I've been dwelling a bit recently on my third deployment and 1-14 Cav's operations in Diyala Province, Iraq. As I was leaving the country I wrote a post about my thoughts at the time. I stated I felt like the mission was incomplete and that there was so much more to do and individuals we should have removed from the battlespace. Part of the reason for those feelings came from the high standards I set for myself, especially since 1-14 had some pretty good initial success at targeting our high value individuals. However, a lot of my frustrations came from the pressures I felt on a daily basis coming from our operations officer and the troop commanders.
There's a saying in the military, "intelligence drives operations". The general meaning of that is information and intelligence gathered should be telling a unit where to send patrols, who to talk to, what areas to conduct clearances, who to detain, etc. Essentially, intel needs to be ahead of ops, not the other way around.
Sounds good on paper, but is often difficult to practice in reality. In my case, intel was hard to come by due to multiple hurdles, one of which was a lack of sources/informants to provide information. This lead to our technical means of collecting information to be weak. Often we were forced to defer to the Iraqis on where operations should occur...which honestly isn't all that bad and in a counter insurgency deferring to the native security forces is usually the best practice.
Unfortunately, the operations officer was not pleased with this and I heard several times from him (both ops officers in fact since the original went up to brigade and was replaced) that my section was failing. The troop commanders also seemed frustrated that I wasn't coming to them daily with compounds and villages that needed to be searched or the exact location of a wanted individual. Multiple times I was told to start targeting like the special ops guys target or to demand from SOF the intel they were getting.
Flash forward to my time in Afghanistan, both at the detention facility and at IJC. In both positions I had daily knowledge of who was being detained or killed and what type of organizations were doing the targeting. Since Afghanistan in 2012-13 was similar to Iraq in 2009-10 (in terms of how spread out units were and their mission) this was a good way to compare 1-14 Cav's time in Iraq to other conventional units and their targeting abilities.
I found that conventional units are doing very little capturing of individuals, it's almost all special forces. SOF have more assets and analysts that have specialized training/experience in conducting the type of targeting that is often required in fighting an insurgency. Conventional units are busy doing the necessary, but somewhat mundane, tasks such as partnership, route clearance, or in the specific case of 1-14's time in Iraq, maintaining checkpoints. They don't have the bodies on the ground and rarely get the intel that leads to something actionable, and when they do they often pass it off to the SOF guys who can further develop and action a target more quickly and efficiently.
This revelation has made me feel better about 1-14's time in Diyala Province. We did what we could and did pretty damn well, especially due to the fact that for a good chunk of our time we were tied to checkpoints and had a very limited number of platoons that could operate to gather information that could then be integrated into our targeting efforts. I have enough demons on my back from that deployment that I don't need to add to them.
No comments:
Post a Comment