It was 25 years ago today that the Western world completely changed following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11th, 2001. The shock of these horrific terrorist attacks caused a seismic shift in security policy both in Washington and Canberra. While the initial shock justified a major response, the focus on non-state and counterterrorist threats soon consumed a generation of national security policy, military resources, intelligence efforts and intellectual attention.
The strategic failure after 9/11 was not the United States’ and Australia’s response, but that 9/11 became the dominant lens through which all security policy was organised. This imbalance ultimately crowded out sustained attention to long-term, state-based strategic competition.
Twenty-five years ago, Prime Minister John Howard was in Washington for the 50th Anniversary of the ANZUS treaty, and from his hotel room he watched the smoke rise from the Pentagon. Upon returning to Canberra, he invoked that ANZUS treaty for the first and only time in its history. Not long afterwards, the first of two terrorist bombings occurred in Bali, killing 202 people including 88 Australians. These attacks brought the terrorist threat home, transforming the national security system from a post-Cold War state-centric framework to one focused on non-state actors, counterterrorism and homeland security.
The Bush administration pivoted to the Global War on Terror; the Patriot Act, which expanded the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies; and the launch of operations in Afghanistan. Australia adapted and developed parts of the Australian Defence Force to integrate with US-led coalition operations. Both governments expanded their domestic intelligence capabilities to integrate more broadly across government agencies and ministries. Many of these reforms were long overdue to better organise around these types of non-conventional threats. Given the shock and uncertainty at the time, this response was necessary.
The problem became one of strategic displacement. Counterterrorism moved from being an essential priority to becoming the dominant lens through which all national security policy was organised. Consequently, our counterterrorism efforts dominated foreign policy relationships, the design of our force structure, intelligence resources, language and regional expertise, strategic geography and industrial priorities.
During this time, the US relationship with both Russia and China was less competitive and adversarial, but more transactional. The Bush administration found common ground with Russia on their military campaign against radical Islamists in Chechnya, and Russia provided the US military with airbases in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The US granted China permanent normal trade relations and supported its entry into the World Trade Organization, while China provided the US with critical votes on the UN security council. Australia’s relationship with China was almost entirely economically driven and increasingly viewed through its positive economic opportunities. Russia was seen as an afterthought with minimal direct connections or interests.
Within the defence community, expeditionary counterinsurgency operations, counter-improvised explosive device capabilities and special forces drew attention and increased spending. This directed resources away from high-end conventional capabilities such as long-range strike, advanced anti-ship missiles, air and missile defence, and maritime denial assets.
As strategic geography lost priority, there was an erosion of deterrence focus in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. Protracted operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria – mostly landlocked countries – left vital Indo-Pacific waterways and the European continent vulnerable and unprotected. The defence industrial base was largely organised and resourced against low-tech adversaries, and therefore utilised a slow-moving logistical chain. Investments in munitions stockpiles, resilient and sovereign supply chains, and combined industrial capacity were under-resourced and underdeveloped.
Meanwhile, state competition never disappeared. A rising China used this period to militarise the South China Sea, dramatically expand its military-technological capabilities and build a sophisticated anti-access and area denial space into global waterways. Russia used this period for military interventions, including the 2008 invasion of Georgia and the 2014 annexation of Crimea, that set the stage for its eventual invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The critical lesson moving forward is to avoid overcorrection. A future strategic shock – whether it’s a major terrorist attack, a cross-strait crisis, a cyberattack, a pandemic or something we aren’t even anticipating – cannot again be allowed to monopolise and reorganise the security system. The system must maintain agility to address immediate crises and enduring strategic threats concurrently. Are the governments in Washington and Canberra prepared to respond decisively to the crisis directly in front of them without allowing that crisis to consume the whole national security system and obscure threats developing over a longer timeframe? This is an essential question to ask and a lesson to learn going forward.
The 9/11 attacks were a strategic shock and demonstrated how quickly shock could overtake our security system. Twenty-five years later, the true measure of success in both Washington and Canberra is a national security system resilient enough to withstand the next sudden shock without losing sight of the broader strategic environment.
