JCS Chairman Caine Recalls Flying Combat Mission on 9/11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Major Dan Caine was at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, serving as chief of weapons and tactics for the 121st Fighter Squadron. He was in a position of technical expertise—the kind of officer who understood the mechanics of air defense, who knew the systems and the protocols. He was not expecting to fly a combat mission that day.

When the second plane struck the World Trade Center, everything changed. The base shifted into a different mode. Caine, now the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would later describe to CBS News anchor Norah O'Donnell what it meant to move from the planning room into the cockpit. The moment the second tower was hit, the theoretical became immediate. The base was no longer preparing for a threat—it was responding to one.

Caine scrambled into a fighter jet. The decision to launch was not complicated by hesitation or bureaucratic delay. The nation was under attack. American airspace had been breached. The military's job, in that moment, was to get armed aircraft into the sky and establish a defensive perimeter. Caine was one of the pilots who did that.

What made his account significant was not just that he flew that day—many pilots did. It was that he was now, more than two decades later, the highest-ranking military officer in the United States, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He carried the memory of that morning not as a historical artifact but as lived experience. He had been there when the protocols were tested in real time, when the training became action, when the abstract concept of national defense became the concrete task of getting airborne and positioning yourself to protect American lives.

The 9/11 attacks killed nearly 3,000 people across New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. The military response that day—the scrambling of fighters, the establishment of combat air patrols, the mobilization of every available asset—was part of the immediate aftermath, part of the effort to prevent further attacks. Caine's recollection placed him inside that response, not as a commander reviewing reports but as a pilot in the seat, making the decisions that came with the responsibility.

His willingness to speak about that morning, decades later, offered something that historical records alone could not: the perspective of someone who had been tested by the worst attack on American soil and had responded by doing his job. It was a reminder that the military response to 9/11 was not abstract policy or strategic doctrine—it was individual officers and pilots making split-second decisions under conditions of extreme uncertainty, not knowing what would come next, knowing only that they had to act.