9/11 and the Lessons of Small Wars – An SWJ Editor’s Perspective
Abstract
On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Small Wars Journal Editor-at-Large David Maxwell reflects on the warning signs, missed connections, and enduring lessons of 9/11 from the perspective of an American Special Forces officer serving in Asia at the time. Linking Operation Bojinka, al-Qaeda’s networks in Southeast Asia, and the later development of Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, Maxwell argues that the central lesson of 9/11 is not only about terrorism, but about how governments understand emerging threats. His essay honors the day by examining the systems, relationships, and weak signals that preceded the attacks, and by drawing renewed attention to the small wars principles of partnership, legitimacy, persistence, indigenous capability, and trust.
Introduction
Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, many Americans are reflecting on where they were and what they were doing when they learned that our nation had been attacked. Those of us serving overseas remember it somewhat differently. We watched the attacks from the other side of the world, knowing almost immediately that what was happening in New York and Washington would soon reach us.
I was in Okinawa, commanding the 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne), and had just flown back from Fort Bragg. My good friend Maria Ressa was in Jakarta as the CNN bureau chief. She later told me that she was on the treadmill at the JW Marriott when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. It was the night of 9/11 for us in Asia.
Maria told me that she felt she had failed.
She had known since the exposure of Operation Bojinka in Manila in 1995 that Osama bin Laden’s emerging al-Qaeda network intended to strike the United States in ways we failed to imagine. Bojinka revealed plans to destroy multiple U.S.-bound airliners over the Pacific. Even more ominously, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Ramzi Yousef had discussed the idea of using aircraft themselves as weapons against American targets.
Maria had reported extensively on the growing terrorist infrastructure in Southeast Asia. She understood that something larger was taking shape. Yet, in the terrible hours after the towers fell, she felt she had not connected the warning signs or conveyed what they might mean.
She had not failed. The system had failed to understand what the evidence was telling us.
The Manila Warning
Maria later captured much of this history in Seeds of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of Al-Qaeda’s Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia. Her central insight deserves reconsideration a quarter century after 9/11. Southeast Asia was not a peripheral theater in the development of al-Qaeda. The Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and neighboring countries had become important nodes in an emerging transnational terrorist network long before Americans learned the name al-Qaeda.
Manila was one of its laboratories.
In 1994, KSM joined his nephew Ramzi Yousef in the Philippines. They began planning what became known as the Operation Bojinka. According to the 9/11 Commission, their principal plan called for bombs to destroy 12 U.S. commercial jets over the Pacific during a two-day period. They acquired bomb-making materials, conducted reconnaissance, and studied flights through Hong Kong and Seoul with onward connections to the United States.
On December 11, 1994, Yousef conducted an operational test aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434. He placed an explosive device aboard the aircraft and departed during its stop at Cebu. The bomb exploded during the subsequent flight toward Japan, killing a passenger and seriously damaging the aircraft. The crew managed to land the crippled Boeing 747 safely in Okinawa.
Consider what that single operation demonstrated: reconnaissance, international movement, penetration of aviation security, covert bomb construction, operational testing, compartmentation, target analysis, and an ability to learn from experience.
Then, in January 1995, the larger conspiracy began to unravel after a fire in a Manila apartment exposed Yousef’s bomb-making operation. Philippine authorities discovered the plot. Yousef escaped but was later captured. His associate Abdul Hakim Murad was arrested.
Among the ideas subsequently uncovered was something even more significant. Murad had discussed crashing an aircraft into CIA headquarters. KSM later told interrogators that he and Yousef had considered using aircraft as weapons while working on Bojinka and had contemplated targets including the World Trade Center and CIA headquarters. The 9/11 Commission carefully noted that these ideas had not advanced to an operational plan in 1995. But the conceptual seed existed.
Six years later, the seed had grown.
KSM eventually presented bin Laden with a proposal for an operation involving pilots crashing aircraft into buildings in the United States. Al-Qaeda adopted the concept, provided the organization, personnel, financing, training, and infrastructure required to transform an idea into an operation. What had been discussed in connection with the Manila plots evolved into the “planes operation” that became September 11.
Bojinka did not predict 9/11. But it revealed an adversary thinking differently about aviation, mass casualties, American vulnerabilities, and the use of ordinary systems as weapons. The pieces were there. We did not put them together.
We Looked for Events When We Should Have Studied Systems
This remains one of the enduring lessons of 9/11. Governments naturally organize themselves around events, organizations, jurisdictions, and known threats. Intelligence services collect information. Law enforcement investigates crimes. Military commands prepare for assigned contingencies. Diplomats manage bilateral relationships. Each can perform its mission well while the larger system fails to understand what is forming between the seams.
The enemy does not respect our wiring diagrams. A terrorist attack is the visible event. Beneath it is an ecosystem: people, relationships, money, ideology, safe havens, facilitators, training areas, communications, reconnaissance, logistics, sympathetic populations, corrupt officials, front organizations, and local conflicts that can be exploited for larger purposes. Look closer.
That was what Maria was seeing in Southeast Asia.
The 9/11 Commission later documented that bin Laden provided equipment and training assistance to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and to the emerging Abu Sayyaf organization, while al-Qaeda also assisted Jemaah Islamiyah, whose cells stretched across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.
The strategic lesson was larger than any one terrorist organization. Al-Qaeda could connect local grievances with transnational ideology, financing, training, expertise, and operational networks. Local insurgencies and terrorist organizations could retain their own objectives while benefiting from relationships with a global network.
That is irregular warfare terrain. It is human terrain. And it cannot be understood by studying organizational charts alone.
September 11 Changes Everything
There is another part of 9/11 that is deeply personal for me. I was supposed to fly from Okinawa to the southern Philippines the next day.
In the spring of 2001, our Special Forces Battalion helped establish and train a Philippine national counterterrorism force. Known then as the Light Reaction Company, after completing its training, the force deployed in support of operations associated with the effort to rescue American missionaries Gracia and Martin Burnham, as well as Guillermo Sobero and Philippine nurse Deborah Yap, who had been kidnapped by Abu Sayyaf.
We wanted to continue advising our Philippine counterparts during their operations. Our recommendations to accompany them had been denied by the Pacific Command and the Pentagon. So, we improvised.
By 2001, text messaging was already ubiquitous in the Philippines and Japan, even though it was still relatively novel for many Americans. Our Special Forces NCOs remained in contact with their Philippine counterparts by text. In retrospect, perhaps this was an early form of “remote advising and assisting,” although certainly not an officially authorized or recognized mission.
The messages were troubling. Our Philippine counterparts believed their newly developed capabilities were being misused and wasted. This was not surprising. Special operations forces employed without an appropriate special operations headquarters, proper command relationships, and an understanding of their capabilities are often reduced to being used as simply another infantry force. We needed an assessment firsthand.
Then came September 11.
Commercial aviation stopped. The world changed. I finally traveled to the Philippines three days later when flights resumed and linked up with the commander. We needed to understand what was happening and report his assessment to Special Operations Command Pacific (SOCPAC).
What followed illustrates how quickly strategic context can change.
For approximately three months before 9/11, our requests for greater support to Philippine military operations had gone nowhere. After 9/11, the same problem was viewed through an entirely different strategic lens.
Within weeks, we deployed a team, led by the 1st Special Forces Group Commander, then-Colonel David Fridovich, to conduct a comprehensive assessment with our Philippine counterparts. From that assessment came the development of a combined campaign approach that ultimately became the little-known Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines, or OEF-P. Its initial manifestation was associated with Balikatan, the longstanding U.S.-Philippine exercise, but what developed proved far more enduring.
I later returned to command the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines from 2006 to 2007. The experience shaped much of how I (and many others in Special Forces, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations) think about special warfare today.
A Different American Way of Fighting
OEF-P never looked like Afghanistan or Iraq. That was its strength. It was by comparison, a small war. American forces were not there to fight the Philippines’ war. The Armed Forces of the Philippines had to remain in the lead. U.S. Special Operations Forces advised and assisted, shared intelligence, supported planning, helped develop capabilities, and built relationships. The mission depended on legitimacy, trust, patience, persistence, and respect for Philippine sovereignty.
The American footprint remained relatively small. Far from being a limitation, that was a key part of its operational design.
However, OEF-P was not without U.S. casualties. Seventeen U.S. service members died during Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines. Three were killed by enemy action. Ten died together in the February 2002 crash of the MH-47E Chinook Wild 42 in the Bohol Sea, while four others died from noncombat causes.
Special Forces were doing what Special Forces were designed to do: working through, with, and by indigenous forces to achieve shared objectives. Persistent engagement built relationships. Relationships created trust. Trust provided access. Access produced understanding. Understanding made better advising possible.
And better advising improved our partners’ ability to solve their own security problems.
I later tried to capture these lessons in my chapter, “Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines: Lessons in Special Warfare,” in the Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations. The central argument is straightforward: counterterrorism and foreign internal defense can succeed with a relatively small U.S. presence when they are built upon a coherent campaign plan, capable host-nation forces, persistent engagement, and trust developed over time.
Those lessons transcend the Philippines.
The Lessons Continue
Twenty-five years later, I think about the strange connections. Maria was on a treadmill in Jakarta watching the World Trade Center burn and thinking about Manila in 1995. I was in Okinawa, where Philippine Airlines Flight 434 had made its emergency landing after Yousef’s operational test seven years earlier. I was preparing to return to the southern Philippines to talk with soldiers we had trained to fight a terrorist organization with historical links to the same transnational extremist networks that had just attacked the United States.
None of us could have understood that night where the indicators would lead. But history rarely announces its turning points in advance. That is why the most important lesson from Bojinka and 9/11 may not be about terrorism at all. It is about how we think. Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, in their seminal work, Thinking in Time, warned strategists against superficial historical analogies and urged decision-makers to ask what is known, what is unknown, what is presumed, and what history actually teaches about the situation at hand. Bojinka offers precisely such a case.
We knew about Ramzi Yousef. We knew about the Manila plot. We knew commercial aviation was a target. We knew terrorists were experimenting with new methods.
We knew KSM was involved in Bojinka, although the depth of his relationship with al-Qaeda was not understood before 9/11. Indeed, the 9/11 Commission found that KSM was viewed largely as a freelance terrorist associated with Yousef, and that no analytical unit had responsibility for following what accumulating information about him might mean. That may be the most important sentence in this entire story.
No one had the job of asking what it all meant.
Intelligence is so much more than just the accumulation of facts. Strategic warning requires synthesis. It requires imagination disciplined by evidence. It requires people willing to challenge assumptions and ask what an adversary might do tomorrow rather than merely catalog what he did yesterday. Bojinka gave us pieces of the future in 1995. September 11 showed us the terrible cost of failing to assemble them.
My first piece of the post-9/11 war was in the Philippines, where American and Filipino forces executed a different model of irregular and special warfare, one based on persistent partnership, advising, indigenous capability, legitimacy, and trust. We did not invent a new way. These characteristics and methods have long been the foundation of Special Forces operations. We stood on the shoulders of those who came before us.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, those are the pieces I choose to remember. And they leave us with questions that remain relevant today.
Are we studying our adversaries’ organizations, or are we understanding the systems and networks that give them power? Are we collecting indicators of what they have already done, or looking for the weak signals of what they are becoming capable of doing? Have we created institutions that reward strategic synthesis, or do we still divide information among bureaucratic compartments until no one can see the whole?
Most importantly, when the next Bojinka appears, will we recognize it for what it is?
The warning may already be there. The challenge is to understand what it means.
