The 19 Islamist extremist fanatics who killed more than 2,800 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, had escaped the notice of the world's largest and most expensive national security and global intelligence agencies with a combined budget at the time of at least $30 billion -- it is now far higher. But their most ambitious plan -- to kill the entire U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and all their congressional staffs -- was only thwarted by simple cell phones.

Passengers on the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 were able to learn from cell-phone calls to their loved ones that previously hijacked planes had already been flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing thousands of innocent people. Knowing they were already doomed and that the fate of thousands more lay in their hands, they rose up and fought the al-Qaida terrorists who had seized control of their plane. Their sacrifice saved the U.S. Capitol from destruction -- as well as untold lives.

The role of the simple cell phone in foiling an ambitious terrorist plot where so much high tech and thousands of professionals had already failed is a common theme in modern war. In early 1942 the British Empire's armed forces outnumbered the invading Japanese in Malaya by nearly two to one, and the British were confident that they had blocked all the roads south and that the jungle was impassable. So it might have been, to heavy British battle tanks. But not to the simple bicycles with which the Japanese army of Gen. Tomoyuki "Tiger" Yamashita was equipped.

They weren't sexy. They must have looked ridiculous. But they worked. Malaya and Singapore fell within a few weeks, and so did the British Empire in the East.

Many other examples could be found. The British Swordfish biplane seemed like an obsolete joke by 1941. Where sleek fighter planes of the day could already fly at 350 miles per hour without breaking a sweat, it was lucky to make 100 miles per hour and often had to fly more slowly than that to conserve fuel. Against a heavy Atlantic headwind, the ungainly, ugly little old aircraft often just appeared to be standing still.

But in May 1941, the sophisticated, state-of-the-art anti-aircraft systems of the German battleship Bismarck, the most accurate and powerful warship in the world, proved useless against those same little lumbering, ungainly Swordfish. They were so inconceivably slow that the settings for the Bismarck's bristling anti-aircraft armaments couldn't be adjusted to compensate for them.

The last, crucial Swordfish attack from the aircraft carrier Ark Royal jammed the Bismarck's rudder and wrecked its steering mechanism, making it a sitting duck to be finished off by British battleships the next day. Not a single old biplane was even seriously damaged in the attack.

Over the past four years, the U.S. armed forces, the most efficient, best trained and best equipped in the world and invincible against huge regular armies, have learned the same sobering lesson in the Iraq war.

No one factored improvised explosive devices into the equation as a serious tactical weapon of war before the current conflict, but IEDs have completely changed the strategic equation in Iraq. And as last July's brief war in southern Lebanon demonstrated, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite Party of God, had learned the lesson well enough to inflict unexpected casualties on Israeli Merkava Main Battle Tanks.

Previously, tough, shrewd old Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had defeated the Second Palestinian Intifada, not with any of the billions of dollars worth of high-tech wonder weapons the United States had supplied to his country over the years, but with nothing more than the cement and barbed wire that was used to construct the Security Fence or Barrier -- in practice usually a wall -- to cut off the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank from Israel's heartland areas.

These examples teach the sobering importance of not trusting too much in high-tech wonder weapons, and encouraging national defense contractors to keep their production lines and maintenance depots open and prepared to provide unsexy, low-tech and improbable weapons of every kind to wage and win wars. As the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes sagely warned thousands of years ago, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happen to them all."

(Next: Ugly ducklings that won wars)

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