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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Vladimir Putin’s massive, triple-decker war room


Russian President Vladimir Putin, fifth from right, with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, sixth from right, and armed forces Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, fourth from right, attend a meeting on Russian air force activity in Syria at the national defense control center in Moscow on Nov. 17. (Alexei Nikolskyi/SPUTNIK/Kremlin via Reuters)

While Congress Starves our Military

  • The Russians have spent hundreds of billions to modernize their military.
  • Meanwhile our anti-military Republican Congress has starved our armed forces since the GOP took over in 1995.


MOSCOW (Washington Post)  -  "Gentlemen. You can't fight in here. This is the war room!"
It could have been a scene straight out of "Dr. Strangelove" when President Vladimir V. Putin stepped into the Russian Ministry of Defense's brand new, three-tiered, multibillion-dollar control center this week, for a war briefing that had its fair share of movie-like pageantry.
The fortified National Control Defense Center was Putin's first stop after officials confirmed that the Russian charter jet crash that claimed 224 lives last month was the result of an act of terror.
On movie-theater-size screens, live broadcasts showed long-range strategic bombers taking off from Russian air bases to fly sorties over Syria. Putin instructed commanders in Syria to "make contact with the French and work with them as allies" as Russia seeks a central role in a proposed anti-terrorist coalition.

LIVE: Putin chairs Defense Ministry meeting after Sinai plane crash confirmed to be terrorist attack





But the real star of the show may have been the building itself, which is designed to be a new nerve center for the Russian military that will coordinate military action around the world, including ballistic missile launches and strategic nuclear deployments.


The building is roughly the equivalent of the U.S. National Military Command Center used by the Pentagon, but as one Russian state news agency noted in a breathless headline this week, "Russian Defense Data Center Outperforms US Facility Threefold: Official."
The center, which is fortified and said to sit on top of a maze of underground tunnels, is on the Frunze Naberezhnaya on the left bank of the Moscow river, a little over two miles from Red Square.
It was finished in 2014 and is part of a massive, decade-long modernization of Russia's army, which has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, but has also produced noted improvements, from the expertise of Russian troops deployed during the Crimea operation to the recent cruise missile strikes launched from the Caspian Sea.
The new national defense center also includes a helicopter pad that was deployed on the Moscow River late last year and can accommodate Russia's Mi-8 transport helicopter. In case of a war, it would be the country's premier communications center, and one Russian commander compared it to the military headquarters of the Soviet Union during World War II.
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