On a clear September morning in 2001, Javed Ali did something entirely ordinary: he got into his car, drove past the Pentagon, and made his way to work in northern Virginia. The sun was warm, the traffic was familiar, and nothing about the commute hinted that the world was about to break open. Roughly half an hour after he passed the building, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into it, tearing through the Pentagon’s facade and killing 184 people. From his office in Falls Church, Ali could see smoke rising in the distance, a dark column against a blue sky. He would later call the moment surreal, but at the time it was simply horrifying. A year later, he experienced a turn so strange it could only happen in a country desperate to respond: he walked into the still-damaged Pentagon as an intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s counterterrorism office. “It was a very eerie and odd and surreal moment in my career,” Ali told Fox News Digital. He had gone from stunned spectator to active participant in the nation’s response, and his career would carry him through the newly created Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and into the heart of the security architecture built after the deadliest foreign attack on American soil. That architecture was born from shock, grief, and a grim determination that the country would never again be caught so unprepared. For Ali, the personal and the national merged that morning. He had spent his working life in intelligence and national security, but the smoke he watched from his office window made the threat feel immediate and intimate. The rest of his professional life became a kind of answer to that smoke.
Twenty-five years later, that enormous response presents a paradox. By the clearest measure, the post-9/11 system appears to have made another attack on the scale of 9/11 far harder. The United States has not suffered a terrorist attack remotely approaching the scale and complexity of the one that killed 2,977 people. U.S. intelligence and military operations dismantled much of the al Qaeda network that planned the hijackings. New agencies, surveillance authorities, watchlists, and intelligence-sharing systems were designed to close the seams the hijackers exploited. The 2026 intelligence community assessment concluded that counterterrorism operations have degraded al Qaeda and ISIS’s ability to quickly rebuild leadership and plan large-scale attacks against the American homeland. But success against the threat of 2001 did not eliminate terrorism; it helped change it. Today’s most difficult threats increasingly involve individuals radicalized online, small cells with little warning signature, foreign terrorist organizations seeking to inspire attacks from afar, and an expanding layer of cyber and state-sponsored threats capable of reaching deep inside the United States without hijacking an airplane. The question after 25 years is not simply whether Americans are safer. They are safer from one kind of attack, while increasingly exposed to others. This is the central contradiction of the post-9/11 era: the country built a massive, layered defense against a specific enemy and a specific method, and that defense worked, but the world kept moving, and the next threat often does not look like the last one. The men who flew planes into buildings had a center of gravity, a command structure, and a plan that could be found, funded, and followed. The threats of today are more diffuse, more digital, and more dispersed, and they raise a question the architects of the post-9/11 system never fully answered: how do you defend against an enemy who may exist only as a screen and a grievance?
Building that system required almost unimaginable speed and scale. Just over two months after the attacks, President George W. Bush signed legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration. TSA says its creation was the largest civilian undertaking in U.S. government history at the time, as the federal government rapidly assumed responsibility for airport passenger and baggage screening. The following year, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, combining all or part of 22 federal agencies and offices. DHS began operating in March 2003 and today employs more than 260,000 people across missions ranging from border and aviation security to cybersecurity, intelligence, and emergency response. The changes went far beyond new agencies. The 9/11 Commission found that the pre-attack breakdown was deeper than the familiar failure to “connect the dots.” Responsibility was scattered across agencies, information was not consistently shared, and no single entity was empowered to integrate intelligence and drive joint action across the foreign-domestic divide. The commission concluded that “responsibility and accountability were diffuse.” Washington spent the next two decades trying to close those gaps. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 wars and related obligations have cost roughly $8 trillion, and that more than $1.1 trillion has been spent on homeland security and counterterrorism inside the United States since DHS was created. These numbers are hard to absorb, but they represent a real human story. Millions of soldiers, intelligence officers, federal workers, and ordinary citizens were asked to carry the burden of preventing another horror. The security lines, the watchlists, the anonymous tip lines, the drone strikes, the wars—all of it was driven by a collective decision that the United States would not be caught unprepared again. There was also a cost to everyday life and to civil liberties that is still being debated. But no one can say the country did not respond. The response was enormous, expensive, and transformative, and it changed the way Americans fly, the way they travel, the way the government watches over them, and the way the nation sees itself.
The original enemy, however, did not disappear overnight. Ali remembers how persistent al Qaeda remained even after the United States invaded Afghanistan, killed or captured senior figures, and put the organization under extraordinary pressure. During his years at DHS, he said, officials repeatedly confronted plots involving al Qaeda and its affiliates, including a 2006 plot to bomb transatlantic airliners traveling to North America. Usama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan in May 2011, but that did not mark the end of jihadist terrorism. Instead, a new and in some ways more difficult challenge emerged. ISIS grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq, expanded rapidly amid the wars in Iraq and Syria, and declared a self-described caliphate in 2014. At its height, the group controlled vast territory and millions of people while inspiring or directing attacks far beyond its borders. For Ali, the center of gravity shifted from identifying trained operatives sent by an organized group to finding individuals radicalizing inside Western countries. Then came another shift: attacks by lone offenders across different ideologies, often with no direct operational relationship to an organization overseas. “Mostly lone actors, lone offenders, not tied to groups overseas, not traveling overseas, and not being directed by people overseas,” said Ali, now an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy. The transformation is reflected in the government’s own threat assessments. The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment says Islamist terrorist groups, weakened in their ability to conduct large-scale complex attacks, now focus on propaganda designed to inspire or enable people in or with access to Western countries. The vulnerability was demonstrated on New Year’s Day 2025, when Shamsud-Din Jabbar, a U.S. citizen, drove a truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. The FBI called it terrorism and noted that lone actors and small cells who radicalize online have posed the greatest terrorist threat in recent years because they are so difficult to detect. This is almost the inverse of the 9/11 problem. The 9/11 plot required 19 hijackers, overseas leadership, financing, international travel, flight training, and years of planning. A lone actor may offer far fewer pieces to collect in the first place. Many recent attackers had never come onto the radar of law enforcement, leaving authorities with the extraordinarily difficult task of identifying people who may commit no obvious crime until they move toward violence.
And yet this vast security system has also become a target of criticism, from both the right and the left, for being too large, too expensive, and too focused on the dangers of a previous era. Morgan Murphy, who served as press secretary to the secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration and later worked in the White House, argues that Washington built too much bureaucracy around the 9/11 threat while other vulnerabilities grew. “TSA agents still pat down grandma and gum up travel while Beijing wires our living rooms with cheap TVs and selfie sticks through the supply chain handed to them by Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden,” Murphy told Fox News Digital. “We spent two decades frisking American passengers while our adversaries plugged themselves into our homes and businesses.” His most memorable phrase was this: “The genius of America after Pearl Harbor was that we built to fight. After 9/11, we built to process.” Real security, he said, means “sovereignty at home and lethality abroad—a sealed border, an untangled supply chain, and enemies who fear us.” Theo Wold, who served as acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy in the first Trump administration, offered a similar critique. He said George W. Bush and the Washington governing elite responded to 9/11 the way their politics demanded: create large, unworkable bureaucracy, push for special legal authorities with limited oversight, and activate ground wars in the Middle East. “Those wars didn’t make us safer, the legal authorities were wielded against Americans, and the bureaucracy is full of waste and has proven nearly unworkable,” Wold said. He argued that the lesson of the past quarter-century should be a more narrowly targeted national-security model. “Americans are safest when we are nimble and focus ruthlessly on targeting real enemies.” These critiques are sharp, but they raise their own questions: what would a truly nimble system look like, and would it be able to detect a lone radicalized citizen before he acts? The argument is not only about money; it is about the soul of American national security.
The challenge now extends far beyond terrorism. The 2026 intelligence assessment warns that China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and non-state ransomware groups continue to seek access to U.S. government networks and private critical infrastructure for espionage, financial gain, and possible future disruption. Artificial intelligence is accelerating cyber capabilities, and several state adversaries are developing missile systems capable of threatening the homeland. The security landscape that began with al Qaeda operatives training to fly passenger jets has therefore expanded into something far less geographically defined: terrorist propaganda transmitted to an individual’s phone, malicious code inserted into a computer network, attacks on critical infrastructure, and state adversaries capable of reaching Americans from thousands of miles away. For Ali, however, this evolution should not lead Washington to conclude that the original threat has vanished. One of the central lessons of the years before 9/11, he said, is that emerging terrorist organizations have to be confronted before they have time and space to develop operational capability. “When these terrorist threats start to emerge, whether it’s overseas or here, you have to put pressure on them before they gather momentum to carry out operations,” Ali said. The danger, he argued, is allowing counterterrorism to fall so far down Washington’s list of priorities that the country begins recreating the complacency that existed before 9/11. “Terrorism as a tactic is probably never going to be defeated,” he said. Twenty-five years after he watched smoke rise from the Pentagon, Ali’s answer to whether America is safer reflects the contradiction at the heart of the post-9/11 era. The United States built a massive system to prevent the next 9/11. It appears to have made another 9/11 far harder to execute. But the harder question now is whether that system can recognize the attack that does not look anything like it. The smoke on that September morning was a warning written in fire. The challenge of the next twenty-five years is to understand that warnings can come in many forms, and that safety is never finished.
