After 12:00 p.m. September 11, 2001: Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Myers Wants CENTCOM Commander Franks to Start Planning a Response to the Attacks

General Richard Myers, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, instructs Colonel Matthew Klimow, his executive assistant, to call General Tommy Franks, commander in chief of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), and tell him to promptly return to his headquarters and start considering how to respond to today’s terrorist attacks. [MSNBC, 9/11/2002; 9/11 Commission, 6/17/2004 ; Myers and McConnell, 2009, pp. 156] Myers and Klimow have been in the National Military Command Center (NMCC) at the Pentagon since around 9:58 a.m. (see (9:58 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [US Department of Defense, 9/11/2001 ; 9/11 Commission, 2/17/2004 ; George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, 8/3/2012]
Myers Wants a ‘Fairly Big Response’ to the Attacks – Around midday, Vice Admiral Tom Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, confirmed to them and others in the NMCC that today’s attacks were undoubtedly committed by al-Qaeda (see 12:00 p.m. September 11, 2001). [Myers and McConnell, 2009, pp. 156] This prompts Myers and his colleagues to immediately start considering “some sort of response.” The one thing they “knew for certain,” Myers will later recall, considering that al-Qaeda had “attacked us on our soil” and thousands of Americans had been killed, was that “this response had to be proportionate, meaning a fairly big response.” [MSNBC, 9/11/2002] Myers notes that Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership are in Afghanistan. However, he will comment, “If the president and the secretary [of defense] ordered us to go to war in Afghanistan, we were going to have to do it before winter and that didn’t leave us a lot of time in the foothills of the Hindu Kush.”
CENTCOM Commander Is Away in Europe – Afghanistan is in the area of responsibility of CENTCOM, the military command that controls US operations in the Middle East. However, Franks, the commander of CENTCOM, is currently overseas, on the Greek island of Crete. Myers therefore instructs Klimow to contact him and ask him to return to CENTCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, as soon as possible. Additionally, Myers says, “I want General Franks to start looking at options for al-Qaeda.” [Myers and McConnell, 2009, pp. 156]
CENTCOM Commander Immediately Starts Preparing a Military Response – Throughout the evening, Franks starts preparing the US military’s response to today’s attacks from his hotel in Crete. CENTCOM has already tried to identify al-Qaeda training camps, barracks, command and control facilities, communications centers, and support complexes in Afghanistan. It has also built target sets for key Taliban installations, air defense sites, and early warning radars in the country. “The time had come when that effort would pay off,” Franks will comment in his 2004 memoir. He talks to Major General Victor Renuart, CENTCOM director of operations, who is at CENTCOM headquarters, and tells him to begin strike targeting for Afghanistan. He also directs his staff to coordinate with Vice Admiral Charles Moore, CENTCOM’s naval component commander, to ensure that American ships in the Afghanistan area cancel all port calls and immediately set out to sea. [Franks and McConnell, 2004, pp. 243] On the morning of September 12, Franks’s flight crew will receive permission from Greek air traffic control to take off from Crete and Franks will then head back to the United States. His plane will land at MacDill Air Force Base at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon. [Franks and McConnell, 2004, pp. 247-248]