Timely Alert II
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The story...

The exercise Timely Alert II may have been a significant factor in the success of the 9-11 attacks..

Our take...

We'll examine this case as it's portrayed in "The Military Drills on 9-11: "Bizarre Coincidence" or Something Else?", by Four Arrows (aka Don Jacobs).

Another exercise that was scheduled on 9/11 was called ‘‘Timely Alert II.’’ Its existence and timing was also officially categorized as a ‘‘coincidence.’’ A U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Command article by Debbie Sheehan of this department’s Public Affairs Office quotes a garrison commander named Col. Stephen N. Wood as saying, ‘‘By sheer coincidence we were scheduled to conduct ‘Timely Alert II,’ a force protection exercise on Sept. 11 and because of that, some of the concrete barriers were already in place.’’ The article continues:

Wood said people on post told him when they first saw live footage of the events
unfolding at the World Trade Center, they thought it was some elaborate training video to accompany the exercise. Firefighters here said others told them the same thing. ‘‘You really outdid yourself this time,’’ a worker said to Captain ‘‘Jack’’ Rindt, training officer for the Fort Monmouth Fire Department. Rindt could only express his sorrow while he acknowledged that indeed, what people were seeing was not a movie, even if it looked like one.7
"The Military Drills on 9-11: "Bizarre Coincidence" or Something Else?"

How did this affect NORAD, or influence the outcome of the attacks in any way? Jacobs fails to tell us. Still, CooperativeResearch step in and try to help by pointing out the significance of the venue:

Fort Monmouth is home to various Army, Defense Department, and other government agencies. The largest of these is the US Army’s Communications-Electronics Command (CECOM). CECOM serves to “develop, acquire, field, and sustain superior information technologies and integrated systems for America’s warfighters.” It is tasked with the “critical role of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR).”
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-1799

However, the final “it is tasked with...” sentence might perhaps make you think that CECOM is responsible for all these elements in a dynamic sense, that it provides services to NORAD (for example) that would be compromised by the exercise, and that seems unlikely. Read up on CECOM and it seems to be much more as the preceding sentence describes, about developing hardware and software, than being a command centre. As no evidence is provided to show that the normal functions of Fort Monmouth were compromised, and we also see no evidence to show that those functions would have had any effect on the outcome of 9/11, it’s difficult to see why we should attach any importance to this particular exercise.

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