Guess they couldn't even have sent unarmed planes to try and distract the hijackers.
BTW - Where did all our $trillions over the years for national defense go?
Social Engineering. Berets made in China, that had to be re-ordered. Pork pet projects of Senators.
OTOH, one AIM-9R costs about $84,000, one AMRAAM about $386,000, one tomahawk is $500,000 today, and that's the cheap stuff.
When someone is hell-bent on crashing a plane into a geographically fixed point, distraction ain't gonna work.
BTW - Where did all our $trillions over the years for national defense go?
Breast cancer research. Environmental cleanup. Stupid peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and every other worthless s**thole where our national interests were not (and still aren't) at stake. Acquisition programs where we paid for everything up to and including production tooling (i.e., the really expensive stuff) and then terminated the program to "save money" (i.e., not very much money) by not building the hardware.
We're now looking at the price tag. The 82nd Airborne no longer has an organic armor battalion--the M8 Buford light tank was intended to replace the M551 Sheridan in the airborne armor role, but it got cancelled literally AFTER the last minute (United Defense still has a complete Buford factory, gathering dust and rust). The F-22 Raptor and RAH-66 Comanche were stretched out so far during the Clinton years that our ability to actually produce these aircraft--computer hardware that was bleeding edge when these aircraft went into RDT&E is now obsolete and going out of production unless we ramp up orders NOW. The Navy is headed to a point below the 300-ship mark unless we start building new ships right now. Clinton expended almost our entire stockpile of PGMs during Operation Allied Farce, and never ordered sufficient replacements.
Why it all went to building "HAARP",of course...<=========Sarcasm
The HAARP (High frequency Active Auroral Research Program) transmitter is operated jointly by the U.S. Navy, Air Force and several universities and is located in Gakona, eastern Alaska.(But that's a whole other ball of wax.)LOL