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6. Tactical Leadership
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Tactical Leadership c h a p t e r s i x “Everyone’s running up to first class. I’ve got to go. Bye.” After these final words to her husband, Sandy Bradshaw presumably joined the battle for United Airlines Flight 93. The cockpit voice recorder captured loud thumps, crashes, breaking glass, and shouting voices as passengers stormed past the fallen flight crew in an attempt to wrest control from their terrorist captors. Terrorists in the cockpit quickly realized they were losing the battle and were about to lose the plane. Twenty minutes short of their intended collision with the White House or Capitol Building, they intentionally crashed.1 United 93 fell in an empty field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Through their improvised assault on the terrorist pilots, United 93 passengers probably saved the lives of hundreds of others, radically eclipsing any results obtained by officials tasked with overseeing their safety. It was the tactical highpoint of a very grim day. There is much to learn from the battle for United 93, and perhaps even more to learn from our failures on 9/11. The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission Report) never focuses on the problem of justifying coercion in mass casualty medicine. Yet the report is an important source for our inquiry because it contains an unprecedented wealth of firsthand and proximate secondhand information about public leadership, tactics, adaptability, and human behavior in a dire public emergency. some lessons from the september 11 airspace defense As the 9/11 Commission Report amply demonstrates, the defense of U.S. airspace against the 9/11 terrorists was not achieved by executing protocols or by relying on a pre-established emergency chain of command. Rather, it “was improvised by civilians who had never handled a hijacked aircraft that attempted to disappear, and by a military unprepared for the transformation of commercial aircraft into weapons of mass destruction”(31). Three major categories of mistaken practice precipitated the tactical failures of that day—each with important practical bearings on the approach to coercion in mass casualty medicine. First, defense efforts were predicated on several false assumptions. Virtually everyone assumed that hijackers would want to negotiate and seek concessions rather than convert airplanes into weapons. Despite the frequency of suicide attacks in the Middle East, no one in authority seriously considered the possibility of this species of suicide attack occurring in the United States. As a result, planners assumed that any air attack on the United States would come from overseas and that they would have ample time to mount an air defense—an assumption that led to several highly maladaptive protocols. More generally, officials, rescuers, and leaders at all levels were conditioned to believe—despite mountains of contrary evidence—that minimally trained or untrained individuals would panic in emergencies of this magnitude . This assumption precluded them from optimally using important frontline personnel. Luckily, the terrorists on United 93 also seem to have suffered the illusion that passengers would be immobilized by fear. Several passengers commented to loved ones that terrorists knew they were conversing on cell phones and with each other but didn’t care. On other flights, even flight attendants managed to converse on cell phones. American Airlines Flight 11 was the first plane hijacked and the first to crash (into the North Tower of the World Trade Center). Regarding this flight, the 9/11 Commission reports: About five minutes after the hijacking began, Betty Ong contacted the American Airlines Southeastern Reservations Office in Cary, North Carolina, via an AT&T airphone to report an emergency aboard the flight. This was the first of several occasions on 9/11 when flight attendants took action outside the scope of their training, which emphasized that in hijacking, they were to communicate with the cockpit crew. The emergency call lasted approximately 25 minutes, as Ong calmly and professionally relayed information about events taking place aboard the airplane to authorities on the ground. (5) ta c t i c a l l e a d e r s h i p 85 [44.203.58.132] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:26 GMT) Two flight attendants and a passenger had been stabbed, and they had been told there was a bomb in the cockpit, but Ong and her colleague, flight attendant Amy Sweeney, made multiple calls passing on crucial information—all the time as...