Company level intelligence in the COIN fight

After nearly 4 months here at FT Huachuca I finally have a job. I still don't have a permanent office or desk to work at, but at least I have a job. While I always had a job title, Training Division XO does sound very important (it's not), my boss had never given me any tasks primarily due to the lack of work space as well as there not being much to assign me with.

That changed a couple of days ago when our little corner of FT Huachuca was given the task of managing the Army's CoIST MTTs, which my boss then decided I would be more than able to do.

So what does all of that mean? Well, an MTT is a mobile training team. An MTT travels to various military posts and provides training to the units on whatever training they have requested. It's a method used when a lot of people need to be trained on something and everybody can't all travel to one location to get the training.

A CoIST is a company intelligence support team, basically a company level intelligence (S2) section. Back in 2005 or 2006 the Army realized that nearly all of the information and intelligence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan was being done down at the company level, unlike in a conventional fight where intelligence usually comes from higher at the corps or division level and then filtered down. Company commanders were being overwhelmed with information and didn't have the resources to process it all; battalion S2's (intelligence sections...what I was in charge of in my last two deployments) were also overwhelmed with all this information from the companies. Company commanders were irritated that most intelligence products disseminated to them from battalion level usually just gave them back the information they had sent higher, with perhaps some analysis to go with it. Companies needed their own intel sections.

Thus, the CoIST was born...but not resourced. Company commanders were told to establish intel sections but weren't given any intelligence soldiers, the personnel had to come from their own elements. An infantry company with between 120-150 soldiers can probably afford to do this. Grab some smart soldiers and a few guys who are too injured to regularly go out on patrol and make them your CoIST. Cavalry troops and field artillery batteries who often have less than 100 soldiers (1-14's troops while deployed usually had between 78-82 soldiers) were hard pressed to allocate soldiers for the CoIST mission without severely degrading their ability to complete daily missions. On top of the personnel issue, these soldiers were not intelligence soldiers, they were infantry, armor, field artillery, etc; they had no training, experience, or idea of what to do.

MTTs were put together from government contractors in order to train non-MI soldiers on how to do basic MI tasks. By 2008/2009 the Army was pushing hard for CoISTs. Some commanders heeded the advice on what these CoISTs could do for them and other commanders ignored it. 5-1 CAV, the unit 1-14 replaced in Iraq did not have CoISTs because the squadron commander did not believe in the idea. My squadron at least made an attempt at the concept, but with fewer soldiers than an infantry battalion, it was a challenge.

1-14's CoISTs consisted of 1-3 soldiers depending on the troop and the commander. Each troop used the HUMINT soldiers as their CoISTs since those soldiers were the closest thing the troop commander had to intelligence analysts. The fire support officer was occassionally augmented the CoIST officer in charge (OIC) as an extra duty. A troop primarily just used their senior HUMINT NCO in conjunction with the troop commander to develop their information; the FSO was brought in to help with the non lethal responsibilities. B troop, blessed with two HUMINT NCOs and a talented FSO were the most successful of our COISTs. They fused information taken from patrol reports, HUMINT reports, SIGINT reports, and intel from higher to not only develop a cohesive picture of the JRTN network in our operating environment, but diseminate it up to higher headquarters as well, giving not only the troop the JRTN picture but also squadron as well as brigade. C troop faced the difficulty of a commander who did not feel the need to have a CoIST, he believed he could manage all the information himself. The FSO did all the non lethal work and the HUMINT NCO helped with link diagrams, but other than the HUMINT reports very little was sent higher so squadron and brigade were left in the dark for the most part. This became problematic when the commander became the S3 (operations officer) and expected me to provide analysis on personalities and areas that he had information on, but had never shared or disseminated in any HUMINT or patrol report. The troop commander that replaced him wasn't much better and began witholding information out of spite. Luckily the HUMINT NCO and I were on fairly good terms and I maintained some level of situational awareness on C troop's operating environment.

So anyway, I am now the manager of 61 contractors who travel around the country to teach and develop CoISTs to active, National Guard, and Reserve Army units. I'm looking forward to this mission because of all the programs my division was responsible for, the CoIST mission was the one in which I felt I would be best suited to give my input on. Now if I can only get some permanent office space...