CIPHER BRIEF EXPERT PERSPECTIVE – Just before 3:00 p.m. local time just outside the Strait of Hormuz, the Safety Officer aboard the USS ENTERPRISE called to tell me to turn on the TV because something was happening in New York.
What I saw, was the North Tower of the World Trade Center on fire and television commentators speculating about whether the blaze was due to an accident or a terror attack. Moments later, the question was answered, when from my captain’s chair on the bridge, I saw the second aircraft hit the South Tower.
We were on our way home at high speed from a six-month deployment with a scheduled port visit in South Africa, but it seemed clear at that moment that we weren’t going anywhere. It also seemed clear that any terror attack would have been initiated from somewhere in the Middle East. So, we slowed the ship and after a few hours of speculation regarding whether we would be sent back into the Arabian Gulf or toward Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was likely located, we began moving toward Pakistan. We arrived the next morning, ready to respond to the attack.
Of course, a month was required for diplomacy to work – or not work – and on October 7, we joined a large coalition force in what became known as Operation Enduring Freedom.
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I would suggest that our initial response was right and proper. We went after the perpetrators of that horrific attack in order to bring them to justice. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies dropped their barriers to cooperation and have largely kept us safe at home from overseas terror threats ever since.
Unfortunately though, we fell into the temptation of believing that changing the enduring culture of an entire nation was the key to preventing such an attack from ever occurring again. Thus, we began a twenty-year war which expanded to Iraq and cost our nation enormous resources in blood and treasure.
We had neither the resources nor the support of the American people to win such a war, but we doggedly continued to prosecute it anyway. Perhaps the effort succeeded in preventing future nation-supported terror attacks directly against our nation, but it is not hard to conclude that there were less costly ways to do it.
Meanwhile, the world changed around us.
Our post-Cold War moment of singular power eroded, our national debt increased astronomically, technology raced forward at a dizzying pace, a fentanyl threat emerged from overseas that now kills more Americans every two weeks than the number of those who perished on 9/11. We experienced a debilitating pandemic, and as a nation, we descended into deep political divisions.
While we were distracted in Afghanistan and Iraq, and our own military modernization took a back seat to counterinsurgency, a more substantial threat from China emerged and Beijing wasted no time building its own power base.
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Today, we find ourselves relatively safe from a persistent but weakened terror threat but we’re still playing catch up in both intelligence and military capability and capacity in order to deter or defeat an economically and militarily powerful threat to our interests.
We still have difficult work to do as a national security enterprise to keep our nation safe from threats, both old and new. That work includes finding more clever “ways” in the face of ever-tightening “means” in order to continue to protect our “ends.”
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