Rescue expert warns FlyDubai hijacking attempt shows US, allies are ‘playing checkers’ against terror threat

The FlyDubai attempted hijacking shows the U.S. and its allies are still using outdated counterterrorism assumptions against increasingly sophisticated enemies, a U.S. rescue expert and 9/11 first responder warns.

"They’re good at chess," Bryan Stern, chairman and CEO of Grey Bull Rescue, told Fox News Digital on Monday, saying the radical ideology behind the FlyDubai attack is a ringing "bell" for global aviation security and Western counterterrorism strategy.

"And we’re, if we’re lucky, playing checkers – if we’re lucky – and I would argue we’re not even playing checkers that well." TERROR CELLS INSIDE FOREIGN AIRLINES 'CERTAINLY A POSSIBILITY,' RETIRED PILOT WARNS Stern, whose global nonprofit conducts evacuations from war zones and hostage situations, said the thwarted FlyDubai attack by "an angry, radicalized, Sunni bad guy" is showing just how far behind our enemies we are in this post-9/11 world.

"They understand us significantly more than we understand them," Stern, who has been "hunting the bad guys" for 30 years, said.

Stern said the U.S. has to understand the "asymmetric warfare" as well as the increasingly sophisticated enemy does.

"The reason why a football coach watches game tapes is not to watch his own team play, it's to watch the bad guys play," he said.

"We gotta start watching some game tapes." AMERICA BUILT A FORTRESS AFTER 9/11.

THEN THE THREAT STARTED HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT Stern is intimately in tune with the playbook on the ground in war zones, including the Middle East and Iran.

"We conduct these operations in these places still to this very day," he said.

"We're actually on the ground, meaning I know people in Hezbollah, I know people in the Taliban.

I know people in ISIS.

I know people in ISIS-K.

I've met with radical jihadi weirdos and whack jobs personally." United Arab Emirates investigators have described the incident aboard FlyDubai flight FZ1073 as an attempted terror attack after the co-pilot allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to hijack the plane , which was carrying more than 170 passengers and crew, most of them Israelis.

Australian authorities have also said a counterterrorism unit is investigating the co-pilot’s links to Australia.