Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sends members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a copy of the foreword to a book, which discusses the US government failures that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. Rumsfeld sends a memo to the chairman, vice chairman, and the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which he refers to a discussion about intelligence that was held on the previous day. He attaches to it a copy of the foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter’s 1962 book, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, written by the Harvard economist Thomas Schelling. He writes in the memo, “I think you will find [Schelling’s foreword] worth reading.” [Donald Rumsfeld, 3/14/2001 
; New York Times, 3/27/2014] In the foreword, Schelling wrote that in order to prepare for the next crisis, the US military needs to avoid thinking that the most familiar threat is also the most likely one. [Associated Press, 5/24/2001] Rumsfeld will write in his 2011 memoir that he considers Schelling’s message to be, “We needed to prepare for the likelihood that we would be attacked by an unanticipated foe in ways that we may not imagine.” [Rumsfeld, 2011, pp. xv] Rumsfeld “routinely handed out or recommended” Wohlstetter’s book about the attack on Pearl Harbor in the eight months before 9/11 and “particularly recommended the foreword, written by Thomas Schelling,” according to journalist and author Bob Woodward. [Woodward, 2002, pp. 22] He will give copies of Schelling’s foreword to members of the House Armed Services Committee when he meets with them on May 23 (see May 23-24, 2001). [US Department of Defense, 5/23/2001; Associated Press, 5/24/2001]
After 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001: Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Crisis Team Activated at the Pentagon
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) activates its Crisis Action Team (CAT) at the Pentagon to respond to the terrorist attacks, although the time this occurs at is unclear. [US Congress, 9/13/2001; 9/11 Commission, 7/21/2003 ; US Air Force, 9/9/2003] General Richard Myers, the vice chairman of the JCS, will later tell a congressional hearing that in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center: “We stood up our Crisis Action Team.… And we started talking to the federal agencies.” [US Congress, 9/13/2001] The JCS’s CAT apparently assembles in the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which is located in the JCS area of the Pentagon and is responsible for monitoring worldwide events for the JCS. [9/11 Commission, 7/21/2003 ; GlobalSecurity (.org), 7/24/2011; Effingham Daily News, 9/12/2011] Myers will state that the CAT is activated just after 8:46 a.m., when the first hijacked plane crashed into the WTC (see 8:46 a.m. September 11, 2001). He will say it is activated “[a]t the time of the first impact on the World Trade Center.” “That was done immediately,” he will add. [US Congress, 9/13/2001] However, other accounts will indicate that the CAT is activated after 9:37 a.m., when the Pentagon attack occurs (see 9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001). Lieutenant Colonel Lyndon Willms is an Air Force officer currently assigned to the Pentagon, working as a joint strategic planner for the JCS. After he and his colleagues in the Joint Vision and Transformation Division of the JCS learn from television reports of the second hijacked plane hitting the WTC, at 9:03 a.m. (see 9:03 a.m. September 11, 2001), they “knew a decision would be made to either send us to augment one of the crisis action teams forming in the National Military Command Center across the hall or be evacuated to another site,” Willms will recall. It appears from Willms’s account, however, that the CAT is only activated later on. By around 9:51 a.m., Willms will state, the CAT is forming in the NMCC, but he and his colleagues are “a bit confused because we thought we would be going in to augment” it. Instead, they are evacuated from the Pentagon. [Effingham Daily News, 9/12/2011] Lieutenant Colonel James Foley, the NMCC operations officer, will also indicate that the CAT is only activated after the Pentagon is hit. He will state that “a Joint Staff Crisis Action Team assembled… within the first two hours, while the situation was entirely uncertain and the Pentagon was burning.” [US Air Force, 9/9/2003] And when they visit the NMCC in 2003, members of the 9/11 Commission staff will be told that a CAT “was stood up” in the NMCC “sometime in the afternoon on 9/11.” [9/11 Commission, 7/21/2003 ] It is apparently standard procedure for the JCS to activate its CAT during a terrorist attack. A Department of Defense memorandum sent in March 2001, about how the US military responds to terrorism, will state that in a crisis, the operations directorate of the JCS “establishes a Crisis Action Team (CAT) to prepare and coordinate deployment, and execute orders.” [US Department of Defense, 3/15/2001]
After 9:03 a.m. September 11, 2001: Military Personnel Are Preparing for an Exercise in Europe Based on Terrorists Threatening to Attack the US
Hundreds of US military personnel are preparing for a major exercise in Europe, which is based around the scenario of terrorists threatening to attack the United States with a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon, but the exercise is canceled in response to the real-world attacks in the US. The exercise, which is run by the US military’s European Command, is called Ellipse Charlie, according to journalists Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker. [Schmitt and Shanker, 2011, pp. 22-23; Naylor, 2015, pp. ix] Ellipse Charlie, however, is run by the Pacific Command. The exercise is therefore likely to be Ellipse Bravo, a European Command exercise. [Arkin, 2005, pp. 359; GlobalSecurity (.org), 4/27/2005; GlobalSecurity (.org), 4/27/2005]
Participants Have to Stop Terrorists Who Have an ‘Unconventional’ Weapon – The exercise is set to take place in six European and Mediterranean countries, and on a ship at sea, and is meant to last 16 days. The goal is for participants “to find and thwart terrorists who [have] captured an unconventional weapon”—i.e. a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon—“and threatened to use it against the United States,” according to Schmitt and Shanker. About 1,800 Special Operations personnel, along with “a handful of other secret government operators,” are set to take part. [Schmitt and Shanker, 2011, pp. 22-23] A smaller exercise called Jackal Cave, which is run by the Joint Special Operations Command and is currently taking place in several European countries, is “nested” in Ellipse Bravo, according to journalist and author Sean Naylor (see (8:46 a.m.-9:03 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [Naylor, 2015, pp. ix-x]
Al-Qaeda Is the Mock Enemy in the Exercise – The hypothetical enemy in Ellipse Bravo appears to be al-Qaeda or a similar terrorist group. Although Naylor will claim that the mock terrorists in Jackal Cave are “not Islamist,” according to Schmitt and Shanker, Ellipse Bravo is going to involve “a complicated mock attack from a foe like al-Qaeda.” [Schmitt and Shanker, 2011, pp. 23; Naylor, 2015, pp. 441] Furthermore, al-Qaeda was apparently the hypothetical enemy in a previous Ellipse Bravo exercise, held in late August to early September 1998. The scenario for that exercise, according to a report by the US Department of Energy, was that “[d]ue to the United States’ continued presence in the Arab world, international terrorist financier Osama bin Laden had called upon the Muslim community to strike back at the United States.” [US Department of Energy, 12/3/1998 ]
‘Ellipse’ Exercises Involve Weapons of Mass Destruction – Further details of the current Ellipse Bravo exercise are unclear. “Ellipse” exercises, which are led by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are “highly classified, interagency, major crisis action and management” exercises that involve weapons of mass destruction, according to military analyst William Arkin. [Arkin, 2005, pp. 358] The Ellipse Bravo exercise held in 1998 was intended to “evaluate and validate the US federal response to a radiological weapon of mass destruction in an international environment.” That exercise, which took place outside the US, involved representatives of the US Special Forces and the US Army’s 52nd Ordnance Group, along with personnel from the Department of Energy, including members of its Nuclear Emergency Search Team. [US Department of Energy, 2/1999, pp. 121 ; Richelson, 2009, pp. 172] The current Ellipse Bravo exercise is called off during its final planning stages in response to the terrorist attacks in the US and the commandos involved in it then hurry back to their normal bases. [Schmitt and Shanker, 2011, pp. 23]
9:37 a.m. September 11, 2001: Flight 77 Misses Key Pentagon Officials
When Flight 77 hits the Pentagon, it misses the parts of the building known to house the military’s most senior leaders. Journalist and author Steve Vogel later says, “The hijackers had not hit the River or Mall sides” of the building, “where the senior military leadership had been concentrated since 1942.” At the time of the attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is “sitting in the same third-floor office above the River Entrance as every secretary of defense since Louis Johnson in 1949, a location that had been a matter of public record all that time. The joint chiefs and all the service secretaries were arrayed in various prime E-Ring offices on the River and Mall sides.” Furthermore, “All the command centers save the Navy’s were on the River or Mall sides; the National Military Command Center could have been decimated as the Navy Command Center was, a disaster that could have effectively shut down the Pentagon as the first American war of the twenty-first century began.” Instead, the area hit comprises Army accounting offices, the Navy Command Center, and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s comptroller’s office. [Vogel, 2007, pp. 431 and 449-450] Due to recent renovation work, many offices in that section of the Pentagon are currently empty. [Government Executive, 9/11/2001]
September 14-18, 2001: Congressional Joint Resolution Allows President Bush to Use All Necessary Military Force
The US Congress adopts a joint resolution, the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), that determines that “the president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” Congress also states that the “grave acts of violence” committed on the US “continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to [its] national security and foreign policy.” [US Congress, 9/14/2001] President Bush signs the resolution into law on September 18. [White House, 9/18/2001] The passage of the AUMF served another purpose: to extend presidential power. While the Defense Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff intended the AUMF to define the conflict in narrow terms, and authorize the US to move militarily against al-Qaeda and its confederates, and the Taliban, Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, had a larger goal. Attorney Scott Horton, who has written two major studies on interrogation of terrorism suspects for the New York City Bar Association, says in 2005 that Cheney and Addington “really wanted [the AUMF defined more broadly], because it provided the trigger for this radical redefinition of presidential power.” Addington helped draft a Justice Department opinion in late 2001, written by lawyer John Yoo (see Late September 2001), that asserted Congress cannot “place any limits on the president’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response.” [US News and World Report, 5/21/2006]
