The memory of September 11 and the demands of today

Honoring the past requires protecting the institutions that keep the country safe.

After addressing the nation on Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush meets with his National Security Council in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center of the White House. (White House photo)

Each September 11 is a day of remembrance—and a moment to take stock. We honor the lives lost while asking whether the defenses built in the wake of the attacks still match the threats that remain, have evolved, or may yet emerge. That second task requires holding fast to the mission’s purpose, but doing so without emotion—deliberate, even cold. It demands answers to hard questions about structure, speed, and focus—about whether the system we rely on is lean enough to move and strong enough to last.

Over the past two decades, the United States has prevented another major terrorist attack on its soil; many lesser ones were foiled—some known, many not. That record was not luck. It came from a counterterrorism architecture built after 9/11, one that grew larger and more complex with each passing year.

More was not always better. The system endured growing pains: infighting, petty territorialism, and bureaucratic drag—I saw it first-hand. Yet the quality of the people within it was never in doubt, and their work has kept the country safer for 24 years.

The professionals who carry this load—agents, analysts, operators, prosecutors—connect fragments, resist wishful thinking, and move resources without fanfare. Their victories rarely make news, and when they do, the press credits the intelligence “community,” not the individuals whose judgment made the difference. Their success has never come from the kinds of performative reorganizations and loyalty purges that politics now produces. It has come from the dedication of the workforce itself. Until 2025, leadership, for the most part, kept politics away from their desks and let them do their work.

Since returning to office, Donald Trump’s reflex has been to break what he should be sharpening—purges dressed up as efficiency, loyalty tests disguised as reform, centralization that trades speed for control. The rhetoric celebrates streamlining; the practice hollows the machinery that prevents attacks. Counterterrorism is not less important today; it is more complicated. And the community designed to prevent it has been targeted by reforms driven less by threat and need than by control.

At the very moment the machinery is being weakened, the global context is harsher. In its own March threat assessment, the Trump administration conceded that terrorism remains a persistent danger. What makes today’s environment worse is that the conditions that drive radicalization are intensifying—and in some cases, Washington is complicit. The war in Gaza and U.S. support for its conduct fuels grievance narratives that recruiters do not have to invent. Whatever label one prefers, the images are propaganda-ready. Anger recruits faster than policy explains, and perceived American complicity is a durable accelerant.

Even as conditions abroad fuel radicalization, the administration has chosen counternarcotics as its signature campaign. Hitting drug networks is necessary—fentanyl kills. But staging kinetic wins for television is not a strategy. A boat vaporized off Venezuela might win a news cycle. It does not dismantle an ideology, degrade an online recruiter, or close a facilitation route that can move people as readily as product. Substituting spectacle for patient disruption is how seams open. Adversaries—criminal and ideological—live in the seams.

Counternarcotics is necessary work, and adding resources to it is logical. But counterterrorism cannot be traded away to fund it. The two missions require balance. Dismantling intelligence capacity, removing experienced officers, and starving prevention programs does not strengthen one fight—it weakens both.

Trump collapses distinctions that matter, treating “terrorism” as a label for whatever suits his politics—cartels, migrants, or street crime. The danger is not in recognizing counternarcotics as urgent; it is in substituting one mission for another, and in distorting definitions until counterterrorism becomes whatever serves the moment.

We have learned, the hard way, what sledgehammers buy. Iraq and Afghanistan proved you can topple regimes and still grow a networked enemy that outlasts you. The current Caribbean show of force—the F-35s to Puerto Rico, added ships, a lethal interdiction—plays to the same reflex: quick blows that feel decisive, expand missions, and blur law enforcement with warfighting. Invasions create oxygen for the next iteration; collective punishment for the wrong target creates the story the next attacker needs. Turning American cities into federalized stage sets to show muscle is the domestic version of the same error. It looks decisive but makes us brittle. The enemy is not the mayor, not the press, not a political opponent. The enemy is the network that means harm.

A safer course is boring but effective. Keep Joint Terrorism Task Forces fully manned and insulated from partisan churn. Protect the analytic cadre and the case officers who feed them; promote for competence, not loyalty. Invest in linguists, digital forensics, and threat-finance teams who follow money that ideology needs to breathe. Make community liaison and prison disengagement programs real, measured, and accountable. Fund tools that let state and local partners sense trouble early and share it fast. Expand targeted authorities where gaps are demonstrated; sunset them when the gaps close.

It also takes constitutional discipline. After the next attack—whenever it comes—the pressure to act first and legalize later will be immediate. That is the moment that separates leadership from theater. The test is whether we hold the line against collective suspicion, resist surveillance creep detached from proven need, and keep watchdogs strong enough to tell us when we are wrong. Politicizing clearances, neutering inspectors general, and punishing internal dissent do not prevent attacks. They suppress the warnings that might.

The country will be tested. Pretending otherwise is sentimental. Blame will come quickly and travel far. It will not close a single vulnerability. The work that does is quieter: clear priorities, defended institutions, transparent metrics, and a willingness to shut down flashy programs that underperform. Lean beats loud. Precision beats purge. Constancy beats improvisation.

September 11 should remind us what competence looks like and what it demands: memory that leads to discipline, not performance; unity around purpose, not personality. We honor the dead by keeping the system lean, the guardrails intact, and the target fixed on the networks that mean harm. Everything else is noise the adversary can use.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.

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