Morning Ed: 9/11 and National Security

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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20 Responses

  1. fillyjonk says:

    911a: I had forgotten about the 2003 blackout but now that he mentions it, I remember coming home that day from work (prepping for the start of classes) and flipping on the TV and seeing New Yorkers streaming home on foot, and my first thought was “Oh s***, there’s been another attack” and I also remember my relief finding out it was “just” a power outage.

    This reminds me of how old I really am: my incoming students this year were babies or toddlers when it happened. They have no memory of it. I have more vivid memories of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation (I was like 4) than they do of this.

    I still don’t know – and never will, probably – why they closed my campus (1000 miles from any of the stuff that happens) that day: whether it was out of respect for lives lost/in consideration for any students who might have lost loved ones, or out of fear that something might happen even here, and better to have the students either contained in the dorms or at home than out walking around campus….Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to fillyjonk says:

      I remember the 2003 blackout because I had to walk from my law school on Worth Street to 68th street with a heavy backpack.Report

      • Anne in reply to LeeEsq says:

        2003 blackout was the day I foolishly wore flip flops in for a quick trip to grad school at E 78th street between 5th and Madison. Had to walk all the way home to basically the Ditmars stop in Queens…five and a half miles IN FLIP FLOPS temperature in high 90’s and high humidity …it really sucked. Spent the rest of the night outside the local pub with the neighborhood gang till we had to go eat some ones ice cream that was at great risk of melting.Report

  2. Michael Cain says:

    911b: The link leads to the same National Interest article on diesel submarines as the second link in NS4. “Canada” doesn’t appear in that article.Report

  3. atomickristin says:

    NS1 – semi-serious question…do men really tell important state/industrial secrets to Eastern European prostitutes? That’s a concept I really have an extremely hard time believing.Report

  4. Kolohe says:

    Ns4- I should have included this Popular Mechanics article as a two link set. Pop Mech uses the National interest article as its jumping off point, but provides the case of why the USN is reluctant to include and/or switch over to diesel or otherwise non-nuke subs.

    (The main thing is that the USN is built to play away games, while an SSK/SSP is better when you have home field advantage)Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kolohe says:

      You’d need a covert sub tender to effectively play away games with Diesels. We could do it , but is it worth it?Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        How do you have a ‘covert’ sub tender? Or is this something that looks like a regular cargo ship but is secretly a tender? (to that I would reply that ‘white’ i.e. neutral shipping hasn’t fared to well in the 100+ years of submarine warfare either)Report

        • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kolohe says:

          Yep, cargo ship that is a tender. Of course, given how much commercial ship tracking there is these days, a lonely freighter that does not look like it’s doing anything much except turning lazy circles would be spotted in a minute.

          Nukes still better.Report

          • Kolohe in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

            Yeah, covert sustainment capability works for low intensity and/or asymetric warfare (or so I’ve heard), but its really hard to hide logistics from modern C4ISR systems once they start supporting a big op.

            (This is also why ‘War with North Korea just on word of dependent evac’ is a somewhat flawed premise – even with existing theater stuff, we’d have to move a lot more in before making a move, which is exactly what we did in Iraq, both times)

            Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to Kolohe says:

      Combine these with the announcement that Boeing has won a contract to develop a refueling drone for the Navy and there’s only one conclusion: the planners have figured out that aircraft carriers and nuclear subs are too expensive to risk in China’s backyard. Or at least are quickly becoming so.Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Michael Cain says:

        The Navy just stood up the first underwater drone squadron. It is, IIRC, a recon squadron, but how far away do you think the Navy is from developing armed drones that can quietly sit near the bottom until they get an ELF pulse?Report

        • Kolohe in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          The US decommed its ELF sites around 15 years ago now.

          Edit to add – whatever y’all did to the site recently, it worked and things are better. I’m able to now see my posts right away for the first time in a few weeks. Thanks.Report

        • Michael Cain in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          Is the US going to play by the rules? As I read the definitions, that’s an unarmed mobile non-contact mine, which comes with lots of restrictions on deployment and arming. There’s always the basic question: which US strategic goals are met by deploying a hundred (a thousand?) smart mines in the South China Sea? What happens when one of them malfunctions in a way that torpedoes a Japanese-flagged supertanker full of crude oil?

          Not to mention, it’s not an arms race I want to get into with, say, China. The thought of a thousand Chinese smart mines 13 miles off every West Coast port makes me nervous.Report

      • Kolohe in reply to Michael Cain says:

        I don’t think the US Navy is leaning into remote/autonomous underwater vehicles all that much – as in, sure its researching them, but are not building an entire transformative infrastructure around them, the way say, Naval Reactors was stood up in the 50s for the nuke sub force (or how carriers became practically their own branch of the Navy when battleships were still the queens). The USN institutionally is certainly not currently leaning away from the primacy of the nuclear sub as its fundamental building block of undersea warfare.

        I think the air picture is more mixed, but again, I don’t think they’re leaning away from human aviators in cockpits as much as some outside the community expect and/or would like to see.Report

  5. Kolohe says:

    I got to remember next year that this I saw more “I was against the war in Afghanistan from the beginning” takes this year then ever before.Report