Newt Gingrich and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford examine the lessons of 9/11 and the emerging threats America must prepare for now.
Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the intelligence system built in their aftermath faces a fundamentally different test. The reforms that improved coordination among America’s intelligence agencies were largely designed to confront terrorism. Today, the threats extend far beyond terrorist networks. Artificial intelligence, autonomous drones, cyberattacks, foreign espionage, biological threats, and attacks on critical infrastructure have created vulnerabilities that reach deeply into American communities and the private sector.
On this episode of Newt’s World, Newt Gingrich talks with Congressman Rick Crawford, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, about the committee’s bipartisan review of the 9/11 Commission recommendations and what America must learn from the last 25 years. Their conversation explores why adversaries increasingly target vulnerabilities rather than traditional military defenses, how America’s food and water systems have become national security concerns, and why preventing the next catastrophe will require the country to rediscover one of the most important lessons of 9/11: We cannot afford another failure of imagination.
Listen to their conversation below, or scroll down for an edited transcript.
Edited Transcript
This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Newt Gingrich
Twenty-five years after the attacks on 9/11, why did you and Ranking Member Himes decide this was the moment to launch a full bipartisan review of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations?
Congressman Rick Crawford
The timing is appropriate. Twenty-five years seems like an appropriate point to look back and ask: What did we get right? What did we get wrong? What worked, and what didn’t?
The core message is that the post-9/11 reforms largely worked for the threat they were designed to address. The challenge now is ensuring that the intelligence architecture built after 9/11 is ready for a new threat environment that has expanded far beyond counterterrorism.
We need to take the lessons we learned from counterterrorism and apply them as we shore up our counterintelligence vulnerabilities. It is healthy to look back and ask what worked over the last 25 years, where we went wrong, and what we can do better.
Newt Gingrich
We’re in the middle of a very partisan era, and yet you made a deliberate choice to make this bipartisan, with Elise Stefanik chairing and Josh Gottheimer co-chairing. Why did that matter?
Congressman Rick Crawford
Because when 9/11 happened, they didn’t attack Republicans. They didn’t attack Democrats. They attacked Americans.
There are certain things that transcend political identity and political persuasion. We are Americans, and an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us. This is not a partisan issue, and I think we should always view it in that context.
Newt Gingrich
The original 9/11 Commission report was almost 600 pages long and led to the creation of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center. Which reforms have held up best?
Congressman Rick Crawford
I think the National Counterterrorism Center is probably the strongest example, along with the DNI construct.
Prior to 9/11, one of the problems that allowed the situation to be exploited was the lack of coordination and communication among the various elements of the intelligence community.
The DNI construct helped break down those barriers. The National Counterterrorism Center created an operational element that brought agencies together and improved interagency coordination against the counterterrorism threat. Those are probably the two biggest success stories.
Newt Gingrich
Your task force held briefings with the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Department of Homeland Security, but you also held roundtables outside Washington. What surprised you most?
Congressman Rick Crawford
What surprised me was the lack of coordination that has taken place over the years.
We’re seeing state, local, county, and tribal governments that don’t necessarily know what channels are available to them for reporting. Everybody says, “If you see something, say something,” but people weren’t necessarily sure who to say it to.
Then there is the private sector. Over the last few years, the private sector has become much more vulnerable to counterintelligence threats. That includes the technology sector and critical infrastructure operators such as water systems and electrical utilities.
We’ve been trying to bridge that gap.
One of the recurring themes of the original 9/11 Commission report was a failure of imagination. We can’t afford another failure of imagination. We cannot allow our failure of imagination to become a success story for our adversaries.
Newt Gingrich
We recently had a surprising series of attacks on our water supply through hacking. What should Americans understand about that threat?
Congressman Rick Crawford
This gets back to how important it is for the federal government to be in constant contact with governments at every level: state, county, local, and tribal. They need to know instantly how to respond and who to contact.
These incidents point to the vulnerability of critical infrastructure.
Cyberattacks can create calamity in the delivery of critical resources such as water. But we also have to manage the physical security of those facilities.
Think about the potential consequences if someone introduced a pathogen into a water treatment facility. It could be devastating for a huge population.
Newt Gingrich
You opened a hearing called “25 Years After 9/11: Confronting the Next Generation of Threats.” You said the post-9/11 intelligence challenges have expanded well beyond counterterrorism coordination. What did you mean?
Congressman Rick Crawford
We’re experiencing a heightened counterintelligence threat to the homeland led by our great-power adversaries, but it isn’t limited to them. Some non-state actors may also be leveraged by nation-states seeking to do us harm.
We have vulnerabilities at every level of government. We have vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, utilities, the technology sector, and the defense industrial base.
We have to constantly red-team ourselves.
Our adversaries don’t organize around our bureaucracy. They organize around our vulnerabilities.
We have to identify those vulnerabilities first so we can shut them down before they become targets.
I’m a former bomb technician, and in that world, you live “left of boom.” Anything to the right of boom is consequence management. It’s already too late. The idea is to prevent the detonation.
If we adopt that same left-of-boom posture toward counterintelligence, we are much better positioned to prevent another 9/11-scale attack.
The lesson of 9/11 is that you have to make the reform before the catastrophe, not after it. You have to be proactive.
Newt Gingrich
We now have artificial intelligence, quantum computing, drones, cyber threats, biological threats, and adversaries using asymmetric and irregular warfare. Which threats really get your attention?
Congressman Rick Crawford
All of them.
AI is pervasive in ways we couldn’t have imagined in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
The drone threat may be one of the most important, and AI is woven into it. We’re talking about the ability to control and deploy swarms at scale. We’ve seen that on the battlefield in Ukraine.
What does that portend for its application here in the United States?
Could an adversary park a ship off the coast of Long Island and deploy a drone swarm against an American target? The answer is yes.
We have to be prepared for that.
This is where the failure of imagination comes in again. We have to constantly red-team ourselves and ask what we could do against an adversary and whether it is reasonable to believe they might try the same thing against us.
Newt Gingrich
Do you think we are evolving as rapidly as the threats are evolving?
Congressman Rick Crawford
I think that’s our problem.
In the counterintelligence space, we have to understand that no single agency can address this threat alone.
We also can’t arrest our way out of a counterintelligence threat. Sometimes making an arrest isn’t even the best way to disrupt a threat because arresting one individual might make it harder to disrupt the entire network.
We need to understand the difference between law enforcement and counterintelligence. They are not the same thing.
We have to expand our bandwidth and use the agencies within the intelligence community that are really good at collecting information, identifying threats, disrupting networks, and getting after these problems.
Newt Gingrich
One challenge is getting large institutions and traditional military cultures to adapt to technologies such as drone warfare.
Congressman Rick Crawford
This is where I think the next generation comes into play.
When they develop robots today, the controllers are often similar to an Xbox controller. Why? Because it’s intuitive to young people. They already know how to use that technology.
I couldn’t control a robot the way a 19-year-old can.
If you told me to go fly some drones, I’m probably not your guy. But if you go to a 19-year-old who just graduated high school and say, “We want you to fly some drones,” you may have exactly the right person.
The defense industry has recognized that it can leverage those existing skills by putting a different application in front of the next generation.
It fundamentally alters the battlefield and the application of technology in a military environment.
Newt Gingrich
As part of the committee’s work, you visited the 9/11 Memorial at the Pentagon. What was it like to be there while conducting this review?
Congressman Rick Crawford
It seemed different this time.
We’re 25 years on, and there are only a handful of people still at the Pentagon who were there on September 11.
They were people running toward calamity when a lot of others were running away from it.
For them, it is still right at the surface. It’s still a highly emotional issue, and you can see it in their faces when you have the conversation.
Newt Gingrich
What do you want Americans to remember on the 25th anniversary of September 11?
Congressman Rick Crawford
I want us to remember the 2,977 individuals who were struck down.
They weren’t Democrats. They weren’t Republicans. First and foremost, they were Americans. And that reason alone was why they were targeted.
It was a terrorist attack, and it will always be remembered as such.
Newt Gingrich
You’ve also talked about agriculture in a way that I think is very important. People don’t necessarily realize how vulnerable our agricultural sector could be to biological attacks and other threats. What worries you?
Congressman Rick Crawford
First and foremost, we have to recognize that a nation that can’t feed and clothe itself is vulnerable.
Our food and fiber production is national security.
Then we have to protect the agricultural infrastructure. That starts with research. We see foreign efforts targeting proprietary information at our research institutions.
We also have to recognize the vulnerability of production agriculture itself.
Imagine an adversary introducing foot-and-mouth disease into a large feedlot in West Texas and what that could do to food prices through a disruption of our beef supply.
What if someone introduced H5N1 into a poultry flock at scale?
The agricultural sector is extremely vulnerable and extremely integral to our national security.
Newt Gingrich
Modern agriculture is also an extraordinarily sophisticated, technology-driven industry.
Congressman Rick Crawford
Absolutely.
A modern combine can cost $1 million. It is controlled largely by GPS systems that allow for precision harvesting with extremely small margins of overlap.
Precision agriculture technology can identify specific weeds and map fields. But what happens if an adversary gets into that network and disrupts your ability to execute precision agriculture?
At a minimum, it costs the farmer more money. It could also affect yields.
Think about the possibilities. What could an adversary do to make it more difficult for us to produce a crop, feed and clothe our own people, and compete in the global marketplace?
I guarantee you they’re thinking about it, because I’m thinking about it.
Newt Gingrich
There’s now an entire generation that has grown up since 9/11. For them, it is at most a history lesson. What do you want young people in high school and college to understand about what America went through?
Congressman Rick Crawford
We’re a generation away from losing direct contact with this point in history.
I have a 21-year-old son and a 19-year-old daughter. They weren’t alive on 9/11. Their understanding comes from what my wife and I tell them about where we were, how we felt, and how we responded.
We need to make sure we don’t lose that living history.
People who remember it and can recall it vividly need to share it with the next generation. We have to make sure it isn’t just a date on the calendar but that young Americans understand the impact it had on this country and the world.
If there was an upside to that terrible day, it galvanized the nation for a period of time.
I wish we were still galvanized. I don’t want another event like that to force us to join arms and become Americans again.
It shouldn’t take that level of calamity and catastrophe to galvanize us as a people.
That is the lesson I want the next generation to embrace.
About the Guest
Congressman Rick Crawford represents Arkansas’s First Congressional District and serves as Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He has served in Congress since 2011 and on the Intelligence Committee since 2017.
Before entering Congress, Crawford enlisted in the United States Army after high school and served for four years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician, earning multiple medals for his service at home and in Southwest Asia. He later attended Arkansas State University, worked as a rodeo announcer and agricultural broadcaster, and founded the AgWatch Network.
As Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Crawford has overseen a bipartisan review of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations examining how America’s intelligence capabilities have evolved since September 11, 2001, and whether the nation is prepared for the emerging threats of the next 25 years.
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