Russian ‘Pentagon’: RT unveils mysteries behind walls of Russia’s MoD management center (VIDEO)
RT has been afforded exclusive access to Russia’s state-of-the-art Defense Ministry Management Center which boasts a multistage check system, over 2,000 CCTV cameras, and a supercomputer capable of calculating military outcomes.
Foreign intelligence agents would relish getting into this impressive building on the Moscow river - the National Management Defense Center which control all the activities of Russia’s Armed Forces.
“A biometric hand scans veins on your palm and the floor of the gates have a weighing platform," an officer explains.
Anything suspicious is certain to be picked up by nearly 2,000 cameras, while the perimeter bristles with sensors scanning for biological, chemical or radioactive contamination.
“The system tracks all mobile communications in the complex,” Dmitry Litvinov, head of the Integrated Safety and Security Center, said.
All personnel has to undergo a thorough medical examination before every shift as well as a stringent physical every three months. Almost all the work is highly classified, but there’s a lower security area that monitors the army’s day-to-day activities.
It’s divided into sectors where officers supervise military acquisitions and deal with medical records of military personnel. There are also analysts and those tackling training and military exercises.
Officers can, in real time, monitor military activity thousands of kilometers away, while a CCTV camera watching over the production of a Mi-27 helicopter in southern Russia.
There are officers overseeing defense systems in Crimea. They monitor reconnaissance planes snooping along the border on a regular basis, with the air defense division on constant high alert. “A Global Hawk surveillance aircraft took off a day from an airbase in Italy. When it comes within fifty km of the border, our on duty fighter jet will take it off and escort until it leaves our air space,” Victor Sevostianov, lieutenant general and air force commander said.
The disposal of documents are also afforded high-end security.
The army has its own in-house Internet, which connects every military unit, enabling the fast transfer of vital and classified information.
This building alone sends and receives 40,000 electronic messages a day.
The National Center does not only supervise the army’s current activities - with the help of its super computer, it predicts how future wars will likely play out, using past conflicts to help map strategy.
“Take the Yugoslavia war for example. It was a large-scale NATO operation. Their naval buildup, missile deployment, dislocations and distances were all subject to analysis. The machine tell us that this or that situation 90 percent similar to what happened in Serbia, then we know that this is likely to happen again and take appropriate measures,” Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said.
The computer is said to be able to process the equivalent of 850 million books per second and so far, the military is using less than half of that capacity.
