US Army War College Press

“Never Forget”: 9/11 Then and Now—Thoughts on Readiness

August 31, 2021  |  Dr. Sarah Lohmann

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I stopped by the post office on my way to the newsroom of the Washington, DC–based newspaper where I worked as an editorial writer. I wanted to mail a postcard of the World Trade Center, where I had just been for an interview with a foreign dignitary a few days before.

“This no longer exists,” the postal employee said as he looked at the postcard I had shoved into his hand. “Word is, next plane is headed for the Capitol,” he said, cranking up the radio.

A few short minutes later, I watched plumes of smoke from the Pentagon clog up the horizon as I drove by on the freeway. Cars were parking on the side of the road, everyone trying to call loved ones. The city was mass pandemonium as Capitol Hill workers abandoned cars and ran, observing the warning the Capitol was to be evacuated.

Finally arriving in the newsroom, I joined shocked colleagues huddled around the television and watching replays of the moment the planes hit the towers. The next week was like one long day. Photographers were sent to get as close to the Pentagon site as possible. Our top journalists were sent to all three sites of the downed planes to do investigative reporting. I was to analyze the events and churn out opinion pieces. With a handful of other big-city newspapers, we were given the Osama bin Laden tape—the one recorded before the attacks in which he talked about his plans for destruction and the angle of impact that causes the most casualties. Horrified, I played it over and over, stopping and starting the tape, jotting down notes, and trying to make sense of it all. For me, the burning Pentagon hurt the most. The Pentagon was more than a familiar landmark that had been part of my backyard since my teen years; it was a symbol of US strength and security.

All week, we kept waiting for the next attack. On the Potomac River in front of my little apartment, warships replaced the little sailboats passing by the small marina across from my home. Tanks and fences surrounded the Capitol. We felt as if we were under siege. And though we did eventually exhale, “We will never forget” became the mantra of every Washington government agency. This mantra guided key decisions long after the banners scrawled with those words were eventually removed from every bridge in the city. We would soon learn warning signs had presented themselves, but we had not been ready.

While Washington prepared its response, NATO was also clear and purposeful. On the day of the attacks, NATO declared its solidarity with the United States and offered its assistance and support. On September 12, it invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, pending confirmation the attacks had emanated from abroad. The secretary general of NATO, Lord Robertson, invoked Article 5 on October 2 as a result of the conclusions of the international investigation into the attack. Article 5 states an armed attack against one or more allies may be considered an attack against all. These events and that month changed the direction of my career.

Previously focused on human rights in my foreign policy coverage, I was now painfully aware—with the rest of the nation—these could not flourish in a security void. My attention turned to NATO, its expansion, and the terrorist threat to member nations from the Greater Middle East, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Mediterranean.1 I increasingly spent my time traveling to the Eastern European countries that were ready to help support the United States in its fight for democracy and reporting on their progress as they coupled new human rights standards with improved military readiness. Desiring to commit more time to my new interest in the nexus of security and human rights,

“Après Nous, le Déluge”​

August 31, 2021 | Dr. Chris M. Mason

The Taliban have retaken control of Afghanistan. The quixotic, United States-led, 20-year nation-building project in Afghanistan is over. “I . . . don’t think anyone thought Afghanistan would turn so badly so quick,” a US official is quoted as saying recently.1 If that is true, then no one read my book, The Strategic Lessons Unlearned from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold, which in fact predicted these events in detail six years ago.2 As I watched yet another foreign country imagined by the United States collapse and another foreign military built by the US Army disintegrate, I often thought of Paul Kattenberg, the State Department officer who tried unsuccessfully to alter the trajectory of American policy in Vietnam.3 By the early 1960s, Kattenberg had worked in and on Vietnam for more than a decade and knew the country better than anyone else in the United States.4 His expert advice was spurned by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Maxwell Taylor, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and  Ambassador Frederick Nolting, none of whom had spent more than a few days in Vietnam and knew virtually nothing about the country. Kattenberg was marginalized for his efforts.

In the summer of 2001, Afghanistan was part of my portfolio in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department. That summer, it was the last place on Earth anyone thought the United States would ever send combat troops. The September 11 attacks changed all that. For the next 20 years, I tried to prevent many of the mistakes that characterized the US political and military involvement in Afghanistan. As a State Department officer on the Afghanistan policy team, I wrote an official memorandum to Ambassador James Dobbins before the Bonn meetings in December 2001, urging that King Mohammad Zahir Shah and the Afghan monarchy be retained in a ceremonial role as a symbol of national unity and a source of legitimacy of government similar to that held by the emperor of Japan or the queen of England.6 Together with civilian American experts on Afghanistan with decades of experience dating back to the Soviet invasion, I also advocated against the creation of a strong, central government model for the country, a model that had no basis in Afghan history and culture. The US government delegation took the opposite path. The leader of the US delegation to the emergency Loya Jirga almost single-handedly dismantled the Afghan monarchy. According to eminent Afghan political historian Dr. Thomas Barfield, the leader of the US delegation at the emergency Loya Jirga “strong-armed the king” into recusing himself from Afghan public life.Afghan political historian Dr. Thomas Barfield, the leader of the US delegation at the emergency Loya Jirga “strong-armed the king” into recusing himself from Afghan public life.7 As long-time Afghan scholars S. Frederick Starr and Marin Strmecki noted at the time, this effectively delegitimized the Afghan government.

 America’s envoys pressed the king to withdraw himself from consideration, in effect pre-empting the loya jirga from selecting the nation’s leader. The leading American envoy . . . then called a press conference to announce that the king would not accept appointment, thereby tainting the new government as a creation of foreign powers and causing delegates to lose face. Each would now return home without having had meaningful input into the crucial question facing the nation.8

Released 19 March 2021.

The failure of liberal internationalism in the post–Cold War period requires the United States to adopt a clear-eyed approach to competition that promotes regional balances of power, emphasizes reciprocity, and creates mission-driven coalitions. Click here to read the article.

Released 4 February 2021.

Today, two-thirds of soldiers depart the US Army with a disability rating. Unfortunately, some soldiers are exploiting a generous disability system overextended beyond its original purposes and potentially damaging trust in the military, jeopardizing Army readiness, and encouraging a culture that erodes the Army’s notions of selfless service. Click here to read the Monograph.

Released 3 February 2021.

The novel coronavirus is only the latest in a series of global crises with implications for the regional order in the Middle East. These changes and the diverging interests of actors in the region have implications for US strategy and provide an opportunity to rethink key US relationships there. Click here for the article.

Released 22 January 2021.

The US military must prepare for the realities of densely populated areas as it plans and conducts campaigns. This planning must include considerations of soldiers’ health and wellbeing. An engaged analysis of urban battlespaces in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries highlights the need for essential updates to US military doctrine and training, particularly in the areas of civilian mass casualties and civilian noncombatants in the urban battlespace.  Click here for the article.

Released 4 January 2021.

The stability achieved by the US military in the European Theater of Operations after D-Day was the direct result of good military governance concurrently deployed with combat operations. The role of civil affairs in securing this stability has been under-emphasized in analyses of these operations. But an examination of the historical record of these events reveals the necessity of a skilled, effective civil-military effort through civil affairs/military government detachments, civil affairs specialty pools, and G-5 staff sections. Click here for the article.

Released 15 December 2020.

US military Joint and Army civil affairs doctrine have failed to consider the operational relevance of gender, posing a risk to mission accomplishment and force protection. A comparison of NATO and Australian Defence Force doctrine reveals gender considerations have been included in Allied doctrine in recent years. US land-force operational planning can provide an example of how a focus on civil affairs doctrine could jump-start the process to address the larger doctrinal gender deficit quickly and effectively. Click here for the article.

Released 11 December 2020.

Statistics behind reported suicide rates in the military are often insufficiently analyzed and portray a distorted picture of reality. Several models for identifying individuals at risk for suicide have been proposed but few show adequate predictive power to be actionable. Instead, a collaborative and consistent effort to address core drivers at the individual level may be more useful. Click here for the article.

Released 25 September 2020.

US security force assistance missions to Arab partner states have had limited success, due in part to a tendency to impose American doctrine, which embodies American cultural values and norms, on Arab armed forces. Accordingly, US security force assistance missions should train Arab partners to fight in a manner better suited to their own cultural preferences and operational requirements. Click here for the article.