The world famous White House Situation Room just got a fancy makeover. Now Joe can monitor the Armageddon he’s starting on high definition monitors while sitting in a comfortable chair and spooning up Ben & Jerry’s from a handy under-counter fridge.
Situation room modernized
The famed White House Situation Room is a much more complex space than people imagined. It’s an entire “high-security complex” buried under the West Wing. That’s where “presidents watch history unfold and receive top-secret intelligence.”
Someone recently left their cocaine in a cubby for personal belongings just outside the door.
It’s been 15 years since the last time the secure bunker had an upgrade and it took an entire year to do it. “The yearlong gut renovation saw the ground dug out five feet to remove concrete and cables, the walls stripped to the studs, and the entire room refitted with enhanced security and technology.”
FOX got a tour of the newly remodeled Situation Room. another photo here is a newly remodeled observation room. Situation Room Director, Marc Gustafson says he hears that it looks a lot more like the movies now. #SituationRoom #WhiteHouse (pic courtesy White House) pic.twitter.com/rWBFxGXCnW
— Edward Lawrence (@EdwardLawrence) September 8, 2023
The budget for that was $50 million and Marc Gustafson, the Situation Room’s director, says they didn’t go too far over that.
Gustafson “joined the White House to oversee the project and its team of contractors who all required varying levels of security clearances to work on site.”
The way he put it with a chuckle, “the stonemason didn’t need top secret.” The more the project advanced, the construction was more “sensitive” to security.
An entire complex
While called the situation “room” it’s really a sprawling complex which “features three boardrooms of graduating size; two breakout rooms for Cabinet secretaries to phone their agencies; and a command center known as the ‘Watch Floor,‘ where a dozen staffers watch intelligence and media feeds from around the world.”
The biggest changes can be seen in the main conference chamber.
The John F. Kennedy conference room now sports “sleek, mahogany finishes paired with navy carpet, ultra-modern monitors lining the walls, and a digital board with time zones selected each day based on global hotspots likely under discussion.”
The White House Situation Room, the high-security complex beneath the West Wing where presidents watch history unfold and receive top-secret intelligence, has undergone a much-needed makeover for the first time in 15 years https://t.co/0oywCalSFA
— CNN (@CNN) September 8, 2023
When reporters got a tour they were set on “Kyiv, Tehran, and Zulu, the zone fixed at prime meridian and used by the military.”
The room is now described as “a marriage of traditional and modern.” They say “Joe Biden’s jaw dropped when he saw it this week alongside the senior White House officials involved in the renovation.” They let him cut the ribbon opening it officially for business.
As an extra bonus, they whipped up interchangeable seals “for the president, vice president, national security adviser and Executive Office of the President.” They can pull them out of “a nearby closet to be swapped out depending on who’s helming the meeting.“
