Summary

  • Retired Army Col. Matthew Klimow’s “As the Pentagon Burned,” reviewed by the Guardian on Sept. 11, 2026, documents specific operational frictions at the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 while asserting retrospective strategic verdicts about the post-9/11 response without reconciling the two evidentiary registers.
  • Klimow’s authority on the morning’s events rests on his physical presence as executive assistant to Gen. Richard Myers, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; his authority on the post-attack verdict rests on retrospective judgment delivered from Monterey, Tennessee, twenty-five years later.
  • The Guardian account reports specific falsifiable details — including a 30-minute period when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not be reached after the Pentagon was struck, Norad–air national guard friction over rules of engagement, and the eastward initial heading of Langley pilots following an erroneous generic flight plan — that could be redeployed in adversarial-information and legal settings regardless of authorial intent.
  • The volume’s strategic register concludes that the war on terror “redefine[d] the global order, not necessarily to the US’s advantage” while declining to specify which tactical or operational decisions of the response qualified as wise and which as unwise.

Retired Army Col. Matthew Klimow, who served as executive assistant to Gen. Richard Myers, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Sept. 11, 2001, has published “As the Pentagon Burned” to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the attacks, the Guardian reported on Sept. 11, 2026. The volume draws on Klimow’s position that morning — at his desk by 5:15 a.m., receiving calls on the secure “red switch” telephone from Gen. Ralph Eberhart, commander of North American Aerospace Defense Command — to provide a first-person account of the Pentagon’s leadership response to the attack on the building. The volume then extends, in the same pages, to retrospective strategic judgments about the post-9/11 response, including the verdict that the war on terror “redefine[d] the global order, not necessarily to the US’s advantage.” The Guardian’s account reports that the bridge between these two evidentiary levels — how the institutional structure that produced the morning’s frictions also produced the decisions of the weeks and years that followed — is asserted rather than examined within the volume.

What the book documents at the operational register

The Guardian reports the following specific, falsifiable details from the volume. A 30-minute window during which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld could not be reached after the Pentagon was struck: Rumsfeld’s immediate response was to run toward the impact site, helping carry stretchers and assist rescue operations, an act Klimow characterizes as personal bravery that “created a serious operational problem.” Friction between Norad and the air national guard over rules of engagement for civilian aircraft: Norad scrambled jets from Langley Air Force Base but initially lacked authorization to shoot down civilian aircraft, while the Secret Service separately prompted the launch of fighters from Andrews Air Force Base outside the normal military chain of command under a more permissive “weapons free” rule of engagement. Langley pilots initially flew east — following an erroneous generic flight plan and, according to Klimow, believing they were responding to a cruise missile attack from the sea — a delay the volume attributes to a lack of “situational awareness.”

The 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 1 (“We Have Some Planes”), addresses the Langley scramble and the generic flight plan that produced the eastward heading, attributing the heading to use of that generic plan; subsequent military reviews engage the same details with varying degrees of agreement. A recently renovated wedge of the Pentagon fitted with state-of-the-art ballistic glass channeled fireballs through the building’s long corridors; Klimow writes that the fortification helped reduce the casualty count. Klimow ordered Capt. Chris Donahue to barge into a senator’s office to retrieve Myers, who had departed for confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill around 8:45 a.m. Klimow remained at his desk from 5:15 a.m. until past midnight, when he left the building covered in gray soot and smelling of burning jet fuel.

Sensory and memory-based details layer on top of the operational record. The red switch rang again with what Klimow called “chilling” news from Eberhart: “We have several airplanes in the air on radar. An unknown number of them have been hijacked.” The moment of impact, as Klimow recalled it, was reported to him by Mary Turner, the office secretary: “All of a sudden, Mary Turner, our secretary, jumped up and said, ‘I think the building moved!’” On his drive home to Arlington, Virginia, the silence was broken by what Klimow reported as “It was the eeriest thing. It was the sound of American jet fighters overhead.” The volume’s authority on these particulars rests on sensory recollections whose documentary basis — written notes, contemporaneous logs, recorded communications — varies; twenty-five years on, the question for hostile counsel or competing memoirists is which details are documented in primary records and which are reconstructed from memory.

The strategic register: asserted verdicts without connective tissue

The work Klimow and colleagues began drafting on Sept. 12, 2001, eventually became the “war on terror,” the volume reports. The documentary record anchors the policy and operational response within days: the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Sept. 14, 2001) and President Bush’s address to the nation (Sept. 12, 2001) appear in the public record of the same week. Klimow’s verdict, as quoted by the Guardian: “We had little choice but to enter Afghanistan militarily and to make sure that the launching pad for what al-Qaida used to do to us was eliminated from Afghanistan.” He continued: “Did we make wise decisions tactically or operationally? Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but strategically I don’t think in the days and weeks following 9/11 there was any doubt in most people’s mind that this required military action, not just diplomacy.” The war on terror “redefine[d] the global order, not necessarily to the US’s advantage.” “The days after September 11 were arguably the last time the United States was truly united.” “America’s principles, and our resilience, and our devotion to liberty and freedom are unshakable.”

The tactical and operational decisions of the response were “sometimes yes, sometimes no” — without specifying which decisions fell into which category, or what would distinguish a sound strategic decision from an unsound one. The juxtaposition visible in the Guardian’s account — “arguably the last time the United States was truly united” alongside “not necessarily to the US’s advantage” and “sometimes yes, sometimes no” — is left unresolved.

The structural gap

The operational section is granular and detailed; the strategic section is comparatively thin. The bridge between them is asserted rather than examined. The authorities Klimow credits with strategic inevitability are the same authorities who, on the day itself, could not establish rules of engagement for civilian aircraft, could not locate the secretary of defense for half an hour, and could not align the responses from Langley and Andrews Air Force Base. The 9/11 Commission Report documents the same command-and-control frictions the volume describes; the volume does not reconcile these documented institutional frictions with the volume’s claim that the response was strategically necessary and largely sound.

The volume’s authority on the operational section rests on Klimow’s physical presence at a specific desk in a specific building on a specific morning. Its authority on the strategic section rests on his retrospective judgment from Monterey, Tennessee, in 2026. The volume invites the reader to transfer authority from the former to the latter without supplying the connective tissue — that is, the work does not present the morning’s frictions as evidence that complicates the strategic verdict, and does not present the strategic verdict as a hypothesis tested against the institutional record the morning produced.

A charitable reading is that first-person military memoirs typically foreground what the author directly observed and leave strategic reconciliation to subsequent policy and academic accounts. On those terms, the operational granularity is the deliverable and the strategic verdict is an authorial aside. That framing explains why the operational section is granular; it does not explain why the strategic section is also assertive. Klimow’s strategic verdicts are not asides. They are evaluative judgments about a twenty-year arc the volume has positioned itself to explain. The genre-norms defense does not account for that load-bearing role.

Redeployment exposure

The operational details can be excerpted and redeployed without the volume’s framing. The 30-minute Rumsfeld gap travels into arguments about Pentagon unreadiness on the morning of 9/11. Norad–air national guard friction travels into arguments about command-and-control failure. The Donahue detail — the aide dispatched to retrieve Myers on 9/11, photographed as the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan — travels into arguments about the war’s outcome. Klimow’s “not necessarily to the US’s advantage” judgment is portable in either direction of the Afghan war legacy debate.

Named living officials who can respond publicly or in their own memoirs: Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers, Norad commander Gen. Ralph Eberhart, and Capt. Donahue, now Maj. Gen. Donahue. The specific reported quote attributed to senior decision-makers in the National Military Command Center — “They were talking past each other. They didn’t realise they were talking about two different responses by the air force” — is the kind of line that travels without context.

Foreign intelligence services could redeploy these operational gaps as evidence of U.S. military unreadiness, independent of any domestic political use. Lawyers engaged in pending 9/11-related civil matters could cite the account in depositions and filings regardless of authorial intent. Reporting indicates 9/11 civil litigation against Saudi Arabia remained active in 2026, with procedural developments in the period surrounding the volume’s publication. The volume does not control how its operational claims travel once in print.

What the book omits

The substrate for this analysis is the Guardian’s compressed review of the volume rather than the volume itself; book reviews compress and select, and absence from the Guardian’s account does not establish absence from the full volume. Within that compressed frame, the passengers and crew of American Airlines Flight 77 do not appear. The people killed at the Pentagon are referenced only as the population the renovated wedge’s ballistic glass is said to have reduced. The soldiers, contractors, and civilians who died in the subsequent campaigns, and the populations whose civil liberties were constrained by the architecture erected in the response, do not appear in the volume’s pages as reported. The frame, as represented in the available reporting, is the institution’s own response to the institution’s own day.

The architecture that emerged from the work begun Sept. 12, 2001 — the legal and surveillance frameworks, detention and interrogation policies, operational decisions in theaters beyond Afghanistan — is not enumerated in the Guardian’s account of the volume. The single concrete endpoint Klimow names in the twenty-year aftermath is the Aug. 30, 2021 night-vision photograph of then-Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue boarding a C-17 out of Kabul — characterized in the volume as “irony.” Multiple independent sources corroborate the date, location, and identity of Donahue’s departure. The Guardian’s account of the volume does not catalogue what produced that image: the evacuation, the Taliban’s return to power, or the scope of what twenty years of operation had built or dismantled.

Publication timing

The Guardian reports Donald Trump was scheduled to mark the 25th anniversary at a Pentagon ceremony on Friday, Sept. 11, 2026. The volume’s release on the same date will be read in the context of a presidential commemoration of the 25th anniversary. Political alignment from any direction will be imputed to the volume on the basis of timing alone, regardless of the author’s intent.

Practical implications

The volume is a useful primary source for the inside of the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001; on the evidence of the Guardian’s reporting, it is not a sufficient source for assessing the twenty-year response it helped initiate. The strongest version of the artifact would either expand the strategic section to match the operational granularity, or restrict its scope to the day itself and let other accounts handle the aftermath.

Several pressure points are visible in the available reporting. An apparatus of footnotes citing contemporaneous records, and flagging where Klimow is reconstructing rather than remembering, would clarify which operational details are documented in primary records and which are reconstructed from memory. Pre-staged documentation from named living officials, where classification permits, would anticipate rebuttal. A press strategy centering the full text rather than individual soundbites would limit the redeployment of single sentences outside their operational context. A clarifying statement on editorial independence from any current commemoration would address the timing question; whether the release date can be decoupled from the political calendar without surrendering the 25th-anniversary framing is an editorial choice the publisher and author can make before further publication cycles.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Red-Team Assessment
Models a capable adversary probing a plan for the seams they would exploit.