On 9/11, defenders just improvised

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, many brave Americans did whatever they could to defend the nation against a threat they did not fully understand.

At one point a Federal Aviation Administration manager ordered a nationwide grounding of all aircraft - without clearance from top FAA officials.

After talking to the Secret Service, a wing commander of the D.C. Air National Guard launched fighters and ordered them to shoot if necessary - though no one from the Pentagon had told him to do so.

Most of all, heroic passengers of United Flight 93, in attacking their hijackers, saved other lives at the expense of their own.

But according to the Sept. 11 commission, these actions underscore an overall theme: The US national security system was utterly unprepared for the challenge posed by the Al Qaeda hijackers.

Those on the front lines had to improvise in the face of a kind of attack for which they had never trained.

"They reacted quickly in staggering circumstances," says Arnold Barnett, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of statistics, who studies aviation safety.

That the commercial airliners in the US had been hijacked, per se, was not the problem. The two arms of the government most responsible for air defense of the US homeland, the FAA and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), had both contemplated such a situation, according to a report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States released Thursday.

Protocols for the FAA to obtain military assistance from NORAD in such a situation already existed. But the protocols were based on several mistaken assumptions. The most likely scenario, they felt, was for an airliner to be hijacked overseas, and then head for US airspace, allowing plenty of time to formulate a response.

Thus standard operating procedure called for multiple levels of notification and approval of actions at the highest levels of government.

Nor did agency officials contemplate that the military assistance might entail shooting down the aircraft. Protocols called for fighter aircraft to trail hijacked planes at a discreet distance of five miles, for example, and to simply monitor progress of the captured aircraft. "On the morning of 9/11, the existing protocol was unsuited in every respect for what was about to happen," says the commission report. "What ensued was a hurried attempt to create an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced."

The chaos of that morning was underlined Thursday in public testimony before the commission by Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Reports of car bombs in Washington and mistaken assumptions that other aircraft had also been hijacked created an atmosphere of confusion. "We fought many phantoms that day," said General Myers.

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