This morning's On Books features a guest post by our military affairs writer, Mark Brunswick. New York Times terrorism correspondent Eric Schmitt knew that his new book, "Counterstrike," might have a problem with shelf-life, given its subject matter: terrorism from the 9/11 attacks through today. As the book, co-authored with colleague Thom Shanker, was going to press, the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden, an event that would certainly change the tenor of any book on the topic. Also, the book's relatively optimistic account of how the U.S. has combated terrorism post 9/11 would certainly change if there was another major attack on U.S. soil shortly after it was published. When bin Laden was killed in May, Schmitt and Shanker were in the final stages of editing the book and there were only a few days before it was scheduled to go to the bindery. They were given 96 hours by their publisher, Times Books, to tweak the beginning and the end and to write a 5,000-word chapter about his death. The second obstacle: forecasting the future of terror attacks, proved to need more nuance. "We tried to look at where is the terrorism threat headed and to try and look out, with imperfect knowledge, as to where a big attack might happen," said Schmitt, who was in town last week as part of a panel sponsored by the William Mitchell School of Law National Security Forum and MPR. He also spoke at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. "The more likely type of attack, if it comes, is more likely to be some smaller scale attack, somebody who has access to get into this country with a VISA or something, who doesn't set up red flags, or someone who is in this country already." "Counterstrike" is a study of how the military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement communities picked themselves up and dusted themselves off following the 9/11 attacks. The book points to an unheralded group of underlings who actually laced together an effective strategy for dealing with terrorism, particularly in the final years of the Bush administration and into the Obama presidency. Schmitt has been with the New York Times since 1983, and has focused on terrorism since 2010. Despite the weight of The New York Times behind him, he says he is inherently cautious about what he reports. "The trick in our business is you write what you know, you don't ever want to be in this world where you over-extend. There are colleagues of mine who get the reputation of being hype artists who take those three pieces of information and project out and extrapolate a lot more than you can. To have any kind of credibility in this field you have to be accurate and put it in the right context and say what you don't know," he said. "Luckily, we work for daily newspapers and we get another chance tomorrow. What we are dealing with so often in this world, with Washington, in particular, is that everybody has an agenda, you have to be aware of that, even within agencies, within State, within DoD, within the CIA, people have got their own agendas. Most of these people are not going to go on the record. You have to be able to come to enough people where you come to your own internal conclusions, based on a lot of reporting. Then you have to just be as straight with your readers as you possibly can. It's better to come up a little bit short on a story and come back and build on it then come back to a story and have to correct it." Schmitt, 51, was born in Eden Prairie, and lived there and in Minnetonka until he was 7, when his family moved to the San Francisco Bay area. Both of his parents were born and raised in Minnesota (attending Blake and Northrup schools, respectively). His uncle, E. Peter Gillette Jr., was commissioner of Minnesota's Department of Trade and Economic Development under Gov. Arne Carlson. In the 1920's, his great-grandmother built a log cabin on the North Shore, north of Two Harbors, in a community called Encampment Forest. Here's a piece Schmitt wrote for The Times after the original family cabin was sold: http://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/14/travel/last-reunion-at-the-family-retreat.html