WHAT IT IS

The National Defence Management Center of the Russian Federation — Национальный центр управления обороной Российской Федерации, НЦУО РФ (NTsUO; written NDMC in English-language copy) — is the Ministry of Defence's permanent, 24-hour strategic command-and-control and situational-awareness centre. It sits in the reconstructed "Third House of the Ministry of Defence" at Frunzenskaya Embankment, 22 (building 17 in the Russian-language listing), Moscow, and is subordinate to the General Staff (Генеральный штаб). It was declared on combat duty on 1 December 2014 after a trial period that began in spring 2014. [DOCUMENTED]

The Ministry's own description calls it a standing organ of operational control that is single in structure for peacetime and wartime (постоянно действующий, единый по структуре для мирного и военного времени орган оперативного управления военной организацией государства). It is the functional successor of the General Staff's Central Command Post (ЦКП, Центральный командный пункт), but built as a wider whole-of-government defence watch rather than a single-service command bunker. [DOCUMENTED]

The page you are reading covers the centre — its purpose, its three control centres, its halls and displays, its computing, its networks and communications, and how it is used. The "NDMC supercomputer" is one subsystem of it, not the whole. [DOCUMENTED]

HOW TO READ THIS PAGE

• [DOCUMENTED] — Ministry of Defence statements, Russian state media quoting named officials, or multiple independent open sources.
• [SINGLE-SOURCE] — one article, one memo, one wiki line.
• [UNVERIFIED] — repeated widely with no primary citation.
• [ESTIMATE] — arithmetic or engineering inference from published numbers, labelled so.

Russian terms appear beside English. Where the public record stops (rack diagrams, bearer maps, cryptography) the page says so rather than filling the hole.

WHAT ITS PURPOSE IS

Official purposes, as listed in Russian Ministry and encyclopedic descriptions: [DOCUMENTED]

1. Analysis and short-term forecasting of the situation in strategic directions and problem regions.
2. Operational coordination of federal executive bodies on questions of the country's defensive capability.
3. Command of the Armed Forces in the tasks assigned to them, including command of multi-agency and coalition groupings of troops (forces).
4. Providing the political leadership and the Ministry with information on the world military-political situation, the domestic socio-political situation and the state of the Armed Forces.
5. Continuous monitoring of combat readiness and the performance of combat duty across the force.
6. Coordination and control of Armed Forces aviation flights.

The Ministry's launch-day language stressed three further things: modelling of scenarios on an online picture of troops, resources and the world; supporting planning and decision-making by state leadership in peace and war; and coordinating the defence work of federal agencies without friction. [DOCUMENTED]

The honest one-sentence version: the NDMC exists so that one floor can see the force, the defence industry, the logistics system and (in the combat hall) the world, and so that orders and queries can move through it at a pace and with a completeness the older, narrower Central Command Post could not manage. [ESTIMATE as summary of documented aims]

HOW IT DIFFERS FROM THE OLD CENTRAL COMMAND POST

Contemporary press (Vedomosti, 2014) put the difference in one clause: the old ЦКП could manage only the Armed Forces; the NDMC adds the non-Ministry troops and the civil agencies that feed defence. A Russian academic review a year later says the same — the centre is "fundamentally different" from the old ЦКП because it fuses the nuclear command centre, the combat control centre and a day-to-day activities centre under one roof. [DOCUMENTED]

Continuity is also documented: the NDMC's first chief, Col. Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev, had run the General Staff Central Command Post from August 2012 until December 2014, i.e. he took over his own predecessor organisation's job in the new building. [DOCUMENTED]

THE THREE CONTROL CENTRES

The NDMC is organised around three functional control centres (центры управления). The Ministry's wording: [DOCUMENTED]

The abbreviation ЦБУ for the combat centre is used in Russian press; the nuclear centre is sometimes abbreviated in other ways in unofficial copy, and no abbreviation for it is needed here. [DOCUMENTED for ЦБУ; UNVERIFIED for any other abbreviation]

What the nuclear centre is — and is not

The Strategic Nuclear Forces Control Centre is the NDMC's slot in the nuclear command chain: the room where the strategic-force picture is held and where authorisation traffic would be handled. It is not a replacement for the survivable launch-control architecture. Kazbek / Cheget (the leadership's authorisation terminals and the special communications that carry them) and Perimeter (the last-resort automatic system) are separate systems that exist precisely so that nuclear control survives the loss of a Moscow building. The NDMC is the everyday, glass-and-video floor; those are the old, hardened cousins. [DOCUMENTED for the roles; ESTIMATE for the exact interfaces]

See Russian strategic C3 for the wider chain and Solnechnogorsk SPRN for the missile-attack warning feed that the nuclear centre would watch.

What the combat centre does

The combat centre is where the Armed Forces' operations are directed — including multi-agency groupings. In Russian public descriptions it is the room that watches the world map, the threat forecast and the operational groupings, and through which orders to the military districts and branches would flow. It is the part most frequently shown on television during the Syrian and Ukrainian operations. [DOCUMENTED]

What the day-to-day centre does

The day-to-day centre is the least glamorous and arguably the most distinctive. It watches the state defence order (государственный оборонный заказ) from contract signature through production to delivery; supply and transport; finance; personnel; medical; and housing. It coordinates the federal agencies that serve the Armed Forces and other troops. Period briefings mentioned live video from defence-industry plants — figures of the order of 700 cameras at roughly 500 enterprises were cited. [DOCUMENTED for the mission; SINGLE-SOURCE for the camera count]

PEOPLE AND STAFFING

Open sources give these figures: [DOCUMENTED / SINGLE-SOURCE as marked]

• More than 1,000 military and civilian specialists working round the clock in four shifts (Swedish defence-research memo citing a 2014 press source). [SINGLE-SOURCE]
• About 500 analysts and specialists a year pass a three-month course run under the General Staff Academy. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
• Programmers are scarce; Shoigu said universities could not meet the centre's need, and the answer was the scientific companies (научные роты), created in 2013, in which conscript students split their service between applied programming and basic military training. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
• Chiefs: Mikhail Mizintsev (from the opening, 2014; a Lieutenant/Colonel General in different sources) → later Oleg Gorshenin appears in the older site text and English Wikipedia as director → Russian Wikipedia lists Col. Gen. Stanislav Gadzhimagomedov as current commander. Source conflict: command appointments change; verify against a dated Ministry release before citing. [DOCUMENTED for Mizintsev; SINGLE-SOURCE / CONFLICTED for successors]

THE BUILDING AND ITS CONSTRUCTION

The centre was created inside the "Third House of the Ministry of Defence" — the building complex at Frunzenskaya Embankment 22, historically the Ground Forces main staff and the Ministry's administrative complex on the Moskva River. Open maps place it at about 55°44′56″ N, 37°36′08″ E (already published on this site; no new coordinates are added here). [DOCUMENTED]

Dates in the public record: [DOCUMENTED]

Russian Wikipedia, quoting Ministry material, gives the construction figures: the engineering complex was built in 333 days; cost about 118 thousand roubles per square metre against up to 200 thousand for average Moscow construction; about 370 km of engineering communications laid; over 1,600 km of communications cable including 700 km of fibre-optic; a security system that gives physical protection against unauthorised entry and blocks wireless communications. [SINGLE-SOURCE — Ministry-derived figures repeated by Russian Wikipedia; plausible but not independently audited]

Jamestown (2014) reported the complex was designed to withstand a nuclear strike. The Ministry's public material does not give a hardening specification, depth or overpressure rating. A Moscow riverside administrative building reconstructed in under a year is not the same thing as a deep bunker; the genuinely hardened underground C2 is elsewhere (see Object 1335 Grot and Russian C3). Treat "nuclear-proof" as [UNVERIFIED]. [SINGLE-SOURCE for the claim; UNVERIFIED for hardening]

THE HALLS AND THE VIDEO WALL

What the public imagery shows: a large, high-ceilinged operations hall with tiered desks facing a curved video wall of tiled panels. The wall carries world and regional maps, bar-and-gauge status widgets, a news/status ticker and live camera views of roads and sites. Operators sit at desk rows with multiple monitors and telephones. The site image on this page shows that style of hall. [DOCUMENTED from official imagery]

The press descriptions add a central atrium and separate, glass-fronted halls for each of the three control centres, with the Minister's and the Chief of General Staff's viewing positions and conference rooms around them. Exact floor plan is unpublished. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

How a video wall works — plain language

A large wall is built from many identical display tiles:

• LCD or LED-backlit panels with very thin bezels — each panel is its own small screen; a controller splits one big picture across them. The seams are the bezel width.
• Rear-projection cubes (DLP) — each tile is a projector throwing onto a screen inside a box; seams are small but depth is large.
• Direct-view LED — tiles of LEDs with no seams but a pixel pitch (spacing) that sets how close you can stand.

A video-wall processor takes dozens of inputs (maps, camera streams, computer desktops) and places them as windows anywhere on the wall; operators can drag a window from their desk to the wall. The software layer is a map-based common operational picture with layers (troops, readiness, transport, weather). The wall's job is not spectacle: it is to make the same picture visible to everybody in the room at once so that the duty general, analysts and callers argue about one set of facts. [ESTIMATE / DOCUMENTED as display practice]

Which of these technologies is installed in the hall is not published. The visual in the photograph (a continuous curved band of near-seamless tiles) is consistent with narrow-bezel panels or direct-view LED; do not read more into it. [UNVERIFIED]

THE COMPUTING — WHAT IS PUBLISHED

Official figures: 16 petaflops of performance and 236 petabytes of storage, repeated by Defence Minister Shoigu and by the NDMC's first chief. At the 2014 opening and in later Ministry-sponsored films the figure was compared with a Pentagon machine claimed at 5 petaflops and 12 petabytes. In December 2016, in an interview for the film «Равнение на центр» (Dress by the Centre), Shoigu said the computer used less than half of its capacity and that its performance could be increased by more than 50%, calling it an open architecture. [DOCUMENTED]

Russian press stated the machine runs a special edition of Astra Linux (RusBITech) and uses Russian processors; the integration of information and communications systems was credited to the RTI Systems concern (РТИ Системы). Earlier site text and some English summaries named the United Instrument-Making Corporation (OPK, Rostec) as integrator. Source conflict: RTI Systems vs OPK — both are Russian state-industry names; the Russian-language article cited here names RTI Systems. [SINGLE-SOURCE for each; CONFLICTED]

English Wikipedia's stub lists Elbrus-8S processors with Komdiv-128 RIO accelerators. That is plausible but the Ministry has not published a rack diagram. See Elbrus chipset line and ITMiVT Lebedev Elbrus C2. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

WHAT 16 PETAFLOPS MEANS — AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

FLOPS are floating-point operations per second. Two numbers are routinely confused: Rpeak (theoretical peak: chips × cores × clock × operations per cycle) and Rmax (what the benchmark LINPACK actually achieves). The TOP500 list ranks by Rmax from a standard run submitted by the owner.

• The NDMC machine has never been submitted to the TOP500. The "7th in 2017" line on some wiki pages and the "fifth most powerful in the world, summer 2016" line in a Russian article are not TOP500 records. [DOCUMENTED that it is absent from the list; the ranking claims are UNVERIFIED]
• For scale: TOP500 #1 in mid-2014 (Tianhe-2) reached about 33.9 PF Rmax; a verified 16 PF machine would have placed roughly in the world top 10 around 2014–15. [DOCUMENTED for the list; ESTIMATE for placement]
• If the 16 PF is Rpeak of Elbrus-8S nodes at about 250 GFLOPS per chip (published peak for the 2015 chip), the arithmetic is 16×10¹⁵ ÷ 250×10⁹ ≈ 64,000 chips; adding Komdiv accelerators would reduce that. Power at that scale is several megawatts. [ESTIMATE]
• 16 PF does not mean 16 PF is available to any one problem: much of a defence-C2 machine is database, video and analytics workload, not floating-point physics. [ESTIMATE]

Storage of 236 PB is the second headline number. Whether it is disk, tape or the sum of every archive the centre can mount is not broken out. Whether the figure is raw or usable is not stated. [UNVERIFIED]

WHAT THE MACHINE IS FOR

Published tasks (Mizintsev and Ministry briefings, 2014–16): [DOCUMENTED]

• Conflict forecasting — run scenarios on a database of modern wars.
• A running picture of troop readiness and of the state defence order from contract through plant to unit.
• Transport and logistics — roads, rail, river and sea routes, weather, emergency damage.
• Video from industry — hundreds of cameras at defence plants reviewed several times per shift.
• Later: artificial-intelligence overlays on the same picture.

It is a C2 and logistics-intelligence computer, not a fire-control or radar processor. It does not guide interceptors; it tells the duty general whether the batch was delivered and the road is open. [ESTIMATE as framing of documented tasks]

How data fusion works here — plain language

"Fusion" means combining reports about the same thing from different sources into one record. At NDMC scale the sources are very different: structured reports from commands and districts (readiness, stocks), sensor-derived pictures (air, space, missile-attack warning), camera video, civil-agency feeds (transport, emergencies, weather) and open information. A fusion system has to (1) ingest them over different networks in different formats; (2) normalise times, places and identities; (3) correlate duplicates; (4) score confidence; (5) publish to displays and to downstream users. The computer is the machine room for steps 2–5; the networks do step 1. Exact software architecture is unpublished. [ESTIMATE]

The OS question

Astra Linux Special Edition is the named platform. It supersedes the older MSVS / МСВС troop-Linux generation described in MSVS / MCBC. The claim that the centre's network is "invulnerable" to WannaCry-class attacks (quoted from developers in Russian press) is a vendor statement; air-gapping, not the OS alone, is what would make it true. [SINGLE-SOURCE / UNVERIFIED]

THE COMMAND-AND-CONTROL TIERS — HOW THE CENTRE CONNECTS DOWNWARD

Russian Ministry material (as reproduced in Russian Wikipedia) says that for the first time a standing system of command centres and posts was created on a staff basis, working under common regulations for information exchange. It has three levels: [DOCUMENTED]

Launch-day reporting added that sub-systems were created for the centres of the services and arms, the districts and the Northern Fleet, for day-to-day activity, and for interaction with the duty services of federal executive bodies. All halls are connected to the information resources of the Ministry, federal bodies, state corporations and defence-sector organisations, in a single information space with rigid access-rights separation — in other words, one network fabric, many compartments. [DOCUMENTED]

Automated command systems named in open sources

Open commentary ties the following to the NDMC tier structure: [SINGLE-SOURCE unless marked]

• АСУВ «Акация-М» (Akatsiya-M) — the automated troop-control system for operational-strategic and operational command, often described as the family that the NDMC top-level picture sits above.
• ЕСУ ТЗ «Созвездие-М2» (Sozvezdie-M2) — the Unified Tactical-Echelon Control System (Единая система управления тактического звена) for ground forces; trials named in 2015 exercises and in Syria.
• ЕСУ ОТЗ «Андромеда-Д» (Andromeda-D) — operational-tactical system fielded with the airborne forces.
• A geospatial information layer attributed by one Russian source to the Kronshtadt Group (distributed collection, storage and delivery of geospatial data; abbreviated ЕАСО ВС РФ ГПИ in that source). [SINGLE-SOURCE]

This is the likely source of the "Kronshtadt" association that occasionally appears in notes about Russian warning-and-command computers: the Kronshtadt Group is credited here with a geospatial subsystem of the NDMC, not with the missile-attack-warning computer complex at Solnechnogorsk, whose open lineage is Kartsev (see Kartsev M-10 and Solnechnogorsk SPRN). [SINGLE-SOURCE; ESTIMATE for the disambiguation]

What "ЕСУ ТЗ" is, in plain language: a digital system that puts platoon-to-brigade commanders, artillery, reconnaissance and air support on one electronic map and one messaging fabric, so that a target seen by a drone can be passed to a gun without a voice relay. It reaches the NDMC as aggregated, not as raw, data. [ESTIMATE]

NETWORK ARCHITECTURE — WHAT CAN BE SAID

The following is a mix of what the Ministry has said and what the design logic implies. Each item is labelled.

1. A closed, rights-separated network. The NDMC works in a single information space with rigid access-right separation. [DOCUMENTED]
2. Fibre inside the complex. Ministry-derived figures give 1,600 km of communications cable, 700 km of it fibre. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
3. Wireless blocked in the complex. The security system blocks wireless communications inside. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
4. Duplication and geographic distribution. A Russian article describes network-centric exchange that spreads and duplicates functions between geographically distant reserve command posts, keeping real-time control if the visible building is lost. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
5. Link to about 80 federal bodies. The same article says about 80 federal departments and organisations are on the military information network. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
6. Secure video-conferencing. Launch-day video link between the Minister and the NDMC; Syria links to the Khmeimim command post with protected video conferences. [DOCUMENTED / SINGLE-SOURCE]
7. Bearers. The mix of terrestrial fibre, radio-relay, satellite and tropospheric links used by Russian strategic networks is documented for earlier generations (see troposcatter and Kazbek); the NDMC-specific bearer map is not published. [ESTIMATE]
8. Encryption. No public information. [UNVERIFIED / unknown]

Network plan — plain-language physics of the bearers

A strategic network does not rely on one medium because each fails differently:

• Buried fibre carries enormous bandwidth with low delay and is hard to jam, but cable runs can be cut by earthworks, sabotage or physical attack.
• Microwave radio-relay hops line-of-sight between towers (tens of kilometres per hop); it is quick to re-route but vulnerable to weather, tower loss and electronic attack.
• Satellite links (geostationary or highly elliptical) cover the whole country from space; delay is a quarter of a second per hop for GEO, and ground terminals are targets.
• Troposcatter bounces microwaves off turbulence in the lower atmosphere to cover 100–500 km hops without relay towers, at low bit rates.
• HF/VLF/LF radio are the survivable, narrow-band last resorts.

The point of redundancy is that a different physical process is attacked each time. Which of these the NDMC actually uses, and for what traffic, is not stated in sources I could verify. [ESTIMATE]

THE NETWORKS INSIDE THE BUILDING

The Ministry has not published the internal network diagram. The following is design inference for any such centre, not a published fact: separate classification domains (the nuclear hall separate from the others), physical separation of cable runs, shielded rooms, controlled interfaces ("guards") where data is allowed to pass from one compartment to another, and a separate management network. The statement that "all halls are on a single information space with rigid access-rights separation" is the official summary of that arrangement. [ESTIMATE]

LINKS TO SPRN, KAZBEK, CHEGET AND PERIMETER

Why these systems are separate

An everyday command centre has to be convenient: many people, many screens, many connections to agencies. A nuclear-control system has to be survivable and simple: few people, few connections, hardened. If you build one thing to do both, the convenience features become attack surface. Russian strategic design keeps them apart. The NDMC is convenient and connected; Kazbek and Perimeter are small and tough. The nuclear control hall sits in the convenient building because it is the place where the leadership and staff would see the situation, but the actual authorisation path is carried by the separate systems. [ESTIMATE]

The warning path in outline

A launch detected by the space layer (EKS Kupol / Tundra satellites) and the ground radar layer (Voronezh, Dnepr, Daryal, Volga) is fused at the main missile-attack warning centre in Solnechnogorsk. The result — a graded warning — is delivered to the General Staff and the leadership. In the pre-2014 arrangement it went to the General Staff Central Command Post; after 2014 the logical destination is the NDMC's strategic nuclear control hall. Whether the physical interface is a dedicated line from Solnechnogorsk, a Krokus-class terminal, or both is not published. The 1995 Norwegian rocket episode, reconstructed in Western sources, reached the leaders via the special communications — not via any commercial path. [DOCUMENTED for the roles; ESTIMATE for the interface]

POWER, COOLING AND HARDENING

What is published. Almost nothing technical. Ministry-derived descriptions say the complex has autonomous engineering systems, a secure perimeter, protection against unauthorised access and wireless blocking; Jamestown wrote that the building was designed to withstand a nuclear strike. No megawatt figure, generator count, fuel store or shielding spec has been released. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

What any such centre needs — a checklist, not a description of this one: [ESTIMATE]

• Two independent grid feeds from different substations, with automatic transfer.
• Diesel generation sized for the whole critical load with on-site fuel for days.
• Uninterruptible power supplies (battery or flywheel) to ride through the 10–60 seconds before generators take over; a data hall that loses power for one second loses the picture.
• Cooling that survives too: a 16-petaflop machine of several megawatts needs chilled-water loops, backup chillers and a way to reject heat even if the city water is cut.
• Electromagnetic protection — shielded rooms, filtered penetrations, grounding and surge arrestors, to cover both ordinary interference and high-altitude nuclear pulse (EMP) threats.
• Physical protection — structure, vehicle barriers, controlled entry, hardened roof or earth cover.

Why a power budget matters for the 16 PF claim

Taking a typical 2015 server-class processor at 100–200 W, 64,000 chips would draw 6–13 MW before cooling; a TOP500 machine at 16 PF Rmax in 2014 typically drew 8–18 MW. Whether the NDMC building houses the whole computer, or whether the machine sits in a separate data centre and is reached through the network, is not stated. Because Russian text speaks of "territorially distributed" resources, a split is plausible. [ESTIMATE]

Hardening versus survivability

A centre in the middle of Moscow, on the river, in a building 100 m from public space, is a peacetime leadership and monitoring facility. In a serious nuclear war with Moscow as a target, the working function would move: to reserve command posts, to the Grot-type deep bunkers and to airborne posts (see Russian C3, Object 1335). The Russian text itself says that functions are duplicated at remote reserve command posts. So the useful reading of "nuclear-proof" is "the system is, not the building." [ESTIMATE]

SECURITY AND ACCESS CONTROL

Published: the Minister and officials enter via controlled checkpoints; the grounds have a river quay and a helipad; the complex is staffed by the General Staff's own soldiers and officers and by civilian technical staff. The stated policy is rigid access control by information domain: a user in the day-to-day hall has no rights on the nuclear hall. [DOCUMENTED / SINGLE-SOURCE]

Not published: personnel vetting regime, two-person rules for nuclear authorisation, device policy, cyber red-teaming. For comparison, the US NMCC is documented as having a controlled-access shielded room staffed continuously by a flag-officer-led watch team. [DOCUMENTED for US]

Insider and information-security problem

The 2014 text says the centre's networks are "isolated", but isolation fails in three ways: removable media, maintenance connections and supply-chain compromise (hardware or firmware). Russia's push for domestic processors (Elbrus) and an in-house OS (Astra Linux) is explained officially as import substitution and security: no foreign firmware or closed-source code. It is a design choice, not a proof of safety. [ESTIMATE]

STAFF AND SHIFTS

Documented: the first chief was Lt-Gen Mikhail Mizintsev, who reported readiness to Shoigu on 1 December 2014; he later became a deputy minister (logistics). Duty shifts were trained and "worked up" in a trial phase from spring 2014. Names of later chiefs are not verified here and are left out rather than guessed. [DOCUMENTED for Mizintsev; later chiefs UNVERIFIED]

DAILY OPERATION

The reporting cycle

Rudskoy (then head of the General Staff's Main Operations Directorate) said at the Army-2017 forum that a combat-control group works round the clock in the NDMC; each day the duty shift prepares and presents a report on the situation to the Defence Minister and the Chief of the General Staff, so the leadership "constantly holds the situation and can react quickly." [DOCUMENTED]

A reasonable reconstruction of a day (not an official timetable): [ESTIMATE]

1. Overnight watch collects and fuses reports from services, districts, the Syria group and agency duty officers.
2. Early-morning reconciliation: the duty general drafts the situation summary.
3. Morning report to the Minister's and the Chief of General Staff's offices; video conference as needed.
4. Daytime: monitoring tasks — exercises, deliveries under the state defence order, transport, weather, emergencies.
5. Event-driven alerts at any hour (flights, incidents, tests).
6. Evening summary and hand-over to the next shift.

Daily connection to the leadership

On launch day the Minister received the duty-group report by videoconference in the ministry's situation centre; Mizintsev reported readiness to go on combat duty. Since then Shoigu — and, from May 2024, Defence Minister Andrey Belousov — has used the centre for video links with the districts, the Syria group and the forces in the Ukraine campaign. The centre's wall is also a stage: it is used for visits by officials and foreign guests. Treat the exact frequency of ministerial use as [UNVERIFIED]. [DOCUMENTED for the launch; SINGLE-SOURCE for later use]

State defence order monitoring

A central NDMC task named in Russian coverage is control of the state defence order (ГОЗ): tracking whether the contracted equipment is produced and delivered on time. The 2014–16 Ministry film described a screen showing production sites, camera views from plants and delivery status; some of the "hundreds of cameras at plants" are on defence-industry premises. This is unusual for a command centre — it makes the NDMC part war room, part industrial dashboard. [DOCUMENTED]

SYRIA, UKRAINE AND OTHER OPERATIONS

Syria. Russia's air operation in Syria (from September 2015) was run, according to Ministry briefings, with a command post at Khmeimim linked to the NDMC. Rudskoy said that the NDMC's combat-control group was used to coordinate with the US, Turkish, Israeli and UN counterparts: US air operations centres in Jordan and Qatar, Turkish air force command post, Israeli command centre — deconfliction to avoid incidents. A Russian military analyst quoted by Moskovsky Komsomolets (April 2016) wrote that "high-speed military internet" and protected video conferences connected Khmeimim to the NDMC. [DOCUMENTED for Rudskoy statements; SINGLE-SOURCE for the commentary]

Ukraine. Russian doctrine would put overall conduct of the "special military operation" under the General Staff, working in the NDMC for display and reporting. Open sources do not give a reliable description of the NDMC's role in specific operations; media pieces speculating on it are mostly based on footage of Minister visits. Western analysis of Russia's command problems in 2022 attributes them to joint-command improvisation, not to the technical network. [UNVERIFIED for the NDMC role; ESTIMATE for the overall conclusion]

Exercises. Strategic exercises (Vostok, Zapad, Tsentr, Kavkaz series) include NDMC video links to the participating districts. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

Where the NDMC fits in the war-time chain

Russian military law places the Chief of General Staff as the person who directly commands the armed forces for the Defence Minister; the General Staff's communications, displays and data run through the NDMC. A short formula: the President decides, the Minister and Chief of General Staff direct, the NDMC shows and conveys. [ESTIMATE as a model]

HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

The old Central Command Post

Before 2014 the General Staff worked from its building on Arbat Square, with the Central Command Post (ЦКП, tsentralny komandny punkt) on the General Staff's own floor; hardened reserve posts existed outside the city. Russian reporting contrasts the Soviet-era Central Command Post with the 2014 centre: the older arrangement was an operations hall with paper maps, wall-mounted status boards and many separate phone lines. The new centre unifies the displays. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

Origins of the 2014 idea

After the 2008 war with Georgia, Russian reforms (Serdyukov, then Shoigu from November 2012) highlighted poor command visibility. In 2012–13 Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Gerasimov set out a plan to put the "whole Armed Forces" on one information picture. The president's decision cited 8 May 2013; the foundation-laying was on 20 January 2014; combat-duty trial started in April; Shoigu's formal order is dated 1 December 2014. In Russian press this was the "Stavka" metaphor — a peacetime Stavka. [DOCUMENTED]

What the NDMC replaced and what it did not

It did not replace the strategic-nuclear control channels (Kazbek, SPRN, the Perimeter back-stop), which pre-date it and have their own hardware. It replaced the idea that each service and district reports separately in different formats. It also gave Russia, for the first time, a visible show-piece of command capability to match the US National Military Command Center. [ESTIMATE]

The Arctic and regional extension

Shoigu said in 2014 that regional centres in the districts and Northern Fleet would be created; open reports through 2015–16 show these as operating, and in the Arctic a combat-control "center" has been mentioned. For the regional step, see the tier table above. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

TIMELINE

COMPARISON WITH THE PENTAGON NMCC

Documented: the NMCC maintains the American end of the US–Russia hotline and its watch teams monitor missile warning (ITW/AA). Russian-side statements place Russia's Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (the national end of the treaty-notification channel set up in 1987) within the Defence Ministry; press descriptions have tied it to the NDMC, but the exact placement is a press claim. [DOCUMENTED for the US side; SINGLE-SOURCE for the Russian placement]

The NMCC is the ancestor in design logic: continuous watch, a "tank" conference room, a Current Actions Center, and the alternate. The NDMC is better compared with NMCC plus the Pentagon's Joint Operations Center plus the Defense Information Systems Agency's Global Command and Control than with the NMCC alone, because the NDMC also does logistics and industry monitoring. [ESTIMATE]

See Cheyenne Mountain for the US warning-and-assessment side that corresponds to Solnechnogorsk.

COMMUNICATIONS — A CLOSER LOOK AT WHAT IS KNOWN AND WHAT IS INFERRED

The question most readers ask is "how does the order or the warning actually get from A to B?" Public sources answer in three layers.

Layer 1 — official statements (documented)

• The three halls are connected to the information resources of the Ministry of Defence, federal executive bodies, state corporations and defence-sector organisations. [DOCUMENTED]
• Information flows between the centre and the lower tiers under common information-exchange regulations. [DOCUMENTED]
• The launch ceremony used a live video link between the Minister's room and the duty group. [DOCUMENTED]
• A combat-control group exchanges information with foreign military counterparts (US, Turkey, Israel, UN) on Syria. [DOCUMENTED, Rudskoy 2017]

Layer 2 — commentary and secondary descriptions (single-source)

• Fibre quantities (700 km inside the complex) and wireless blocking. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
• "Military internet" and protected video conferences to Khmeimim in 2016. [SINGLE-SOURCE]
• Reserve command posts that duplicate functions. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

Layer 3 — design inference (estimates)

Every strategic C2 node of this type has to answer five questions, and the answers can be inferred from physics and Russian practice even where they are unpublished:

1. How does the warning arrive? From Solnechnogorsk over dedicated, redundant circuits — a land line as primary, with radio and satellite fall-back. The older Krokus channel and its successors were built for exactly this. See Solnechnogorsk for the detail that is public.
2. How do orders leave? Through the General Staff's communication network to the strategic forces' own command posts, and for nuclear matters through the special channels associated with Kazbek. The NDMC hall is the staff end; the dedicated "nuclear" path does not depend on the daily network.
3. How does the Minister reach it? By a secure telephone and video system, within the ministry's own network.
4. How do districts reach it? Through the ministry's backbone: a fibre core with satellite and radio-relay branches and, where cable is absent, tropospheric and satellite links.
5. How does it talk to civil agencies? Through guarded gateways to agency duty services, since the connected bodies are not military.

Timing and synchronisation

Distributed centres need a common clock so that events from different places can be ordered. The standard Russian answer is GLONASS and ground-based time standards. A time error of a few milliseconds is irrelevant to a daily report but matters to a launch-warning track, where the position error of a missile moving at 7 km/s grows by 7 m per millisecond of clock error. [ESTIMATE]

Encryption and authentication

Nothing is published on algorithms or devices. For the nuclear hall, standard strategic practice is that orders carry authentication codes that a receiver can check without trusting the carrier network. This is why a compromised daily network cannot, in principle, issue a valid launch order. [ESTIMATE]

Redundancy summary

THE NUCLEAR CONTROL HALL IN MORE DETAIL

Official wording: the Strategic Nuclear Forces Control Centre ensures "authorisation and employment of weapons on the decisions of the highest military-political leadership". The words matter: authorisation is a political-military act, employment is the technical release of the orders to the forces (the Strategic Missile Forces, strategic aviation and the submarine fleet). What the hall does in that chain is staff work: show the leadership the picture (warning, readiness of the forces, status of the communications), produce the orders in the correct form and pass them to the dedicated channels. [DOCUMENTED for the words; ESTIMATE for the sequence]

Open sources do not describe procedure or timings. The Western literature on the Soviet-era chain (and the 1983 and 1995 incidents) gives a rough scale: the time from a warning to a decision is measured in minutes, because a missile from the United States takes about 30 minutes and a submarine-launched missile from the Atlantic perhaps 10–15 minutes. A hall designed for this must have a short, clear path from the SPRN picture to the leadership. That is the rationale for placing the nuclear centre in the same complex as the situational wall rather than in a separate agency. [ESTIMATE]

Training and rehearsal

The Ministry has said that shifts were "worked up" and that the centre takes part in strategic command-staff exercises, including those that test strategic nuclear forces. The annual strategic-forces exercise (Grom), where the President observes launches by the three legs of the triad, is run through the same command structure. Which NDMC element does what in such exercises is not described. [SINGLE-SOURCE]

THE COMBAT AND DAY-TO-DAY HALLS IN MORE DETAIL

Combat control. Its tasks include world military-political monitoring, threat analysis and forecasting, and the direction of the use of the Armed Forces and other troops. In practice that means the General Staff's operational directorates (the Main Operations Directorate, the services' operations departments and the district centres) have a single place to see and discuss the picture. [DOCUMENTED / ESTIMATE]

Day-to-day control. The third hall monitors all lines of the military organisation's daily support: supply, medical care, transport, construction, housing, training, the defence order. It also coordinates federal bodies in meeting the needs of troops not under the Ministry (the National Guard, border service, emergency services). That wider "other troops" mandate is why about 80 federal bodies are connected. [DOCUMENTED / SINGLE-SOURCE]

Why peace and war share one centre

The Ministry calls the NDMC a body of operational control "unified in structure for peace and war". The benefit is that no hand-over is needed when a crisis starts: the same shifts, screens and links simply change tempo. The cost is that the peacetime users, who are many, are in the same building as the wartime users, who must be few. The rights-separation described above is how the two are reconciled. [DOCUMENTED / ESTIMATE]

THE REGIONAL CENTRES

At the strategic tier there are regional defence management centres in the joint strategic commands (the Western, Southern, Central and Eastern military districts at the time, and the Northern Fleet); at the operational tier, territorial centres in army, fleet, air force and air-defence commands. Reporting around 2015 said that they were created and equipped with the same hardware family and the same software, so that the NDMC picture and the district pictures are the same data at different zoom. Subsequent re-organisations (the 2024 restoration of the Moscow and Leningrad military districts and the new combined commands) will have changed the list; the current list is not given here. [DOCUMENTED for 2014–15; UNVERIFIED for now]

The Arctic, the fleets and the strategic forces

The Northern Fleet has its own regional centre because it holds most of the sea-based deterrent. The nuclear hall at the NDMC has to be able to see the fleet's submarine status; how it is carried (VLF, LF, satellite) belongs to the naval communications story, not to the NDMC. [ESTIMATE]

HOW OTHER COUNTRIES BUILD THE SAME THING

• United States. NMCC in the Pentagon, an alternate at Site R, airborne alternates; run by the Joint Staff with Air Force support. (See the table above.)
• United Kingdom. Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood; the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms for government-level control.
• China. A joint operations command centre of the Central Military Commission, set up in the 2015–16 reforms; no technical detail is public.
• France. The Centre de Planification et de Conduite des Opérations in Paris, and the hardened command post Jupiter for nuclear forces.

The Russian centre is unusual in three ways: it announces its computing and storage figures, it mixes the nuclear hall with day-to-day logistics and industry monitoring, and it is at the heart of a tiered, nationally standardised system of centres. [ESTIMATE]

HOW TO READ OFFICIAL IMAGERY

Photos and films from the NDMC are produced by the Ministry. Read them as follows:

• Content on the wall is staged. For a visit the wall shows maps and pretty status graphics; classified detail is not shown.
• The desks are real. The arrangement of desks in tiers tells you about shift structure: separate sections by service and function.
• Look for what is missing. Few visible cables, no visible racks and no windows in the hall. These suggest the machines are elsewhere.
• The caption is the message. Statements such as "16 petaflops" reflect a communicative aim: to show a capability comparable to the American one.

This site's image of the hall follows that pattern: a curved wall of tiles, operators at desks, no visible equipment racks. [ESTIMATE]

HOW THE HARDWARE WORKS — A WALK THROUGH ONE REPORT

Take a hypothetical event: an air-defence unit in a southern district reports an engagement. This is an illustration of the architecture, not a record of a real event. [ESTIMATE]

1. Origin. The unit's command-post terminal (a Sozvezdie-class tactical system or a radio message) generates a structured report: unit, time, place, event.
2. Local aggregation. The brigade and army command centres add the report to their own picture and forward a summary upward. Some detail is dropped here for bandwidth.
3. District centre. The regional defence management centre merges it with other reports, aviation and air-defence data and civil information.
4. Long-haul transport. The summary rides a trunk network (fibre, radio-relay or satellite) to Moscow. Latency is in the tens of milliseconds over fibre; a geostationary satellite hop adds about 250 ms one way.
5. Ingest at the NDMC. A gateway checks the sender's rights, labels the classification domain and puts the item into the combat-control database.
6. Correlation and display. Software matches the item to existing tracks and places a symbol on the situation map. The same entry appears at the duty officer's workstation and on the video wall.
7. Human decision. The duty general decides whether to escalate: call the district, add to the daily report or inform the Minister.
8. Response path. A decision from above travels the reverse path as an order, signed or authenticated, through the same tiers.

The weakest links in such a chain are rarely the big computers. They are the tactical-end radios and the data standard: if the unit can't send a clean structured report, the NDMC has only what a voice call tells it. Open reporting on Russian operations since 2022 describes uneven digitisation at the tactical level, which is consistent with this. [SINGLE-SOURCE / ESTIMATE]

Latency and refresh — why the wall is not "real-time"

A system that fuses reports from sensors with different update rates has a picture whose parts have different ages. A satellite warning has seconds of age; a readiness report may be a day old. A good display shows age with each symbol. Whether the NDMC wall does this is unpublished. [UNVERIFIED]

Availability maths in plain language

If a node is available 99.9% of the time, it is down about 8.8 hours per year. Two independent nodes in parallel give 1 − (0.001)², i.e. 99.9999% — about 32 seconds a year. The catch is the word independent: if both rely on the same power feed, the same cable duct or the same software bug, they fail together. Strategic networks spend most of their money on making failures independent: different routes, different bearers, different vendors, different software. [DOCUMENTED as engineering principle; ESTIMATE for application]

Storage — what 236 PB means

236 petabytes is 236 × 10¹⁵ bytes. A high-definition video stream at 5 Mbit/s uses about 2.2 GB per hour; 236 PB is equivalent to roughly 100 million hours of such video — about 12,000 years. Storage is dominated by imagery, video, scanned archives and sensor logs, not by documents. At 2014 densities (4–6 TB disks) that is on the order of 40,000–60,000 drives; at 2020s densities (20 TB) about 12,000. [ESTIMATE]

Display maths — how large a wall can be read

A viewer can resolve about one arc-minute. At a viewing distance of 5 m, a pixel pitch of about 1.5 mm is the limit of what can be read; wider rooms accept coarser pitches. A wall 10 m wide at 1.5 mm pitch is about 6,700 pixels across — roughly "8K" (7,680 pixels) at a modest height. Walls like this are mosaics, not single screens; each tile is driven by its own input. [ESTIMATE]

ELBRUS AND THE PROCESSOR QUESTION

The Elbrus family (MCST, Moscow) uses a very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) design where the compiler, not the chip, decides which operations run in parallel. It runs x86 programs through binary translation, but native code is much faster. The Elbrus-8S (2015) has eight cores at about 1.3 GHz and a peak of about 250 GFLOPS single-precision; later chips (Elbrus-8SV, -16C, -12C) increase core counts. Elbrus is used in Russian government machines and in Ministry networks, and is the sort of processor Russian import-substitution policy favours. [DOCUMENTED for the family; SINGLE-SOURCE for NDMC use] See Elbrus and Elbrus C2.

Two honest questions remain: (1) does the 16 PF figure refer to a single Elbrus cluster, or the sum of the Ministry's machines; (2) was the 2014 computer already Elbrus-based when the opening footage was filmed, given that the Elbrus-8S entered production in 2015. The record answers neither. [UNVERIFIED]

WHAT IS UNKNOWN

• Exact building area, floors, underground levels and power capacity. [UNVERIFIED]
• Computer-room location (in the building or elsewhere). [UNVERIFIED]
• The identity and design of the network bearers between the NDMC and Solnechnogorsk, Kazbek and the districts. [UNVERIFIED]
• Encryption systems in use. [UNVERIFIED]
• Whether the 16 PF number is Rpeak, Rmax or a sum. [UNVERIFIED]
• Staff counts by hall. [UNVERIFIED]
• Backup site and its relation to Grot. [UNVERIFIED]
• Procedures: authorisation steps in the nuclear hall, test cycles with the strategic forces. [UNVERIFIED]
• The degree of use in Ukraine operations. [UNVERIFIED]

MYTHS AND OVER-READINGS

• "The nuclear button is in the centre." The Russian description says the first hall is for authorisation and employment decisions of the leadership; the president's Cheget is a separate terminal carried by the leadership, and Perimeter is a separate system. The hall is a control centre, not a button. [DOCUMENTED / ESTIMATE]
• "The world's strongest supercomputer." Never benchmarked; no TOP500 entry. [DOCUMENTED]
• "The system manages all Russian forces in real time." The official text says it monitors and coordinates; real-time tactical control stays with the commanders. [ESTIMATE]
• "It is a bunker." It is a reconstructed riverside building. [DOCUMENTED]
• "Mirror of the Pentagon." It is more like a combination of the NMCC and a ministry dashboard. [ESTIMATE]
• "It controls Perimeter." No source says so. [UNVERIFIED]

SOURCE CONFLICTS

GLOSSARY

ONE-PARAGRAPH SUMMARY

The NDMC is the General Staff's showpiece and working command floor: three halls (nuclear, combat, daily activity) on a rights-separated network, a video wall, a computer claimed at 16 PF and 236 PB, tiers of regional and army centres, and a link to the agencies that feed defence. Its purpose is visibility and coordination; its hardware is meant to carry the picture up and the orders down. The nuclear-survival job belongs to Kazbek, the Solnechnogorsk warning chain and Perimeter, which sit beside it rather than inside it.

QUESTIONS READERS ASK

Is the NDMC the same as the General Staff? No. The General Staff is the organisation; the NDMC is a working centre subordinate to it, the place from which the General Staff's duty groups see and run the picture. [DOCUMENTED]

Is it where Russia would launch nuclear weapons from? It contains the hall for control of the strategic nuclear forces, but the leadership's authorisation channel is carried by separate hardened systems, and Perimeter exists because leadership and centres may be destroyed. The honest answer is "one of several nodes". [DOCUMENTED / ESTIMATE]

Does it get the missile-attack warning directly? The warning is produced at Solnechnogorsk and delivered to the General Staff and the leadership; the NDMC nuclear hall is the natural recipient, but the circuit is not published. [ESTIMATE]

Why does the page say "16 petaflops" with a caveat? Because the number is an official claim; it has never been checked by a public benchmark. [DOCUMENTED]

Why compare with the Pentagon? The Ministry itself made the comparison at the opening. The honest comparison has to include the role differences listed in the table. [DOCUMENTED]

Could a cyber-attack disable it? A closed network lowers exposure; it does not remove it. Public history shows air-gapped systems being reached through removable media and supply chains. No incident involving the NDMC is documented. [ESTIMATE / UNVERIFIED]

What would change my view? Published procurement records for the computer and network; a leaked or declassified architecture; a TOP500 submission; the identity of the network integrator confirmed in primary documents; or imagery of the computer room.

INDICATORS WORTH WATCHING

• Ministry announcements of new regional centres or of reorganised military districts, which change the tier table.
• Procurement notices for Astra Linux, Elbrus servers or storage systems used by the Ministry.
• Appearances of the centre in official films, particularly shots of the hall with new displays.
• Statements from the General Staff's operations directorate about the combat-control group's work.
• Any independent benchmark or technical paper from the manufacturer of the processors.

SOURCES

• Russian Wikipedia, «Национальный центр управления обороной Российской Федерации» — structure, three centres, tiers, figures (accessed October 2026).
• Moskovsky Komsomolets, 1 December 2014 — «На боевое дежурство заступить!»: launch-day account.
• Moskovsky Komsomolets, 7 April 2016 — Syria military-internet commentary.
• VPK.name, Army-2017 round table: Rudskoy on the combat-control group and Syria deconfliction.
• SNEG5.com — long Russian-language overview naming Akatsiya-M, Sozvezdie-M2, Andromeda-D and Astra Linux (secondary, opinionated).
• Jamestown Foundation (2014) — Russian command-centre commentary (cited via the older version of this page).
• Federation of American Scientists, NMCC page; Congressional Research Service RL33408 (2006); Wikipedia pages on the NMCC and Emergency Action Message — US comparison.
• Project Orlan earlier version of this article (kept where verified).
• TOP500 list archives, mid-2014 to 2017 — the NDMC is absent.

Labelling reminder: [DOCUMENTED] = stated by an official or primary-type source; [SINGLE-SOURCE] = one secondary source; [UNVERIFIED] = claimed but unconfirmed; [ESTIMATE] = my reasoning.

RELATED ARTICLES

• Russian command, control and communications
• Solnechnogorsk SPRN command centre
• Kazbek
• Perimeter (Dead Hand)
• Object 1335 Grot
• Elbrus and Elbrus C2
• MSVS / MCBC operating system
• Troposcatter
• Voronezh, Dnepr
• Cheyenne Mountain
• Kartsev M-10
• EKS Kupol / Tundra early-warning satellites