The U.S. military was unprepared for 9/11 a decade ago. Up until the day of the attacks, its focus was on training for conventional wars against enemies such as North Korea or Iraq's Republican Guard. Nobody knows if or when the next 9/11 might happen, but most likely the U.S. military once again will be caught flat-footed, military analysts predict.
Surprise attacks are inevitable, and cannot be avoided regardless of how careful and foreboding military plans might be. But the U.S. military consistently tends to prepare to fight the last war because that is what is familiar, said Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
“We’re prepared for a future that looks very much like today,” he said at a Sept. 8 news conference.
The biggest lesson of 9/11 for the Defense Department was that it cannot choose what wars to fight. Before the attacks, “We were imagining the wars that we preferred. We were looking at repeats of Desert Storm,” said CSBA Vice President Jim Thomas.