The coordinated terrorist attacks on 9/11 took the lives of almost 3,000 people, destroyed $55 billion worth of infrastructure, and caused $123 billion in other economic impact.1 Perhaps just as tragically, the attacks destroyed Americans’ sense of security. Though the United States had experienced terrorist attacks before, the scale of the September 11 attacks transformed acts previously considered to be criminal to acts of war. Indeed, the Pearl Harbor attack, which led to the United States’ direct involvement in World War II, resulted in 2,403 persons killed, of whom 68 were civilians.2 When compared to ...

On September 11, 2001, then US President George W. Bush had just completed a historic summit with his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, the week prior. The interaction built on the “special friendship” between the two nations and the intertwined commercial, security, and other strategic interests binding the United States and Mexico.1 This relationship had deepened considerably in the seven years since the two nations, along with Canada, had signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. For those of us emphasizing the importance of the US bond with the people of its hemisphere, ...

INTRODUCTION: LAST FEW HOURS OF UNRIVALED PRIMACY September 2001 was Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) season in the Pentagon. The QDR was the Bush-Rumsfeld DoD’s first crack at publicly reshaping the post–Cold War military.1 The DPG was the classified instrument by which the Rumsfeld team was to reprioritize military planning and resources to meet the QDR’s public-facing, transformational vision.2 Thousands of civilian and military staffers entered the Pentagon through the old Metro entrance on September 11, 2001, ...

The Impact of COVID-19 on Civil-Military Relations https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/ Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff There has been a great deal of speculation regarding how the current COVID-19 pandemic could affect civil-military relations in the United States. Oona Hathaway observes that after the terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001, which killed approximately three thousand Americans, the United States “radically re-oriented” its security priorities and embarked on a two-decade-long global war on terror that cost $2.8 trillion from 2002 to 2017. Given that COVID-19 could kill more than one hundred thousand Americans, she argues that it is time to re-orient those priorities again.

Tell Me How This Ends: The US Army in the Pandemic Era US Army Heritage and Education Center Historical Services Division https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/ Prepared by: Conrad C. Crane, PhD: Chief, Historical Svcs. Div. Michael E. Lynch, PhD: Senior Historian Jessica J. Sheets, PhD: Research Historian Douglas I. Bell, PhD: Postdoctoral Fellow Shane P. Reilly: Contract Research Analyst Executive Summary After the 9/11 attacks, Americans yearned for a “return to normal.” The normal they longed for was the world as it was on September 10th, or status quo ante. That was impossible, however, because the events of that day irrevocably changed the world. The new normal, the status quo post, was the world as it was after 9/11. The same must be said for COVID-19. . .. We cannot return to the world before we understood the terms “social distance,” “herd immunity,” or “flatten the curve.” The coronavirus behaves as the Spanish flu virus did in 1918-1919, then a third wave might be expected as well. Army was not prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic, but neither was the nation nor the world. Given the information now known about the virus and the expert predictions that a second wave might occur soon, the Army is better prepared to plan for potentially operating under pandemic conditions. Experts warn that a true second wave arriving in the fall or winter could be much worse than the first. If the