. While the research process has been slow, tedious, and expensive, TAM has uncovered some very interesting information.

Additional work still needs to be completed, but in the meantime I thought I would share the following tidbit from a Lockheed Martin brochure currently available on the company’s website.

The ever-changing missions of the Joint Warfighter require staffs that are capable of performing their warfighting duties efficiently and effectively. Policies and procedures used by the warfighter need to be used, validated, and updated. Effective exercise planning and execution requires experienced and dedicated personnel that are experts in their functional area as well as experts in the Joint Exercise process. Intelligence scenarios need to be well thought out and thoroughly documented; event scripting must be sequential and believable; event injects must be orchestrated and achieve desired outcomes; and exercise after-action reported should be accurate, well documented, with aggressive follow-up action.

LMIT (Lockheed Martin Information Technology) Joint Exercise Planners and Analysts have supported the USSTRATCOM (and earlier SAC) Joint Exercise program for nearly 15 years. Our people are known throughout the DOD for their experience and outstanding deliverables, products, and results. The principal elements of our assistance are in the areas of exercise planning, documentation, event sequencing, role-playing, administration and observation, and after action analysis. Global Guardian and Global Archer are two of the primary exercises we support. In addition, out analysts provide similar support for STRATCOM's participation in regional command exercises. ... LMIT has extensive experienced in assisting personnel in attaining high levels of IT proficiency. We offer course in all of the operating systems. For example, at USSTRATCOM, we offer course in the Nuclear Planning and Execution System (NPES) and in the Command's LAN operations.

The role played by private defense contractors in military war games should not be overlooked. As illustrated above, companies like Lockheed Martin play a major role in large-scale nuclear and post-nuclear exercises, including the Global Guardian exercise that was in "full swing" during both attacks on the World Trade Center.

According to the brochure, "event scripting must be sequential and believable" and "event injects must be orchestrated and achieve desired outcomes."

Event "injects" or "inputs" are imaginary scenarios/threats that are "injected" into exercises in order to test the military's responses.

"I think this is a damn input," one NORAD official noted after the second attack on the World Trade Center. He thought, like everybody at NEADS originally did, that the attacks were all part of Vigilant Guardian--an exercise that was being conducted in conjunction with Global Guardian.

A simulated hijack scenario was scheduled to be "injected" at about the same time as the real attacks, causing significant confusion.

The 9/11 Commission gave a different story.