LTG Flynn to the DIA

For those who are inclined to care, LTG Michael Flynn was nominated by the Pentagon to be the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency which is the central producer and manager of military intelligence for the Department of Defense. Congrats to him assuming the Senate approves him.

So who is LTG Flynn?

He was in charge of military intelligence in Afghanistan during the tenures of GEN McChrystal (you remember him from the Rolling Stone scandal) and GEN Petraeus (you remember him from that little thing we called the Surge in Iraq). I don't know much about him since I was never in Afghanistan but he published a report for the think tank CNAS in 2010. It can be found here...in case you're really bored.

The report caused a bit of controversy since it basically states that the way the military was doing intel in Afghanistan was completely wrong. Flynn was pretty brutal but he also cited specific examples of intel guys who were doing things right...at the tactical level.

Since his report came out at about the same time we had a scheduled network outage during my last deployment, I downloaded it prior to the outage and spend a couple of hours reading it and comparing what Flynn was saying to how I was conducting military intelligence in my little corner of Iraq.

I was pretty set in my ways by the time I read it but I made some adjustments to how I saw the operating environment and the insurgency within it as well as how I should be managing my staff and producing intel products.

Flynn's dislike for PowerPoint slides and urge for more comprehensive written reports I took to heart and did my best to write well thought out analysis on major upcoming events and how the insurgents would react to them. Not much success there as nobody really wants to read a 3 or 4 page report on how elections will affect indirect fire attacks against checkpoints...but one of my papers did go up to Division where I'm sure it was ignored.

There was also an emphasis on intel officers actually discussing events/people/areas/etc with the company commanders and platoon leaders they are supposed to be helping. With a little kick in the ass from the Squadron XO (I was set in my ways afterall) I began sitting down with most of the troop commanders a couple of times a week...I say most since by this time C troop's commander was actively avoiding me but I did chat with his XO and the commander's replacement after the commander was relieved for getting a lieutenant pregnant. Were these chats successful? I like to think so, at the very least it showed the commanders that I cared about what they thought and I could get their insight directly instead of during some stuffy daily update that everyone just wants over with so we can get to dinner.

But back to LTG Flynn. I think this is a great move and hopefully he will be able to break the Cold War mentality that often can be found at the upper echelons of the intel bureaucracy.