As of today twelve years have passed since the attacks on September 11, 2001. I’ll leave it to others to provide remembrances of the events of the day.
Instead, I’ll repeat something I began saying shortly after those events and have repeated often: we haven’t prevented any of the critical success factors that lead to the attacks and, consequently, similar attacks are just as likely as they were on September 10, 2001.
A “critical success factor” for a process is a process without which the process would not take place. Most processes have critical success factors. For the process of buying a house, for example, one of the critical success factors is having money and/or the financing to make the purchase. In addition to critical success factors some processes depend on interrelated clusters of factors, none of them critical by themselves but critical in combination.
Judging by the federal government’s actions over the last twelve years, federal officials believe that the critical success factors behind the attacks included inadequate security theater at airports, Taliban rule in Afghanistan, inadequate gathering of information, and Osama bin Laden. Essentially, I think that’s hooey. I don’t believe that any of those were critical success factors for the attacks.
I’ve avoided delineating what I see as the critical success factors behind the attacks but I’ll give you an example. Once aliens enter the United States we don’t monitor their activities or movements. We lose track of them. I think we’re understandably reluctant to change that but if you consider the events of leading up to the attacks it’s obvious that was a factor critical to their success. As supporting evidence (and evidence refuting that inadequate information gathering was a critical success factor) I would submit the Boston Marathon Bombing of last year. Strict monitoring of the movements and activities of resident aliens would have made that impossible.
One of the things about critical success factors is that inhibiting any of them ends the process. I think it’s arguable that one of the critical success factors behind the 9/11 attacks was the stationing of U. S. troops in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. If that’s the case we have already done everything we need to do to prevent a future 9/11 and everything else we’ve done over the last twelve years to that end has been waste motion.
These are things that I think are worth debating so that, at the very least, we understood the trade-offs we’re making. I completely understand why we’re reluctant to intercept any of the critical factors that leave us vulnerable to attack. Sadly, we’ve decided to do things which have very little to do with avoiding other attacks similar to those we experienced on that day. That almost 70% of Americans believe that another attack is at least somewhat likely suggests that many people have an intuitive understanding of the shortcomings of what we’ve done.
Typical of Amerikans to sacrifice their liberty for a 30% reduction in risk. Hell, they submit to insurance, which returns some 2% to 80% of premiums. And lotteries, which pay half the meager winnings to the gummint in taxes.
The smart ones are those who play roulette or blackjack, which are fun and return 95% or more.
C’mon, jimbino, you know better than that. By its nature insurance shouldn’t return to everyone premiums paid, otherwise everyone would self insure and for those it does, you have had a hell of a bad losing streak.
As for blackjack, I don’t gamble (I have enough risk in my business) but I’ve heard that a skillful player can win 48% against the house. And then you pay your winnings in taxes. You DO report your winnings, right?
I’ve been really busy and didn’t even notice it was 9/11 until I saw the base flags a half mast. I did take a moment to remember LCDR Vince Tolbert, a fine officer I served with who was killed in the Pentagon.
So it’s a coincidence that we’ve experienced no major Al Qaeda attacks in the last 12 years? Did Al Qaeda lose interest?
If they lost interest then I guess we’d better analyze the critical factors that caused them to lose interest. Here’s my guess: We raised the difficulty level in getting armed guys onto planes, we blew up their havens, we killed their leadership and we instituted covert surveillance that enabled the blowing up of said leadership as well as hampering the movement of money.
See, call me crazy, but if I wanted to blow something up in the US, I think I’d probably want to call my good friend Abdul and. . . Wait, what? Abdul got blowed up? Okay then, I’ll just call up my friend Achmed. . . Hmmm, no answer. Possibly because he got blowed up. How about Aziz? Dead? Um. . . Okay, I’m going to. . . Oh, shit, is that drone I see up there?
Here’s a way to test this in the real world. Let’s bomb Cupertino and start shooting a different Apple executive every week and see if it delays the next iPhone. Because I kind of think it will.
The surveillance has had an effect. If you cant use the phone to communicate, or email, you pretty much have to use people to people communication. That makes it inefficient and likely to fall apart. Try getting 10 people together for dinner without using the phone or email. Of course, singletons and small groups can still attack successfully.
That said, I think the biggest difference is just that people are more aware. They never even thought about it before 9/11.
Steve
Eight years elapsed between the first attack on the World Trade Center (1993) and the second (2001). Largescale terrorist attacks aren’t like busses. One doesn’t come along every hour. I think it’s arguable that fighting closer to the home ground of the folks that were attacking us has drawn activity away from us. Of course, we’re phasing that out now so we’ll have a handy test. But, as I noted in my post, it may be the case that just removing our troops from Saudi Arabia was enough.
Alternate experiment: shoot a different McDonalds franchise manager once a week and see if the number of franchises goes down.
We’ve spent something between $1 and $3 trillion over the last 12 years on security, beyond what we were spending prior to that. Is it your position that all of that was money well spent? I think that only a relatively small fraction of it was.
Totally off-topic, but how savvy was Putin? Perfectly calibrated editorial, if you overlook the fact that he’s lying about who did what to whom. I hate everything about him but I kind of love him.
Barchetta,
I don’t play blackjack, roulette, lotteries or the insurance game. I consider it a mental and economic shortcoming to invest in something that returns less than 100%. Of course, it’s worth paying for fun, and while blackjack, roulette and even lotteries and bingo can be fun, insurance sure isn’t.
Furthermore, it’s well-known that savvy blackjack player can gain a return of over 100%. Yes, a person is required to pay taxes on gambling winnings, but they can be offset by losses. Too bad they can’t be offset by the sure losses, over the long term, represented by insurance.
What really needs to be said is what was repeated in my law school classes:
We want accidents to happen. (Likewise, we want terrorist catastrophes to occur.) Why? Because the costs incurred in prevention of all accidents and all terrorists catastrophes are too high to bear as long as we have important needs besides security, like liberty, air, water, travel and free speech, to name a few.
We have defeated the Soviet Union and are winning over the terrorists, but we have become them!
American’s are generally plagued by a short attention span. If something doesn’t work properly, within minutes of activation, they become frustrated. The now mode is what they not only want but also expect. So, it seems behaviorally normal, that after 12 years of few-and-far-between personally-felt acts of terrorism, many might conclude we are guarded better by our growing and more dominant means of surveillance.
I do think increased public awareness, aided and abetted by greater surveillance efforts, has put a perceived ‘iron dome’ around the potential of attack. However, I also believe that much of the relative calm we have experienced, has simply been due to old-fashioned luck and American self-determinism. For instance, certain attacks that didn’t happen were foiled because the bomb was faulty, didn’t detonate, and the public rose up and intervened, i.e. shoelace and Central Park bombers, not because of any sophisticated deterrence or precognition on the part of government forces. Also, the past bombings in Boston have shown that we still have sloppy on-the-ground follow-through and flawed suspect monitoring. Nonetheless, by continually injecting fear into the hearts and minds of our citizens, government entities mightily argue for their vital importance, as they concomitantly minimize the creeping powers and breath of the secretive NSA, or the long term, unimagined impact such privacy trespasses might inflict on our individual Constitutional rights
Military minds, however, have questioned such current-day assurances, that the quid pro quo, of exchanging individual rights for safety, has indeed secured a more reliable terror-free zone in this country. In fact, their most recent assessment has been Americans are actually less safe, the last 5 years, than they were before so many life-changing precautions and privacy intrusions became government-sanctioned procedures. So, the lack of another spectacular 911 event may merely reflect a pause in terrorist activity, Consequently, IMO, we are still very susceptible to the ambitious hatred and lengths of their retribution these terrorists are willing to carry out, in order to wound this country. IOW, it may be just a matter of time, and waiting for the right moment for yet another 911 to be implemented and fulfilled.
Regarding Putin’s NYT opinion piece — all I can say is that, unlike our president, Putin is a skilled strategist. His letter was precisely crafted, displaying an ingenious statesmanlike quality that will cajole and fool many. Putin has not only managed to overturn a stupid mistake by our administration, but, at the same time, create a brilliant outcome for himself, revitalizing his image and presence on the world stage. While we may have the biggest, baddest military in the world, if the governance behind it is so inept and directionless, it could be the smaller, craftier country, one with cunning and foresight, who wins out. It’s reminiscent of a David and Goliath kind of struggle, except this time, with Obama as our leader, we have become the fabled Goliath.
Jan:
My entire life I’ve heard how bad we Americans are at playing the game. But we just keep winning. In this case we seem to have gotten 110% of what we wanted at zero cost, so, how badly are we playing? Isn’t getting everything you want kind of the definition of success?
The thing to remember is this: every time the cards are dealt we get two aces to start with. How clever do you have to be when you always start with a great hand?
Michael,
We are still a young and rather brash nation. I really don’t know what to make of it, as to why we have survived all the ensuing ups and downs since our creation. However, you’re right, we do seem to have acquired a lot of aces to play out our hands.
However, luck, especially undeserved or reckless luck does run out. And, I simply have an uneasy, ‘bad’ feeling about how our foreign policy is being constructed and then employed, as well as the end game it is inspiring.
In this case we seem to have gotten 110% of what we wanted at zero cost, so, how badly are we playing? Isn’t getting everything you want kind of the definition of success?
I actually don’t see it the way you do, as to getting what we wanted.
For one thing, what we wanted, what we even earlier called for, has changed over time, and been defanged in it’s demands. We earlier insisted that we were going to get Assad out of power. That was not acted on, and hasn’t happened. Now we are insisting that all chemical weapons be accounted for and destroyed. But, time has elapsed, weapons have been moved, and we don’t even have full knowledge of how much or where these chemicals ever are! So, with so little to go on, how can these big demands even be met?
On paper, and via challenging rhetoric it is all very satisfying — a 110% satisfaction, according to you. But, I only see muscular words and convoluted ploys to get the job done.
In the meantime, I believe, 110%, that Putin is the one with the well-played hand — aces or no aces.