MSNBC has a piece by Michael Moran castigating the Air Force and NORAD for what he says is their utter failure on September 11: The Air Force has a long-delayed reckoning. (Hat tip: Dirk Diggler.)

For more than three years, countless reviews, investigations and commissions on the 9/11 attacks concentrated on the intelligence, law enforcement and broader foreign policy failures that allowed al-Qaida to strike a devastating blow at the United States that day. On Wednesday, at long last, the most important of these reviews finally turned its spotlight on the most comprehensive and startling failure of that day: the inability of the world’s most sophisticated air force to mount any significant defense against the attackers.

In the strictest sense, all other questions plumbed in the days since that awful Tuesday are about the context of the attacks, not their substance. Conflicting jurisdictions and missions bedeviled the CIA and other agencies, including those dealing with visas, borders, immigration and domestic surveillance. Even without these handicaps, perfect performance might still fall short.

Intelligence and law enforcement activities, even at their most competent and coordinated, might never glean the evil plans of a small group of well-disciplined attackers. Foreign policy at its most enlightened will still fail to dissuade those bent on blaming the world’s injustices (and their own culture’s myriad failures) on the dominant nation of the times. Even the Federal Aviation Administration, which repeatedly failed to do the right thing that day, can legitimately argue that its core mission did not include command and control of American air defenses.

Ready or not, that was the job of the Air Force, and its domestic defense branches, North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and the Air National Guard.

“Regardless of the color of the plane or what flag it had on its tail, NORAD and the Air Force for 50 years have been tasked with the job of going up, intercepting them and making sure they never get close,” says Dan Goure, a senior defense official in the Reagan administration and now an NBC News military analyst. “No failure on 9/11 was more complete.”

As several LGF readers have suggested, the only way to prevent such terrible failures in the future is to immediately shoot down any commercial airplane that deviates from its flight path. Then MSNBC and all the other media will be back to singing the praises of the military, in our shining new era of success.

(What? They’ve never sung the praises of the military? Oh. Never mind.)