A great essay by Elaine Scarry of Harvard about September 11th and American defense policy. [Thanks for the link to Adam Shostack and Dave Farber’s Interesting People list!]
When the plane that hit the Pentagon and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania are looked at side by side, they reveal two different conceptions of national defense: one model is authoritarian, centralized, top down; the other is distributed and egalitarian and accords with what the Framers of the Constitution expected of the citizenry.