It’s hard to believe that 10 years have passed since 9/11, the tragedy that changed our country forever. All of us who are old enough to remember that day can recall where we were when we first heard the news that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City.
At the time I was stationed at Fort Meade, Md. serving as the Director of Operations for the 70th Intelligence Wing, the Air Force component of the National Security Agency. I had left the Pentagon two months earlier.
On that fateful day we were briefing the Deputy Director of that agency on a new concept called Air Force National-Tactical Integration. The concept was designed to provide nationally-derived intelligence information to combat forces in near-real-time. We never finished the briefing. Mid-way through, the door opened and an aide told the Deputy Director that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center.
Like everyone else, we knew at that point that our nation had been attacked. We went on a war-footing immediately and that night we received the green light to implement our concept.
We were the first to provide specialized intelligence to the fighter units patrolling our airspace. By the time the first American forces had entered Afghanistan, we had already provided aircrews with vital national intelligence they wouldn’t have received otherwise.
That same spirit of innovation characterized the response of the entire U.S. Intelligence community. Awakened from a stupefying slumber during which we had missed the signs that al-Qaida was planning to attack us, we came back with a vengeance in an effort to save our country and avenge those who had perished or been wounded in the terrible attacks.
Today we have gone far beyond our initial responses to the 9/11 attacks. We have made giant strides in collection, processing, and data mining that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Now we can sift through terabytes of data and provide relevant information to combat forces from anywhere in the world and we can do it in real-time. That is the signal achievement of our Intelligence Community during the past ten years.
Programs such as the Real-Time Regional Gateway (RT-RG in intel-speak) and the Distributed Common Ground System have, in fact, saved the lives of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines because they help provide an unparalleled view of the battlespace. They are “key enablers” for our combat forces.
These programs are among those that have changed how we fight wars because they brought the information age into the combat zone. Many of these programs were at least partly developed right in this area. Fort Belvoir and Quantico are “in the fight” and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
That is something worth noting as we remember what happened to our nation a decade ago.
Cedric Leighton lives in Lorton and is the Founder and President of Cedric Leighton Associates, a Washington area strategic risk and management consultancy.
