Quan Kamble, a former Marine and active-duty Green Beret, said, “There are some things we can’t talk about because our mission is to protect them. We can do as much as we can to protect them. They are our sons and sisters and our friends, our brothers. I don’t know why I am telling you this—because the Marines who come in, they are not our enemies, they’re our brothers and they’re going to be our brothers.”
Kamble said that the Marines could be better trained than the intelligence community. The Marines will be given the intelligence necessary to protect America’s citizens from terrorists, but when it comes to preventing terrorist attacks, they often have to rely on other sources.
Kamble noted that the Marine Corps is very close to the top of the list of those who have been victimized by the 9/11 attacks:
“Not just the Marines—every civilian government they’ve had to protect has suffered the consequences of 9/11. No matter how good their plan is, they’ll have to rely on another agency. What we need is a plan that will protect the entire country from all of these dangers.”
The American Legion said that the 9/11 attacks could still be avoided if a comprehensive intelligence base could be built on the Arabian peninsula to prevent terrorists from taking advantage of weaknesses in security in the United States.
Col. Jim C. Haney, a commander of America’s first post-9/11 unit in Yemen, said, “You don’t have to have a great concept of how intelligence works to protect you when a terrorist attack is imminent, no matter how big the threat is.” Haney’s unit has trained the Iraqi and Afghan intelligence services, and even assisted Israeli intelligence with counterterrorism operations in Saudi Arabia.
Haney added that the U.S. military should spend “absolutely” what it takes to have a comprehensive intelligence structure “that’s going to stop a terrorist attack in its tracks.”
In an op-ed for The American Spectator, retired intelligence experts and current military observers from the Iraq reconstruction units said building such a structure now would be cost-effective because “intelligence-based combat operations are now the way to go for American forces, but they can be defeated by the most sophisticated counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism programs ever attempted by the U.S.”
The current “no compromise” model of war has been