“The 6th was pretty dramatic. That’s about as dramatic as you’re going to see it, short of a civil war.” The conventional wisdom, which had settled into Washington, was that there had been warnings. But Milley knew the internet chatter had lacked coherence and did not provide the specific, credible intelligence that could avert a catastrophe. It had been a grave U.S. intelligence failure, comparable to the missed warnings prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and to Pearl Harbor, and exposed glaring gaps and weaknesses in the American system.
