Warhorse Intel

Another tribal sheikh bites the dust

2012-02-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

As much as I know that I should completly move on and forget about NE Diyala Province, I can't help but keep tabs on some of the major events that occur in that little corner of Iraq that 1-14 spent a year in.

That said, the other day a sheikh of a minor tribe of As Sadiyah was killed by a bomb placed in his car. The sheikh was from the al-Asakira tribe and to be honest if I ever knew anything about that tribe it escapes me now. As Sadiyah was the town just south of COP Cobra and was actually a series of villages that became neighborhoods of As Sadiyah. For many of the neighborhoods one tribe would be the majority of the residents and I suspect the Asakira are one of those tribes.

What does this attack mean?

Having no other information other than it seems pretty apparent somebody was trying to kill him I can't really say for sure. Most likely he just angered somebody but most likely it was a political hit. Perhaps this sheikh was too friendly towards the Kurds, or maybe he was active in removing Al Qaida cells from his neighborhood. Whatever the case, it appears that there is still an insurgent cell or two conducting operations (unless it was indeed political and in that case, Iraqi politics as usual).

A chapter ends

2012-02-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

I am out of the Army as of 0850 today...hold up...I'm a civilian now...sorry, 8:50 am. There, that's better.

Feels good.

I'll still be posting on this blog since my interest in insurgencies around the world and the happenings in Iraq have not ceased. Also, I'm pretty sure I can still come up with some more interesting stories from my previous deployments.

Ok, enough of this...back to Skyrim.

Working with our "Special" friends: Part III

2012-02-01T19:34:00.000-08:00

Ok, so when I left off in my previous post 1-14 Cav had gone after a possible meeting of 3 high value targets based off information from a source belonging to our friendly neighborhood special forces team. The info was essentially bogus and the raid a dud but had led to the fascinating discovery of a sheikh inhabited by a djinn.

The source's information might have been bad, but at least he had given some actionable intelligence. Unfortunately, the SF team continued to get information that was likely bad and kept concluding that it was valid.

About two or three weeks after the false raid we had a mortar attack on (now FOB) Cobra. We hadn't had a mortar attack on the base since November and this attack still bothers me to this day since the insurgent mortar team should have been eliminated back when they were consistently hitting us.

Back story: between October and November, Cobra was hit 4 times by 60mm mortars from the same general location. The attacks occured 14-17 days apart and between certain hours in the late afternoon/early evening. However, due to some equipment "issues" we weren't entirely sure where the team was hitting us from and chased our tails for the first couple of attacks. By the third attack we had the location pinned down. Strangely, the last attack in November was the last attack until March 13. This was likely due to two events. 1: The previous SF team along with the Iraqi army captured two individuals and a cache of weapons in December...this likely spooked the cell. 2: 1-14 conducted a rehearsal "dry" fire of counter mortars in which we accidently fired mortars at the known location where the team was hitting us from (known as the point of origin...POO...heh, heh, poo). This also likely spooked the cell.

On the evening in question we were renovating our dining facility and so everyone was filing through an outdoor kitchen and generally eating outside. There was also a crane assisting in the renovation that was lit up like a Christmas tree. The entire base had gotten complacent. Five 60mm mortars came in and the first one struck the bottom part of a storage container sending the strapnel further and faster than usual. The strapnel struck PFC Erin McLyman who was assigned to us from 296 Brigade Support Battalion to assist in searching females on the combined checkpoints that had been established in the Combined Security Area. She died on the MEDEVAC flight.

C troop spent the next several days going through the villages in the Tibij tribal area talking with everyone they could and searching under every rock. The evidence and information they gathered pointed straight back to the known insurgent network operating in the area. Two individuals were also detained, one of whom was a teenager. During interrogation the teenager also blamed the AQI network.

Within the same time frame a couple of SF intel reports from their sources came out that we of course put in our daily squadron intelligence summary, standard practice. The intel from the SF team conflicted with our own and we put in our assessment that we believed the source was wrong or providing false information knowingly. Apparently this bruised the egos of the SF team who sent emails to two of my NCOs (but not my HUMINT NCO for some reason) asking WTF. As my night NCO told me, you can't get so focused on your own sources that you believe everything they say, you've got to have thick skin about it.

It didn't help that the SF team may have had a chat with the detainees taken by C troop without the proper paperwork and authorization. When asked by my brigade intel officer if anyone had interrogated the detainees I stated that my team had and the SF team may have. The brigade S2 went to the SF company commander and questioned why the team conducted an interrogation without the proper paperwork in which the commander called the team commander to find out what the fuck was going on...yeah, whoops on my part.

So not only was I calling out the team's sources, I was unintentially calling them out on a possible illegal interrogation. The SF intel guy stopped coming by to see me at that point.

My winning personality is probably not going to fix this

Communication wasn't completely severed, though. Lucky me I had been assigned a female counter-intelligence NCO who eventually started having a close relationship with one of the SF members. There is a slight pun in there and if she reads this blog (unlikely) she may hunt me down and kill me.

The final straw between myself and the SF team came in June after the suicide car bomb that killed 2 of our soldiers and wounded several more. Within hours an SF source had named the person who conducted the attack. However, it soon became apparent that this information didn't make sense. The Iraqi army was soon able to determine who the suicide bomber was (not the guy the SF team said) and who was responsible (also not the guy the SF team said). The information my section gathered corroborated what the Iraqi army was finding out. Someone was blowing smoke up the SF team's ass.

A week after the attack I had most of the scenario mapped out and who did what. Late one evening the adjudant (personnel officer/aide to the squadron commander) called me and said I should come to his office. Sitting there waiting for our squadron commander to get out of another meeting was the SF team commander. He told me that they were certain that the guy their source was naming was the guy who conducted the attack...and that we should target him.

I will state this was not one of my more finer or professional moments. It was mid June, I had a month and half left in theater. I was exhausted mentally, physically, and emotionally. I also didn't want to put up with some jackass telling me who I should be targeting when they very well could target the guy themselves.

I told the SF commander very sternly that their source was wrong. I informed him of what we had determined (which was much more in depth than what he was giving me...a single name). I then told him that if they were so certain about this guy then they should target him since they hadn't really done much during their deployment. Before getting a reaction I left the office.

Hmm...the ashes of that bridge look like a great spot to piss on.

That reaction isn't like me. That's not my personality at all but he really really really pushed me and my temperment. If he mentioned anything to the squadron commander about my attitude I never heard about it. The next and last interaction I had with the SF team was to introduce my replacement to them. Fortunately my NCOs still talked with them so not all was lost.

Maybe it's the reason I was banished to Huachuca, though.

Working with our "Special" friends: Part II

2012-01-31T20:09:00.000-08:00

Alright, so my last post discussed a few of 1-14 Cav's, and my, more colorful interactions in Iraq with the organization known as Task Force which was primarily made up of Rangers and civilian intel analysts. I realize that it came off a bit bitter, but when you have most of your toilet paper used up in a matter of hours you'd be bitter too. I wasn't exaggerating about the lack of information sharing either. Multiple times they asked for information from us and I was expected to provide it to them (if I didn't they would go to my squadron commander, basically tattle on me) but if I asked something of them I would rarely get a reply...or it would go to the operations officer who then failed to share it with me (so we had our own info flow problem in the squadron as well).

Anyway, enough about that...what about our green beret fellows?

They were better...on occasion. The team down at FOB Caldwell was awesome and we had a great working relationship with them. Their intel guy would pop in to discuss targets and the enemy situation and myself or one of my section members would swing by their team house from time to time to do the same. A few high value targets and persons of interest were detained because of this relationship. When the team rotated out we kept up our working relationship with the new team but unfortunately that only lasted a couple of months before the team was forced to move out of the area because Caldwell was shut down.

Working with the team on COP Cobra was a little more...interesting. I rarely saw their intel guy and he kept his cards close to his chest. Their commander was a very common site in our headquarters, though, and he would often have sit down chats with the squadron commander and stop into my office to talk and share. Several of our missions were conducted with the assistance of the SF team on Cobra.

It was when that team left and a new one came in that the situation got a little weird, and I'll admit part of it was my fault. Their new intel guy came around a lot and even participated in the joint Iraq/Kurd intel meetings that I hosted which was great. However, the team didn't get out much and they practically stopped conducting missions. Not entirely their fault as by this time the Combined Security Area© had been established meaning that all US forces had to conduct missions with both Iraqi and Kurd partners in the CSA. Fine for us, we brought in a Kurdish platoon and lived on the same base with an Iraqi army brigade HQ. Not so fine for the SF team who only had an Iraqi commando company to work with (there was a Kurdish "Swat" team in the Khanaqin area but no way in hell were the Iraqis going to allow those guys to come anywhere near the CSA). This led to my concern the new team seemed to be taking their sources' information hook, line, and sinker without taking the info with the standard grain of salt. The team couldn't really leave the base to go confirm information on the ground.

I should explain. Human intelligence, or HUMINT for short, is the process of gaining information from human informants...like a police snitch. The source can be as informal as a random civilian telling you something in the marketplace to a vetted, known personality, who is a member of an insurgent cell but is feeding you info. Part of my job as the intelligence officer was to weed through all the reports we would get and determine which were legit and which were bullshit...not always easy.

One evening in February the SF commander came to our headquarters and stated they had a source claiming that some of our high value targets were meeting in a village in the Tibij tribal area (Tibij being a dusty wasteland across the river from us where the hostile Kurwi tribe lived). The source was using a sub source so it took us several hours to determine which village and which building the meeting was occuring in. We also had to grab our Iraqi friends to plan with them (the Kurds were easy, tell them we're going to capture Arabs and they'll follow you like a platoon of puppies).

Pictured: our Kurdish Peshmerga platoon! I kid, I kid.

It was pretty late by the time we got rolling (I use "we" because I somehow got roped into going) and by this time the un-named HVTs became named HVTs. This should have been a red light for me since a source like this suddenly giving very actionable intelligence with named individuals almost never happens, but we preceeded anyway because, hey, you've got to at least take a shot on goal to get a score.

The troop (plus Iraqis and Kurds) hit the target house sometime after 2 am...but it was the wrong house. Hell, it was the wrong damn village. This set off more red lights for me since the source couldn't even get us to the right village, but of course we pressed on. It was determined the correct village and house wasn't that far away so we got our shit straight and hit that house...
...and found pretty much nothing.

Well, I shouldn't say nothing. There was the family plus 3 teenagers visiting from Salah al Din province. Of note there were a lot of video tapes "hidden" in a closet and some computer equipment set up with a wireless network, which was very odd for this part of Iraq. Of particular note one of the videos was labeled in Arabic "Beheading" or "Torture" or something along those lines.

...which was pretty much nothing. Turns out they were Egyptian movies. Oh well.

So what the hell happened?

The way I figure it, and the squadron commander generally agreed with my figuring, was that someone saw these teenagers arrive at the house and freaked because they were strangers. Strangers are generally bad in that part of Iraq and in some crazy game of telephone 3 teenagers visiting from Salah al Din became 3 insurgents, which got to the SF source who turned that into 3 HVTs, and after some pressure just gave us 3 names of guys he knew we were going after.

You can see why I had a lack of trust in the SF sources. Hell, I had a lack of trust in most of my squadron's sources as well. It was after 6 am before I got to bed thanks to lack of vetting by the SF team.

There was a bit of silver lining, though. We would eventually learn that the owner of the house we raided was a minor sheikh. A sheikh who believed he had a a djinn inside of him who helped him heal people. A djinn is essentially a genie that can be good, evil, or neutral...and this sheikh had one inhabiting his body. The teenagers from Salah al Din were likely visiting to be healed by the djinn. The sheikh immediately became a person of interest to us because we had some information that one of our targets was chronically ill. So where would an insurgent who is ill and lives in an area with little to no medical care? A sheikh with a healing djinn of course! Or that was the logic of the operations officer, but I was willing to go along with because it was a better lead than anything else my section had at the time. Looking back it seems a little ridiculous, but that's Iraq for ya.

But the bigger question, did it work? Did we capture any of targets by monitoring the majic sheikh man with spirits inside him? Of course not. Not going to be that easy.

Next post...I burn the bridge with the SF team and then piss on the ashes.

Working with our "Special" friends

2012-01-29T21:04:00.000-08:00

During the '09-'10 deployment, 1-14 Cav and myself had an interesting relationship with the different special operations units that operated in and around our area of operations. It was occasionally amicable and occasionally it was strained, and the relationship often depended on the personalities of the SOF members and how friendly I was feeling.

There were two types of SOF units that we worked with. The first was the standard spec ops guys you think of when you think Army special operations, the green beret type guys. FOB Caldwell and COP Cobra each had a special forces team. The Caldwell team operated in the Nidah Tribal Region, Balad Ruz, and Mandali...our southern portion essentially. The Cobra team operated in our northern portion, As Sadiya, Jalula, and Qara Tapa for the most part.

The second SOF unit was made up of Rangers and who had the mission of targeting key Sunni insurgent leadership, primarily Ayyub al-Masri and his little gang of merry pirates. "Task Force" as they were known would pop in every couple of weeks with only a few hours warning (if you were lucky) and snag someone in their sleep. That someone or someones had possible links to some insurgent big shot but who rarely seemed to have any role in the insurgent cells operating in 1-14's corner of Iraq. It was this unit, Task Force who would give me a few of the biggest headaches.

My first experience with Task Force was just after my arrival to Caldwell. TF had flown into Jalula to conduct a mission but accidently startled some of the local security forces who promptly began firing on the TF guys. The local security (the Julula Emergency Reaction Force) had a touchy relationship with US forces and had asked to be notified of any US operations in and around Jalula so they would not "accidently" fire on them. Because the TF operation was super double probation secret, no one had notified the Jalula ERF so naturally they assumed the guys dropping out of helicopters with modern military equipment were insurgents (it was night so maybe the ERF was just confused). TF opened up on the ERF with snipers and an AC-130 gunship...managing to wound only 3 ERF members. TF completed the mission and the Jalula ERF, police, and government officials banned US forces from entering Jalula because of the incident.

A week and a few meetings later and US forces were allowed back into Jalula with the promise of informing the Iraqi Army and ERF of any operation that would be occuring in the city. This actually did work out as the Iraqis understood the nature of these missions and as longs as they got an hour or so heads up everything was fine.

A few months after 1-14 took over for 5-1 Cav there was another incident involving Task Force. TF was conducted a mission in As Sadiyah, a town just south of COP Cobra. We had been warned ahead of time as had the Iraqi Army. However, problems began almost as soon as the team hit the ground. As TF approached the target house on foot they began taking fire from one of the roof tops...not the target house. One soldier was wounded and the interpreter began shouting that they were US forces...which only caused the gunfire to increase. An MH-6 "Little Bird" was called in to fire missiles at the house. The target house was eventually raided but the target was gone. The missiles from the Little Bird started a fire that burned several more structures.

The mayor of As Sadiyah was pissed, as were the people of that neighborhood who were primarily Kurds. But when you fire on US forces, hell is going to come down on you. The official story from the Iraqis was that the US had fired first, on bodyguards protecting the home of some government official. The video TF had of the incident showed otherwise.

A few days after the incident the TF commander flew in with some of his intel analysts and showed us the video and we briefed them on our picture of the enemy situation in our area. TF believed that the bodyguards were actually part of an early warning for their target, which made sense to us. I had virtually no info on their target and they promised to do a better job of sharing information...which never happened.

The face to face meeting worked out enough that whenever a new team came in (they were on much shorter deployment schedules than we were) we would have a sit down and give them our perspective on our situation. This open dialogue allowed for some gained trust on both sides and enabled 1-14 to participate on a couple of missions with TF...but no information sharing like I mentioned.

The first dual mission was shortly after the As Sadiyah fiasco and targeted the same individual. If I recall correctly it was another successful capture.

The second mission involving 1-14 generally just annoyed the crap out of me. TF received intel that al-Masri would be in Jalula and so flew in a team to capture him. This meant that for about 2 days we had to play host to a group of Rangers who had the opinion that everything that wasn't nailed down they could take. The first morning I walked into my office to find it full of Rangers milling about. When I tried to get by one of them to get to my computer the Ranger asked me what I was doing there. I of course explained to him that this was my S2 office and that I had work to do. Sitting down I looked at my NCO who sat across from me and he just gave me an exacerbated look.

We had several rolls of toilet paper in the office since the bathroom regularly ran out at inconvenient times and you could never be sure when it would be restocked. After a few hours the toilet paper was gone and when I asked about it I was told the Task Force guys "borrowed it". So much for that. By the end of the day all our snacks were gone too. Eventually I found one of the leaders for the team and tried to get some intel from him on their mission after explaining who I was. This got me nowhere so I resigned myself to going about my daily routine and telling myself that if they did capture al-Masri I could at least say I was there, if not directly involved.

Al-Masri was not captured in Jalula of course. He would be killed in April outside of Tikrit.

Task Force missions came and went, mostly without any further drama. The final dual TF/1-14 mission would come after a suicide carbombing targeting 1-14 in June. After the attack my section and I pieced together who was involved and eventually were able to determine one of the key players in not only the attack but possibly the "godfather" of AQI in our area. Division just happened to have a warrant on the guy but we were hesitant to conduct a mission to capture him because we would have to conduct the mission with both Iraqi Army and Peshmerga and word would most likely reach our target...so we called TF. They were receptive to the mission and a couple nights after gaining the warrant we captured our target.

I'm still bitter about the toilet paper though.

This post became longer than I expected so tomorrow (or the next day, or maybe the day after that) I'll discuss my relationship with our green beret partners.

No, I haven't abandoned this blog yet!

2012-01-26T20:20:00.000-08:00

I need to apologize for the lack of posts recently. I promise you that I am not ignoring this blog and I will do my best to not regress to the horrible blogger I was while I was deployed in '09-'10. My attention has been focused on clearing FT Huachuca and preparing to leave the Army so my energy to update has been limited.

By the end of this weekend I will have a new post, hopefully of some interesting or amusing event that I can recall from one of my deployments.

Stop SOPA/PIPA

2012-01-18T13:43:00.000-08:00

I usually refrain from bringing politics into this blog but I'm breaking habit.

Just say no to internet censorship.

Marines doing it better: Part II

2012-01-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

Back in April I posted a blog about a squad of Marines and their patrol tactics. I was very impressed by not only the techniques the Marines were utilizing but also their restraint in dealing with an apparently hostile population.

Today, Tom Ricks included in his blog a story of a Marine in Afghanistan and how they integrated a couple of reporters who were looking to get a story on the Marine's use of FETs (female engagement teams). Once again I was impressed by the Marines who took the time to sit down with the reporters and learn what the reporters hoped to accomplish and then placed them with different squads throughout their stay. The Marines ensured that the reporters saw what they wanted to see and the reporters made sure to stay within the ground rules that the Marines established.

I'm not saying that the Marines are far superior than the other services, all I'm saying is that in this particular situation the Marines did an excellent job in media interaction and getting their story out. My last unit, 1-14 Cav did essentially the same thing when we had media arrive and other than my cultural landmine, some stupid comments by stupid lieutenants, and a misquote by our squadron XO, we had excellent dealings with the media.

One other element of the article caught my attention and that was the Marine's description of a particular IED infested area dominated by the Taliban and what the Marine's did to improve the situation. They put a patrol base right next to the main village and the marketplace...where the people are. The population grew to trust the Marines and the Afghan Army soldiers because they were living essentially where they were living and could protect them. Civilians pointed out IEDs and passed on information on any Taliban infiltrating into the area. That's how you defeat an insurgency.

Very similar to what we did in 1-23 IN as part of Operation Arrowhead Ripper in 2007. After securing the western half of Baqubah with the help of the Iraqi Army and 5-20 IN (5-20 occasionally does things right) my battalion was ordered to establish two combat outposts in the city. We could have placed the COPs in the areas with the most historic enemy activity (the main road that went north to south through the city and then cut east across the river) but that wouldn't have made a lot of sense. Enemy attacks were highest on that road because that's where American activity was highest. It was the primary route between the brigade headquarters at FOB Warhorse and a base in the eastern part of the city, FOB Gabe. A single combined armor/mech infantry company was the only American forces in western Baqubah before my battalion arrived and all they could really do with their lack of manpower was hold that road open, so that is where they were attacked.

So we built COPs away from the main road in two neighborhoods where it was assessed the enemy actually "lived", as opposed to where they were "working". The buildings we occupied were both abandoned houses of significant size. A sizable portion of the population had fled prior to our operation (both civilians and insurgents) and so there were plenty of homes to choose from. Neighbors told us one of the homes we took over was owned by one of the insurgent leaders who had fled the city so score 1 for us.

Going off topic because I can...as I was walking through this house with the S3 (operations officer) and some engineers I noticed a spoon on the floor. I picked it up and as I looked at it another soldier and I said at the same time, "there is no spoon." Good times. In another room there was a teddy bear on a shelf. A quick reminder that these men we were hunting and who were doing their best to kill us also had families. War sucks.

Back on topic...the owners (or possibly renters, I can't recall) of the other home we took over eventually returned. Iraqis in general are pretty tolerating of difficult situations and according to the company commander understood that this building could no longer be their home. They accepted a significant financial compensation for the home (which as I mentioned earlier they may not even have owned) as well as our apologies.

Establishing those COPs worked out tremendously and enemy activity was curtailed. There were still problems and attacks of course and we would eventually lose 4 soldiers and an interpreter to a booby trapped house. However, because we had 2 companies living with the population we began to gain the trust of the population. People came to us with concerns as well as information; the Iraqi Army saw we were willing to endure the same hardships they endured; and the Iraqi police gained locations in which to recruit and train new members.

War still sucks, though.

And I thought cadets were dumb...

2012-01-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

Officers do a lot of dumb things, at least from the perspective of the soldier...and the perspective of other officers on occasion. We make up stupid rules, demand stupid projects and products, and are often seen as assigning busy work. 2nd lieutenants are so notorious for doing dumb things that when they are given an opportunity to lead a platoon the lieutenant is assigned a sergeant first class as a platoon sergeant to help keep an eye on the young officer and hopefully mitigate some of the dumb things the lieutenant will likely do.

I have done dumb things in my career. I did dumb things as a 2nd lieutenant (stealing the company commander's HMMWV comes to mind). I did dumb things as a 1st lieutenant (overslept the morning commander's update during a field exercise). I've done numerous dumb things as a captain (agreeing to PCS to Huachuca being one of them). I'm sure that if I were staying in I would do dumb things as a major.

Most of the time I had an NCO, warrant officer, or understanding boss to help smooth over any problems I caused by my mistakes, sweep those mistakes under the carpet, or just ignore them completely and move on. Most officers are like me and have had somebody to clean up the mess they left and are capable of learning from those mistakes. Of course there are a few officers who created so massive a mess that nobody was going to be able to help them out; flagrant disobeying of orders or committing adultery (and getting caught!) in the supply yard come to mind.

So what is the dumbest thing I've ever done as an Army officer?

It wasn't stealing the HMMWV, I only received a slight scolding for that. It wasn't even as a lieutenant.

It was as a captain, and it was something I should have known better than to do.

The event took place in June of 2007 prior to my battalion's (1-23 IN) move from Baghdad to Baqubah to help 5-20 IN (one of our sister battalions) and 3rd brigade, 1st Cavalry Division retake that city from entrenched insurgent forces. I had gone up to FOB Warhorse with the lead element (what is known as the torch movement) to help establish the headquarters and initial intelligence collection prior to the start of Operation Arrowhead Ripper.

Jon Stewart sums up what we were all thinking...

One evening the FOB was hit by indirect fire (if I remember correctly it was actually the last time the FOB would be hit with mortars while we were there). I happened to be standing in line at the phone center waiting to call my parents like the good son that I am. The mortars hit far from where I was at the time so I was not concerned and didn't even bother to find a bunker...I would have lost my place in line anyway.

After making my phone call I walked back to battalion to find out that one of the mortars had hit directly behind the headquarters building. The mortar had gone into a dirt berm that surrounded the building on two sides and left a nice 60mm mortar sized hole. We had no idea if the mortar had gone off inside the berm or if the round was still intact. EOD had been called but for whatever reason they would not be able to swing by until the morning. This is when I swung into action and did a very dumb thing.

I stuck my hand down the damn hole.

I can't even tell you what I was thinking at the time. I probably was just curious to see if the round was still there. Even if it was, was I going to pull out a live round and show it to everyone?

At this point the staff sergeant behind me (a good distance behind me) mentioned that sticking my hand down the mortar hole might not be the best idea.

I ignored him and pulled a pen from my sleeve. The mortar was probably just further down the berm. I stuck my arm and the pen down as far as I could reach searching for the lost mortar.

There was a private standing next to the staff sergeant who finally decided to speak up. "Sir, that's probably really not a good idea."

That's when it struck me. A private is telling me this is a bad idea. Privates are full of bad ideas and constantly carry them out. If a private is telling me I shouldn't be doing this, then I really really really shouldn't be doing this.

And that's the story of the dumbest thing I've ever done in the Army. Could have blown my hand off. Most likely wouldn't even have gotten a Purple Heart for it either...they don't award stupid. I believe the real lesson here isn't "don't put your hand in mortar holes", it's "don't deploy soldiers longer than 12 months they start doing really stupid things".

A Deployed New Years Eve

2012-01-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

2009/2010 was the only New Year that I found myself in Iraq. 2004/2005 I had re-deployed for and 2006/2007 I was lucky enough to spend on leave.

The day was like any other in Iraq and that part of the deployment is pretty much a blur for me since 1-14 was still split between two bases and the staff was working 3 different projects at this time....the combined checkpoints, upcoming elections, and a massive targeting mission to remove as many of the threats from the battlespace as we could before elections. To say I was stressed would be an understatement.

There was also that irritating mortar team that had suddenly vanished but who I was convinced would be back.

By 11:00 pm I had ditched work and gone back to my room. There was only so many PowerPoint slides and emails I could stare at and according to my notes I had to partake in a mission analysis meeting at 9 am (I think it was a briefing to the squadron commander about the checkpoint planning). Looking at my notes there was also a briefing to the US Forces-Iraq commander, GEN Odierno, that was going to occur on January 2nd. We had a lot going on.

I was in a pretty deep sleep when I woke up to an explosion. A very, very close explosion. To say my mind clicked on immediately would be a complete lie but I at least managed to look at my watch...11:59 pm. My first thoughts were, "this is a really strange time for that mortar team to be hitting us."

Our friendly neighborhood mortar team had hit us 4 times at this point. Twice in October and twice in November, all between 6-8 pm...ish.

A second explosion followed by a "Woooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!" rattled me into a slighly more awake state.

"Who the fuck 'woooo's' at being mortared?" Was the only thought I could muster.

A third exposion, a second "woo", and another look at my watch it finally dawned on me...the Special Forces team was setting off explosives for New Years. Their compound was right next to ours so whatever they were lighting off sounded and felt like incoming mortars. I rolled over and fell back asleep to the thought, "fucking Green Berets."

The lesson learned: always stay up for major holidays.

Iraqi "politics"

2011-12-20T09:07:00.000-08:00

Update 2: And there are the bombs. Of course that was easier to predict than determining when the Mariners will be mathmatically eliminated from the playoffs (a baseball joke where I'm not mocking the Cubs? Shocking!).

Update: And here we have the pressure by Maliki to have the Kurds turn over the Vice President.

Less than 72 hours after US forces leave Iraq Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki issued an arrest warrant for the Vice President, Tareq al-Hashemi, for suspected ties to assassinations and other attacks. Maliki has also asked the Iraqi Parliament to have a no confidence vote against Deputy Premier Saleh al-Mutlaq. Both Hashemi and Mutlaq are Sunnis who belong to the Iraqi National Movement political party led by Iyad Allawi, a major rival to Maliki. Hashemi has managed to flee to Kurdistan to avoid arrest but how long will it be before Maliki pressures the Kurds to turn him over?

Is this just standard Iraqi politics or a sign of something more sinister? After Maliki returned from his recent trip the United States, member of the National Movement began a series of political attacks and challenges against the Prime Minister. Mutlaq even called Maliki the worst dictator in Iraqi history, so the arrest orders were likely in response to these attacks.

However, this may be the beginning of a Shiite dictatorship where political disagreement by a rival party leads to accusations and arrests. It could also mean that Maliki and his political allies fear a coup attempt or a Sunni uprising. These political moves may be an attempt to mitigate that threat.

How long before AQI and JRTN take advantage of the situation? I give it a week tops before there is another major carbomb attack in Baghdad.

Tell me how this really ends...

2011-12-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

This ceremony I did not expect to see for a long, long time.

US military involvment in the Iraq conflict is officially over. It is a bitter-sweet moment for me.

Like I've mentioned a few times in this blog, I spent a majority of my Army career either preparing for or deploying to Iraq. There are a lot of memories; some good, some bad.

The conflict is not over for Iraq, however. There are still remnants of AQI and ISI running around causing problems. Can't forget about JRTN either who most likely will start making news shortly. And what about the Kirkuk issue? That likely won't get answered without violence.

I would like to go back one day.

Did Iran really shoot down "The Beast"?

2011-12-12T13:21:00.000-08:00

Look out! It's an albino stealth bomber!

Did Iran shoot down and capture a US UAV in the beginning of December? The US government is admitting that a ultra-super-double-secret-probation drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel, aka "the Beast of Kandahar", did go down inside of Iran.

Having no knowledge or experience with this UAV and with access to nothing more than Google these days I can't with any certainty say that what Iran is saying is true or not. Iran did show off video of what appears to be the drone, but Iran has been known to fake military equipment in the past (fake missiles anyone?). The UAV in the video also looks remarkably undamaged for something that was either shot down and/or crashed.

The thing in the video also looks really fake, but then Hunter, Shadow, and Gray Eagle UAVs also appear kind of flimsy looking when up close.

Even if the Iranians captured part or whole of the UAV, some experts are saying it doesn't really matter anyway. Reverse engineering will be difficult at best and the RQ-170 may not even have the latest technology in terms of its sensor package.

The best part of all this? Iran is trying to play the victim. This amuses me since Iran gave Hezbollah UAVs to fly over Israel; had their own UAV shot down in Iraq in 2006; have been smuggling weapons, including EFP IEDs, to insurgent and militia groups in Iraq; AND (I find this the worst part) likely befundled the hell out of me for a several week period in 2009.

My guess? The RQ-170 crashed in Iran but the Iranians didn't get much from the pieces scattered about but are trotting out this mock up to make the US look bad. Although...the RQ-170 is Tweeting from Iran.

My Kabul attack analysis

2011-12-06T12:31:00.000-08:00

I don't usually write anything about Afghanistan and the insurgency there mostly because I am completely in the dark about much of what is going on in that country. Having spent a majority of my Army career either preparing for, or deploying to, Iraq I had enough on my plate to study, train for, and worry over. Unless I was going to be sent to Afghanistan, I wasn't about study it indepth unless I could gleam some good lessons learned.

Having said that, the suicide attacks in Kabul and Mazar-e-Sharif today both interest and worry the hell out of me. Close to 60 people died in the attack in Kabul which occured when a suicide bomber detonated himself outside a Shia shrine. Another 4 people were killed in Mazar-e-Sharif when a bicycle bomb went off outside the city's main mosque.

The reason for my concern is that while terrorist/insurgent groups in Afghanistan have targeted civilians in the past, attacks in Kabul have primarily targeted US/ISAF/NATO forces and the government. Mullah Omar, the Taliban emir, has even stated recently that he is concerned over the the perception that the Taliban were killing civilians. A Taliban spokesman today condemned the bombings and claimed the group was not behind either of the attacks.

In February 2006, an attack at the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq kicked off a wave of sectarian bloodshed throughout the country which led to civil war in Baghdad and caused US forces to lose virtually complete control in the capital.

Were the attacks against the Shia in Afghanistan today an attempt by an insurgent organization...most likely Al Qaida...to create a repeat of what occured in Iraq?

Shia Muslims only make up about 10-20% of Afghanistan's population as opposed to Iraq's 60-65% so an attempt at sectarian civil war is most likely not what is going on here. An expansion of the conflict by Al Qaida and other groups to attack not just NATO and the Afghan government but minority religious sects as well is more likely.

Expand the conflict, create more chaos, instill fear and lack of faith in the government. Those are the ways of the insurgent. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, anger leads to more recruits and more water for the insurgent fish to swim in.

3-2 SBCT off to the 'Stan

2011-11-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

3-2 SBCT deployment ceremony looking cold and rainy, just like every other ceremony on FT Lewis

My old brigade, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, is currently on its way to Afghanistan for the brigade's 4th deployment and its first to Afghanistan. For budgetary and other reasons I do not quite understand they have left their Strykers behind and will be utilizing MRAPs instead.

Had I chosen to take a company command within the brigade instead of running off to southern Arizona I would most likely be joining them. Part of me really wishes that I were going.

Good luck Arrowhead.

Civilian to veteran interactions: Part II

2011-11-23T09:01:00.000-08:00

If you have some free minutes, please take the time to read this article by Crispin Burke. In case you're curious, Crispin is an Army pilot and a major...but I try not to hold those against him. He has his own blog over at Wings Over Iraq. Tom Ricks was wise enough to host MAJ Burke's article.

The article itself is about how the author dislikes telling people he's in the military because of all the follow up questions he inevitably gets. I completely understand his reasonings and some of the questions he uses as examples make me cringe.

Now, I think it's understandable to ask someone questions when you meet them and learn what they do for a living...it's human nature. It's also polite and shows interest in what that person does. However, there are certain questions that are just plain inappropriate and I'll share some of the more irritating questions I've received in a bit.

The author goes on to explain the two general reactions that service members and veterans encounter that often make us feel uneasy The first is the hero-worship and lavish praise that, at least to me, is uncomfortable when coming from complete strangers. If you want to thank us for our service or buy us a beer, that's fine; but please, please, please do not go overboard and treat us like we're the second-coming of George Washington. A vast majority of us are not superheroes (except this guy), we're just human. Please treat us that way.

The second reaction is one of horror that we are in the military and that we are victims and should be treated as such. It's as if those individuals believe we were kidnapped from our mother's arms, forced into service, and then brainwashed to obey orders all day (for the record, I've been given only one order today, which is one more than yesterday, and that order was to go home at lunch...an order I will be following with unquestioned loyalty). Like I mentioned above, we're human and we can think for ourselves. Shocking statement I know.

So along with MAJ Burke's list of uncomfortable questions, here is my list of questions I've been asked that I dislike:

"What's Iraq like?" (How does one answer this question? Next person who asks this gets a snarky response along the lines of "it's a mystical place full of unicorns and Skittle rainbows!")

"Did you ever fire your gun?" (My dear sister asked me this once. In my opinion it's only a couple of steps away from the dreaded "did you kill anyone" question.)

"What's it like to kill someone?" (Ahh, there it is. Ask this and I automaticaly label you a douchebag who I will avoid interacting with in the future.)

"Are you a Fobbit?" (My dad asked this one. He did not know what the term meant and also did not know it's a derogatory word slung at support soldiers by combat arms so I'll give him a pass. Yes, my job kept me on the base most of the time. No, I did not avoid going "outside the wire", in fact, I did my best to get off the FOB.)

"When can you get out/When are you getting out?" (Not annoying if it's centered around me stating that I'm leaving the Army. Teeth-gnashingly irritating if it's someone I just met who thinks my time in the military is similar to a prison sentence. I think I might start asking teachers when they are getting out, see what their reaction is.)

"Where are the weapons of mass destruction?" (With Jimmy Hoffa and the Chicago Cubs' chances at a World Series.)

There you have it. A short lesson on what to do and what not to ask when a wild veteran appears. We are not victims nor are we Batman. We're just people.

Love me some Somalia

2011-11-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

Haven't written anything about Somalia in awhile, but not because there hasn't been anything going on in that little crap hole (is crap hole too harsh? Should I say dump? Or am I being too judgemental?) As I've mentioned before, Somalia fascinates me, mostly because no matter what else is going on I know I can take a look at the news in Somalia and say to myself "well the economy sucks here but at least it's not Somalia!".

I love mocking other nations. But maybe I'm just a cynical asshole.

Anyway...what's going on there these days? Kenya recently recently decided to jump into the mix after the African Union pushed Shabaab (the fundamentalist group/organization/militia fighting against the Transitional Federal Government) out of Moqadishu. Kenya entered into southern Somalia to remove the Shabaab threat in that area as well as help prevent violence from spilling over the border.

Ethiopia then decided it wanted in on some of that sweet Shabaab bashing action and sent troops into areas along its border. This is not a repeat from 2006. The government of Ethiopia is now denying that their troops entered into Somalia. Don't hide it Ethiopia. We all know Somalia is just a proxy war between you and Eritrea.

So Shabaab is now on the run and apparently can only conduct occasional attacks in Moqadishu against AU and TFG forces. On top of that Kenya is threatening to remove them from their strongholds in southern Somalia. Plus Ethiopia is likely to prevent the organization from fleeing to western Somalia and making a stand there.

What can Shabaab do? They could make an appeal to Eritrea for assistance but I don't know what good that will do. Eritrea is already in the dog house for covertly supporting Shabaab and any overt help would likely bring unwanted attention from the West like the Eye of Sauron staring down some defenseless Hobbits.

Beg big brother Al Qaida for help? That likely won't go anywhere since AQ has its own problems right now. Losing your leadership and facing constant pressure from scary UAVs in the sky makes one less inclined or capable to render assistance. Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is a little busy in Yemen and Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb is...well hell, what has AQIM been up to? Oh, just kidnapping Europeans in Algeria. Yeah, go ask them for help Shabaab, I'm sure they'll get right on it.

I give Shabaab 6-8 months. Who knows though, they may pull a rabbit out of their hat and keep the chaos in Somalia going. Even if Shabaab is defeated though, I just can't see stability occuring in Somalia. It's just so unnatural.

From 505 to 11

2011-11-10T10:11:00.000-08:00

The US effort in Iraq really is coming to a close. Joint Base Balad was handed over to Iraqi authorities yesterday and all I can think is...wow.

During my 2004 deployment I was part of several logistics convoys that went up to Balad to pick up parts, supplies, etc. I spent 10 days there atttending a HAZMAT handling course. It's the base where I picked up my fear of dying in a Port-O-John.

Hell, when I wanted to buy the DVD box set of Babylon 5: Season 2 and it was sold out on Camp Victory I hopped on the first convoy to Balad I could get on to get it there...it was sold out in Balad too. That's right, I risked my life to drive 2 hours in a non armored HMMWV into the Sunni Triangle with all of its IEDs, small arms fire, rockets, mortars, and RPGs just for Babylon 5.

Hey, it's a good season.

With characters like Londo here I would have driven through Sadr City to get season 3

I wonder what the mad mortarman of Balad is going to do now that there are no more US forces at the base...

Doesn't get any easier

2011-11-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

For a time after the US invaded Afghanistan I would read the names of the troops killed in combat and look at their faces. This continued after the invasion of Iraq. It was my way of putting names and faces to the war, remind myself that it was real people involved in the conflicts.

During my second deployment I would read the names every day while I read Stars and Stripes, the military's newspaper. That was the most difficult because on numerous occasions, 58 to be exact, I recognized the names of those killed since they belonged to my brigade or were attached to my brigade. Many of those names I read immediately after attending the memorial for those soldiers.

I would eventually stop reading the names and looking at the faces. As I spent more and more time in the Army and met more and more people I feared that I would see a familiar name. A former coworker. A comrade. A friend.

This past Saturday there was a suicide attack in Kabul that killed 5 ISAF soldiers. One of them was LTC Dave Cabrera who I knew from my time in 296 BSB while he was assigned as the 3-2 SBCT mental health officer.

That's then Major Cabrera in happier times prior to my promotion ceremony in Mosul, November 2006. Why does it look like he's about to punch me? It's because I looked away when he was talking to me wasn't it? Stupid lieutenant, never turn your back from a field grade! They are quick to anger!

I saw his name today among those who were killed. For some reason I was curious about the attack and read the names. He left behind a wife and 4 children.

We ate a few meals together those 5 months in Mosul before the brigade was sent down to Baghad and LTC Cabrera moved on to another assignment. Spent some time in his office chatting as well.

Rest in peace, sir.

Yeah, I didn't see this coming at all...

2011-11-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

Around 8 months ago, way way back in March Andrew Exum aka Abu Muqawama discussed an interesting report from West Point's Harmony Project. I also wrote about the report which you can read here and get caught up on where I'm coming from when I point you to my next link.

To summarize, if you do not feel like clicking links, in October 2007 some documents were captured in Sinjar, Iraq. Those documents indicated that many foreign fighters coming to Iraq to fight the infidels (that would be the US and its allies) were from Libya, and more specifically eastern Libya.

Back in March I was not sure we could entirely trust the Libyan rebels who had their center of gravity and most support in eastern Libya. What exactly were their motivations? Now that Colonel Gadaffi has been "eliminated", who will really run the show in Libya?

Now we come to the link I mentioned above. The flag of Al Qaeda has been seen flying over the courthouse in Benghazi. Locals are stating "Islamists" are driving around in brand new SUVs waving the flag as well.

I realize that the US government faced a tough decision when it came to the Libyan revolution/insurrection/rebellion (what the hell was it anyway?). Do we back the dictator or do we back the rebels who may or may not be backed by our current boogeyman?

Hopefully this is just an isolated incident, but it appears to this lowly captain that the situation in Libya is looking more and more like what happened in Afghanistan. In 10 years are we going to be backing the Taureg tribe in a civil war against an Al Qaida controlled government? Would we even bother waiting 10 years?

Is an arrest in Iraq ever just an arrest?

2011-10-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

Update: Over 615 Sunni "Baathists" were arrested over this past weekend. Yeah, this isn't political at all. How long before we reach the "Sunni red line" and the Sunnis say a collective "fuck it" and through their full support to AQI and JRTN?

On Sunday Iraqi security forces detained 47 people in the provinces of Kirkuk and Diyala including 21 people in my old stomping ground in northeast Diyala. Those arrested included former Iraqi Army officers and members of the old Baath Party.

Are these arrests an indication that Iraq is getting serious about the Baathist threat as American forces withdraw or were these arrests merely a political action designed to remove rivals to the ruling party?

My guess is that it's the latter.

The widrawal of US forces from Diyala today has absolutely nothing to do with the timing of these detainments I'm sure.

More movie comments...Armadillo

2011-10-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

After several months of waiting Netflix finally has the documentary Armadillo available and I managed to find a free couple of hours in my incredibly busy schedule (ha!) to watch it and take some mental notes. If you are not familiar, Armadillo came out in 2010 and is about a platoon of Danish soldiers stationed at FOB Armadillo (later renamed Budwan and since closed) in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan. The movie documents the lives of the soldiers from the days prior to deploying and through their 6 month deployment. If you haven't seen it and have an interest in the challenges, as well as the daily life of a soldier, I highly recommend it along with Restrepo, a documentary that also came out in 2010 and follows a platoon of US soldiers in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan.

That's not the look of an actor folks, that's true emotion

There were a number of interesting things I picked up while watching the movie which I will of course share with you:

- Danish soldiers act very much like American soldiers (I'm not sure why this surprised me). They hire strippers before they deploy, bitch about the deployment, and on their free time they do PT, play video games, and watch porn. If they weren't all speaking Danish I would swear they were American.

- They were authorized to grow beards. Several of the soldiers, including the officers, grew facial hair and kept nice, clean beards. This is something I wish US forces who have consistant contact with locals in Iraq and Afghanistan would be allowed to do. Having facial hair is a sign of wisdom and respect in Afghanistan and Iraq (at least in the less urban areas) and virtually all the elders grow beards (or bushy mustaches in the case of Iraq).

- The patrols were conducted by foot with a vehicle nearby in overwatch. This allowed the soldiers to interact with the locals and get to know them as well as have the protection of heavy weapons close at hand.

- Several of the soldiers spoke the local language. Clearly language training was pushed hard by the Danish military thus eliminating the need for (potentially unreliable) translators.

- After each patrol an after action review (AAR) was conducted...at least that's what the documentary led me to believe. I know at the beginning of a deployment and during training AAR's are conducted by the US Army but those tend to fall by the wayside after a few months. You always have something to learn and improve on, AAR's are part of that process.

- On the first patrol out, the platoon leader talked with the locals but asked very basic questions (Is the Taliban here? Where are the Taliban fighters? Etc). I know it's their first time out but come on. The look the civilians gave eachother was priceless, something like "ugh, not this shit again. Damn rookies."

- The company had a Raven UAV and used it. Too many times have American companies deployed with their Raven UAV only to keep it locked away in a storage container and then bitch at the S2 for not getting them enough UAV coverage (I'm looking at you Crazyhorse troop!).

- Spoke Danish with eachother but English over the radio. This was likely done to standardize comms. They were on a British FOB and the company fell under the command of a British battalion so this just makes sense. I still found it fascinating though.

- The company commander or platoon leader briefed each patrol before it went out making sure the patrol understood what its mission was and the purpose for going on the patrol. Ask an American private patrolling in Afghanistan and I am willing to bet he has no idea of the purpose of that patrol. You don't leave the wire just for the sake of leaving the wire.

- The Afghans asked soldiers what religion they were, specifically if they were Jewish. Not sure what was going on there but no Iraqi ever asked me what religion I was, it just wasn't brought up. My ignorance of Afghanistan is pretty high but I have to wonder if this indicated a high level of extremism in the area.

- At one point in the movie the Danes witness (using that wonderful Raven) 3 or 4 suspected Taliban either burying weapons in a compound or about to set up a mortar system (wasn't quite clear to me) so they call in an artillery strike. Boom. Suspected insurgents dead. The Danes go to the compound later and talk with two elderly men who claim animals were killed and would like compensation. The platoon leader tells the men if they come by the FOB the next day they can be compensated. The men say that if they go to the FOB the Taliban will likely kill them. This goes on for a bit and the Danish officer tells the me something along the lines of "we all need to work together". The two elderly men exchange a glance that I have seen time and time and time and time again. They are caught between an invading force who they don't like and isn't around 24 hours a day and an extremist group who they also probably don't like but who will kill them, or make their life hell, if they cooperate with the "western invaders." That's the bitch about an insurgency, you aren't going to kill the locals if they don't cooperate (or you shouldn't be killing them anyway); the insurgents WILL kill the locals if they cooperate with you.

- Where was the Afghan Army or Afghan police in all of this? Why weren't they imbedded with the Danish soldiers?

When the Danes came home after 6 months the local town threw them a parade. Good for the Danes, even if they didn't agree with the war they celebrated their soldiers and welcomed them home.

We never got a parade...but I'm not sure any of us in 1-14 Cav or 3-2 SBCT really wanted one.

Counter insurgency lessons from Pan's Labyrinth?

2011-10-14T09:44:00.000-07:00

So I watched Pan's Labyrinth last night for the first time and I began the movie knowing virtually nothing about it other than it was some kind of fantasy story directed by Guillermo del Toro. Color me surprised when I found myself not only enjoying the film, but discovering some interesting lessons in conducting an insurgency and fighting one.

The movie takes place at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1944 with a company of pro-fascist/Franco soldiers hunting down a band of communist guerrillas. I'll do my best to avoid ruining the movie but there are some spoilers so if you plan on seeing the film you might just want to stop reading.

The company is led by a sadistic captain whose actions and cruelty lead not only to his downfall, but the complete destruction of his company. However, a few of his decisions and tactics would be successful to combat an insurgency if combined with less violent techniques.

Do's:

- CPT Vidal used horses for the movements of his small patrols. The terrain around his headquarters was wooded mountains and using armored vehicles would have been useless since they would have been restricted to the few roads in the area. Now it is entirely likely that all he had at his disposal were horses since this was 1944 Spain just after a civil war, but the use of horses was still a wise one.

-The use of small patrols. Instead of using the entire company for large (and generally pointless) "clearance operations", CPT Vidal sent his men out in groups of 10-15 soldiers when investigating signs of the guerrilla band.

- Use of ration cards to control access to food/supplies. The company commander had all of the local village's food and supplies located in the barn at the headquarters building. The villagers had a ration card per family and had to go to the company HQ to get their food for the week. This helped (or should have helped, but we'll get to that later) limit the amount of food and supplies the villagers could supply to the insurgents. When the villagers were getting their food, a soldier from the company would then distribute propaganda to the locals (get your message to the people!). While this measure may seem overly controlling, the British did have success with this sort of tactic in Malaysia...although the British did it better by sealing off the villages.

Dont's:

- pretty much everything else CPT Vidal did. I'll start with the placement of the company HQ. It was a farmhouse near where the guerrilla band was hiding and operating. He should have placed it in the village instead (I'm assuming there was a village, you never see one in the movie) so he could better control the population and prevent the insurgents from having access to the village. If the insurgents can't get into the village, they can't get food, supplies, or new recruits and will eventually wither away. By placing the HQ in the farmhouse, CPT Vidal was only prolonging the fight. He may believe he is taking the fight to the enemy, but he is only going to cause more casualties to his soldiers and may not gain success agains the insurgent band who more than likely will just move to a different location.

- near the beginning of the movie CPT Vidal's soldiers bring him 2 men they suspect of being guerrillas. They claim to be only farmers and were out hunting rabbits. They have some communist propaganda on them so CPT Vidal kills them both. Rabbits are then discovered in the farmers' bag and CPT Vidal chides the sergent for not doing a proper search. By killing these two suspects CPT Vidal gives the locals a reason to hate him (or even more reasons) which plays right into the hand of the local guerrilla forces.

- killing wounded insurgents. Dead men can't give information so by killing a wounded insurgent you eliminate any ability to question him, either right there on the spot or later when he recovers. It also highlights your cruelty which once again enables insurgent propaganda.

- torturing prisoners. One occasion where CPT Vidal's soldiers did capture an insurgent CPT Vidal personnally tortured the prisoner in order to gain information. Torture does not help your cause, will likely lead to false information, and further alienates the population against you. But CPT Vidal was a fascist, so he likely didn't give a damn.

- over extending your forces. When the insurgents conducted an attack against a train CPT Vidal for some reason sent nearly his entire company to investigate the incident. The attack was a diversion and once most of the troops were away, the insurgents attacked the headquarters building and with the help of an inside informant, captured most of the food and supplies located at the HQ. CPT Vidal should have sent a smaller force to the train who could then call for reinforcements if needed.

The communist guerrillas in the movie conducted themselves brilliantly (it helps to have a script writer). They had informants at the farmhouse who could get them news, mail, and some supplies; they avoided attacking a large force; used diversions to distract the fascist forces before conducting a raid; ambushed smaller fascist elements which eventually enabled the destruction of CPT Vidal's company.

My favorite line in the movie:

CPT Vidal: "Tell my son the time that his father died. Tell him..."
Mercedes: "No. He won't even know your name."

Damn good movie, but I was distracted for part of it as I pondered which side of that war I would have taken...communist or fascist. Both are equally horrible in my opinion. Eventually determined I would go with the communists because perhaps you can encourage a socialist democracy/republic be created. I could live with that.

Computer viruses happen to the best of us

2011-10-12T14:27:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in my last post that my laptop computer was hit with a nasty little virus that I couldn't seem to get rid of. Not much of a big deal since I hate that computer anyway and only use it when I travel; but when I read the other day that the Air Force's drone fleet has been hit with a virus that they can't rid of as well I was a bit relieved. If it can happen to them then i don't feel as bad.

Apparently the virus that has affected the Predator and Reaper UAV systems is a "keylogger" and hasn't affected the flights of the drones...yet. The primary issue is that the IT guys just can't get rid of the bastard. Every time they remove the virus it pops up again. Makes me believe that somebody keeps uploading games onto the computer systems using a thumb drive.

But anyway, it doesn't appear at the moment that this virus was put into the system by any foreign government or experienced computer hacker...it just got there on accident. In a few months it will probably evolve to displaying pop up ads for penis enlargement while you're trying to view the feed...

Do I want a bigger Hellfire? Well now that the nice ad mentions it...

There is one other little "oops" with all of this. Apparently Creech Air Force Base, where the "pilots" of the drones are located, didn't bother to inform the Air Force's cybersecurity unit of the virus. The cybersecurity guys found out about it from Danger Room. That's some egg on your face. Kind of like when I found out from CNN during my second deployment that I was extended for another 3 months instead of hearing it first from my chain of command.

Kurds, Ke$ha, and Kinetic Strikes

2011-10-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

I was in the Maryland/DC area this past weekend for a wedding and also visiting some friends. I had planned to do a quick post on some recent interesting stories, however my laptop picked up a nasty virus that I couldn't eliminate so that plan went out the window. That may be a sign that I should switch to an iPad...we'll see. DC has also managed to find itself high up on the list of places that I will job hunt in, it's in a tight race with Seattle/Tacoma of where I should settle for the next few years. The decision is really going to be decided more by where I can actually get a job as opposed to where I want to go. I will say this though, if Seattle were to snag an NHL team it would be the clear winner, but then again, I've never heard Ke$ha being blasted from the Space Needle, whereas the Treasury building is apparently hoppin late at night...

The Treasury Department knows what it's like to wake up in the mornin' feelin' like P. Diddy

Anyway, Joel Wing over at Musings On Iraq has an interesting article on the Kurds deploying two more Peshmerga battalions into the Diyala province back in August. The Kurdish Regional Government appears to be seriously maneuvering in order to annex the Khaniqan District (and the Kifri District along with it) into Kurdistan taking advantage of the withdrawal of US forces who at this point can do nothing other than escort the new units into their positions. I'm interested to know how the Sunni Arab pro-Saddam Kurwi tribe that controls the town of Jalula and the surrounding area are handling this news. I'd really love to know how they will react if the Kurds are successful in annexing the district. I suspect an increase in activity by JRTN and a resurgence of Ansar al Sunna and Jaysh al Islami will occur. If the KRG and the Government of Iraq were smart they would redraw the district boundaries and allow the Kurds to have Kifri and Khanaqin while Diyala kept the majority Arab towns of Qara Tapa, Jalula, As Sadiya, and the oil town of Naft Khana. That just might be enough of a compromise to make everyone happy.

As you may already be aware, an airstrike likely killed Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen. Awlaki was an American born cleric who was an operational commander for Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and was also responsible for the English language propaganda newsletter "Inspire". Does the killing of Awlaki strike a blow against AQAP? Most likely. Am I completely happy about the strike? Not exactly. I'm not really comfortable with the US government assassinating its own citizens without a trial. However, Awlaki was in a combat zone actively fighting against a US ally and calling for attacks against the United States and its interests. I'm not exactly shedding any tears here.

If you have any interest in reading about the legality debate about the strike, Danger Room has a good article on it.

Women voting? How scandalous!

2011-09-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

I'm going to break from what I usually blog about to share a news article that I woke up to when I checked BBC online this morning. In a shocking (to me anyway) move towards reform the king of Saudi Arabia announced that women would be granted the right to vote.

Women will be allowed to vote in municipal elections as well have the right to be appointed to the Shura Council. Was this done due to pressure from the West or was it a way of attempting to avoid an "Arab Spring" movement in Saudi?

I wonder how the religious police and conservative citizens of the country will handle this.

Next thing you know they'll be showing off ankles and such

One more thing to inflate my ego

2011-09-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Had the pleasure of running into one of my NCOs from 1-14 Cav today during lunch. He was my senior HUMINTer after SSG Tirador was lost and did an outstanding job of focusing the Squadron's HUMINT soldiers and improving the team while at the same time keeping Brigade off our back and then later was instrumental in establishing the base defense cell for FOB Cobra. I have no doubt that my intelligence section would not have as successful as it was without this NCO and it was great to get to spend a few minutes reminicsing about the deployment.

One of the subjects he brought up was this individual who we managed to capture in the beginning of February 2010 with the assistance of the Special Forces team at FOB Caldwell. I mentioned the capture in this blog post where I commented that I was wondering if the capture would accomplish anything.

The detainment at the time was a great moment for my section and the troop responsible for the southern portion of our OE (operating environment) where this individual was conducting attacks. At the beginning of the deployment we had a sudden spike in attacks in the Niddawi tribal area that at first I believed to be due to the insurgents increasing their attacks due to my squadron being the new kids in town. Our sources quickly pointed the finger at the above mentioned individual as being the cell leader in the area and who had recently returned from being in prison. Our local security force partners were unwilling to assist us with this individual partly due to him being a relation of one of the powerful sheikhs in the area and refused to believe that this individual was a bad guy.

We worked the issue for months gathering as much evidence as we could to include plenty of HUMINT as well as SIGINT. It helped that one of our sources happened to be a low level member of our bad guy's cell. The Special Forces team was essential in our targeting because they had access to UAV systems that we did not and what systems we did have were being utilized in the northern portion of our OE; this team also did much of the grunt work in gaining the warrant for this individual's arrest. The detainment came late one night in early February with the Special Forces conducting the raid along with the Mandali city SWAT and our A troop providing the outer cordon.

As for the effect, IED attacks in the Niddawi tribal area dropped considerably and the majority of attacks that occured after the detainment were most likely the result of the tribal turmoil in the region and not terrorist/insurgent related. It was a good capture.

Which brings me back to my run in with my old NCO. He happened to mention, which I did not know at the time, that not only was our target one of our "top 10" and a brigade target, but apparently he was a Theater level target as well, meaning that he was on someone's radar up at Corps. How true that actually is I have no idea and will likely never know, but having captured a Theater level target, something few battalions ever do, is one more thing I get to brag about.

TDY and Twitter comments

2011-09-16T10:11:00.001-07:00

Anchorage, AK...minus the moose dodging

I've been TDY to Anchorage, AK obeserving CoIST training on FT Richardson for the past week which is why there have been a lack of updates. 4th Brigade, 25th Infantry Division appears to be taking the whole company intelligence cell concept pretty seriously; they've already had a mobile training team up here several months back, had more training at the Joint Readiness Training Center in FT Polk, LA, and then have brought the MTT back here this week for some more advanced training. It's good to see an organization embracing the concept which will no doubt be extremely helpful in their upcoming Afghanistan deployment.

Continuing along with my Afghanistan train of thought, there was an all day assualt in Kabul conducted by Taliban fighters. What I find most interesting about this attack was not the attack itself, but the information ops (IO) conducted immediately after and even during the fight. The NATO public affairs office posted a YouTube video of the attack and the response to it. Normally it takes days or even weeks NATO/ISAF/US forces to put out our spin on events so somebody was really on the ball.

Even more amusing is the Twitter battle that occured between the ISAF press office and a Taliban sympathizer. Does this seem a bit childish? Hell yeah it does, but shit-talking across trench lines between combatants is also childishly absurd and yet a time honored warrior tradition. I would have loved to engaged in this kind of modern trash talking with some of the punks we faced in Iraq in '09-10.

Hemorrhaging officers: Part III, This Captain's Story

2011-09-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

There is a bit of news that I have let my family and most of my friends know (and have even made it official by posting it on Facebook) but have failed to mention on this blog, although I've hinted at it a bit...

I have decided to leave the Army next year.

There are several reasons for the decision which I will get into but for the most part the reasons fall in line with why my fellow captains as well as mid-level NCOs are leaving. If you feel inclined you can read about why the future of the Army is choosing to leave the service in a couple of my blog posts here and here. If you don't feel like going back and reading, the top 3 reasons given for leaving the service were:

1) lack of career control
2) quality of life
3) military bureaucracy

So why am I leaving?

Like I said, it's a number of reasons but the biggest one for me is that it's time to move on. I never saw myself doing a full 20 years in the Army and I'm actually a bit surprised that I've made it 8 years. My current job is dull, fairly uneventful, and boring and while there is the benefit of not deploying I feel like there are interesting jobs that I could be doing that don't deploy me. Instead, the Army has stuck me in an office with little responsibility, almost as if I've been put in a corner and told to wait until I'm needed for another deployment. Can I find something else, either on FT Huachuca or another post? Sure, but 8 years is a good time to leave; if I were closer to 10 years it would just be stupid to leave.

Another primary reason is the lack of feeling valued by FT Huachuca and the Army in general. Huachuca was no where near the top of my list of duty stations to be stationed at when Branch sent me the list of positions/duty stations and asked me to send them back my wish list. I had been here twice already for officer basic and the career course and I really wanted to see what else the Army had to offer. I could have left the Army after my last deployment in '10 but I chose to PCS to Huachuca because Branch told me I was being sent here to be an instructor. This made sense since I had 7 years in the Army at that point and 3 deployments to Iraq; the system was taking advantage of my experience and training while at the same time giving me a much needed break from constant deployments. There was just one problem...

...the G1 section (personnel) at Huachua decided to divert me from being an instructor and instead send me somewhere into the bowels of USAICoE (United States Army Intelligence Center of Excellence). To add to the insanity, when I signed in with HQ USAICoE, nobody could tell me which directorate or organization I was supposed to be assigned to...they weren't expecting me. Phone calls were made to G1 but the calls went unanswered, so the commander of HQ USAICoE (a captain, go figure) decided I should go to G3 to assist with the upcoming Intel Warfighting Seminar. Looking back I'm pretty sure he was trying to help a friend of his up at G3 who was swamped with this project and needed bodies, but he shouldn't have that kind of power nor should he have done that to someone who was permanent party. If I'm assigned to G3 fine, I'm assigned to them, but don't just start tossing officers willy nilly all over the place just because you can't get ahold of G1.

So, being the good soldier that I am I went over to G3 to find out from the captain working the IWS exactly what my duties would be. I still hadn't inprocessed post yet and so I assumed that my duties wouldn't begin until that was completed the following week. How wrong I was.

The captain I was being assigned to (being assigned to another captain should have set off all kinds of warning lights) sat me down to get to know me and asked me when my career course date was. Clearly she thought I was just a holdover waiting on a course and she seemed to become rather confused when I told her I graduated the MICCC back in '08. Undaunted by her confusion of a permanent party captain being assigned to help a temporary project she then told me my duty would be to assist another captain (former Air Force officer who switched to Army and who was waiting on a career course slot, i.e., a holdover) in vacuuming and cleaning up classrooms for the IWS. You read that correctly, a captain in the United States Army who is a veteran of 3 Iraq tours with a primary look for major less than a year away and who was supposed to be an instructor was going to be assigned as essentially a janitor. WTF over?

It got worse. She then asked me if I had any family. After telling her that I did not she said, "Good, because you won't be seeing them much. I'll need you to come in this weekend to help stuff gift bags for the IWS. Next week you'll work on creating name tags."

Seriously...wtf?

Beyond baffled, and still playing the good soldier, I went over to the classrooms to be cleaned and helped the other captain for a couple of hours until lunch time. After lunch it was determined that I was actually supposed to be assigned to the Training, Doctrine, and Support Directorate...this bit of information had actually been emailed to the HQ commander that morning but he had failed to read it. This was a Thursday and it actually took until Monday for the XO of TDS to figure out where to officially put me due to me not being on any gains roster and not being expected. Honestly, how incompetent are the personnel sections at this post?

I was assigned as the executive officer of the Training Division, one of several divisions under the TDS directorate. My new boss told me he was glad to have me, but that there was no space to put me. I would spend the next several months cubicle hopping and jumping on open computers before a permanent space was found for me. This wasn't too much of an issue since in the first 7 months in the division, I spent 3 months on temporary assignments to FT Benning, GA and FT Bliss, TX. As it appears to me, my experiences and expertise are not as valued so much as having a body in which to send on taskers.

So there you have it. From my perspective FT Huachuca, and thus the Army, only values my ability to push a vacuum around and having a pulse so I can fill taskers given to the directorate. It's really not surprising that after hearing my story the brigade commander stated, "No wonder you are getting out."

They don't pay me enough to put up with this

2011-08-28T14:43:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves a good top 10 list so I've combed through my notes from my past deployments to bring you some of the "Top 10 Dumbest Things Ever Asked Me As the S2". These are in no real order and I have also included an brief explaination as to why they are dumb. A few of these questions are straight up stupid, others are based on the individual's false belief or perception that I had some magical box with all the answers.

10. *During a near-daily battalion update brief where I had just finished discussing a carbomb that targeted a patrol of MPs returning to Mosul from Irbil killing the female platoon leader.*
"Did the insurgents target her because she is a woman?" - female company commander in the BSB.

- This question really threw me off because if you've ever seen soldiers fully kitted up and inside an up-armored HMMWV you know that it is pretty much impossible to tell what sex they are. Also, while women do not generally have the same rights as men in Arab culture and in many cases are subservient to men, I have never known a case where Iraqis were upset that American women had more rights and roles and served in our military. The idea that insurgents somehow saw this patrol in Irbil, recognized the platoon leader was female, tracked them all the way back to Mosul, and then targeted the lead vehicle with a suicide carbomb is utterly ridiculous.

9. *Same meeting directly after the "targeting her because she's a woman question".*
"Was she wearing a seatbelt?" -medical company commander

- I didn't have pictures at the time of this attack but the carbomb rammed the front of the HMMWV and completely destroyed the front right of the vehicle. I'm not sure if there was much left of the platoon leader. No, seatbelts do not protect you from suicide carbombs. I think I stammered something about not having that information and getting back to the company commander. Luckily the battalion XO stepped in at that point and moved us on, thus saving me from more stupid questions like if the HMMWV was low on oil or something.

8. *Morning update sometime in late '06 after North Korea possibly conducted an underground nuclear test. I'll remind you that I'm in Iraq, worrying about Mosul, not the Korean peninsula...*
"Did North Korea detonate a nuclear device or was it something else? What is your analysis?" - BSB battalion XO

- I loved the XO, he was hands down my best boss and still ranks as the top 1 or 2 best XOs I've ever served under. However, I'm not sure what he was expecting out of me with this question. At the time the US had no idea what NK had set off and all the surrounding countries each had their own official opinions. I was a BSB S2, not a nuclear weapons expert on the Korean peninsula.

7. *Battalion update brief some time in 2007 in Baghdad after one of the brigade Stryker patrols had been hit with an IED which consisted of a chemical weapon artillery shell.*
"Why isn't the media reporting on the chemical weapon attacks? Doesn't this prove Saddam had WMD?!" -BSB command sergeant major

- This was just part of the rant the CSM launched at me after I briefed this particular attack. The artillery shell likely came from a stockpile of chemical weapons that the old Iraqi Army had but hadn't destroyed yet, or forgot about. These stockpiles were known to the UN and the US and were not part of the WMD reasoning when Iraq was invaded/liberated. The insurgents who used this round likely didn't even know the shell had chemical weapons in it. Despite trying to explain this to the CSM he kept at me like I had somehow failed to alert the national media about this. Once again, the battalion XO had to intervene and move the briefing along.

6. *Another battalion update brief where I just discussed an indirect fire attack that hit Baghdad International Airport and I stated the rounds were likely meant to target the military (US controlled) side of the airport.*
"What do you mean by 'the military side of the airport'? Isn't it all the military side?" -BSB headquarters company commander

- I fully believe the company commander was trying to stump me, or prove that I didn't know what I was talking about. However, in 2007 Baghdad International was clearly divided into two parts: the US controlled part where we flew all our aircraft out of, and the civilian side which had civilian aircraft operating and was controlled by the Iraqi civilian government. When I stated that insurgents were trying to hit the military side I was essentially implying that they weren't trying to hit Iraqi civilian aircraft. I guess this was a difficult concept to grasp.

5. *Morning update sometime in 2007.*
"Which province is the most dangerous right now?" -BSB commander

- In 2006/07 asking me which province was the most dangerous was similar to asking me which member of the Village People was the gayest. They are pretty much all dangerous. Also, what is your criteria? Most attacks or most attacks that cause casualties or most attacks against civilians? I realize that the battalion commander was trying to gauge where our brigade might be sent to next since we were the Corps reserve and we had just about cleared all of Baghdad at that point, but seriously, give me a heads up for this type of question so I can be bettered prepared. I threw out Anbar as the most dangerous because in '06/07 Anbar could reasonably seen as the answer to any similar question.

4. *Troop commander wanders into my office in 2009.*
"I need 24 hour UAV coverage for 3 days straight. Can you get that?" -1-14 Cav troop commander

- By 2009 aerial intelligence assets in Iraq had dwindled considerably as the US began its drawdown. On a given day I could expect a few hours coverage from a UAV plus some helicopters. If I worded the request right and promised the BDE S2 my first born child I could possibly get a predator UAV for most of the day; but to get 24 hour coverage, especially for several days was an absurd notion that would get me laughed at. The troop commander wanted to confirm/deny smuggling in a certain area...which was not a high priority at brigade or division. The troop commander even got angry with me for not supporting him after I explained why we couldn't get that kind of coverage. Whatever dude, you've got a raven UAV in your troop, use it.

3. *Several encounters with S3 (operations) NCOs over the course of the '09-10 deployment.*
"What is the location of *insert Iraqi security force* checkpoint/HQ/base? You guys are S2, don't you know everything? -various 1-14 Cav S3 NCOs

- I ran the S2 section. That means we tracked enemy forces, not friendly. The various Iraqi security forces (police, army, oil police, etc) were friendly (for the most part) forces. It is one of the many jobs of the S3 section to track friendly forces on the battlefield. Asking my section, usually one of my analysts bore the brunt of these questions, where a particular friendly unit was is essentially admitting you aren't doing your job. And no, we don't know everything, the crystal ball has been broken for some time now.

2. *Email from the S3 (a major).*
"Why does Task Force (Rangers) have intel on these individuals that we don't have? Tell TF they need to share their sources." -1-14 S3

- It became pretty clear at the beginning of the deployment that our S3 really didn't have much of a clue as to what the S2 section could and could not do as well as what our assets and capabilities were. You'd think that after being the XO and the S3 in the squadron for over 2 years he would have some concept, but he didn't. Task Force was the organization created to hunt down Sunni insurgents that posed the most threat plus gather intel that would lead to Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of Al Qaida in Iraq. They would fly into our area about once a week and grab a couple of guys, individuals I usually had no information on. Most of the time the individuals detained were associates of an associate to someone more important. Since these guys weren't usually responsible for the instability in our particular area, they weren't on my radar. The S3 didn't like this and all he saw was somebody who wasn't us detaining people. Yes, they had sources and collection assets that we didn't have. No, they weren't going to share.

1. *Intel update sometime in 2009*
"Where did the carbombs go?" -1-14 S3

- Spend any amount of time in Iraq and you'll see report after report of possible carbombs moving through your area of operations. As the S2 it was my responsibility to sort through these reports and determine if they were credible or not. For the most part these reports were false, either the sources they came from were wrong or misinformed or the Iraqi Army was just reporting on rumors. After seeing several "blue bongo VBIED moving through Diyala" reports and nothing going boom I could discount the reports for the most part. I would make sure the report was passed on to my Iraqi counterparts and the troop commanders, but there wasn't much more I could do, or was willing to do for phantom carbombs. The S3, however, was convinced that every report was factual and after a week of heavy carbomb reports then asked the above question. While I wanted to say something snarky like the carbombs were waiting right outside the gate I instead calmly and rationally told him about false reports and rumors. He wasn't convinced and I spent a couple of weeks wasting time, energy, and assets looking for phantom carbombs.

Rebelz can haz Tripoli?

2011-08-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

Last night, when I should have been going to bed, I was surfing the internet and found out that the rebels in Libya had begun their assault on Tripoli. At most they had already taken much of the city and at the least were on the outskirts and conducting raids into Tripoli.

The rebels are claiming to control the capital, but I'll believe that when the bullets stop flying. They've also managed to capture two of Gadhafi's sons, however the leader himself still remains at large.

Good for the rebels who a few short months ago looked like they were going to get crushed. Although they probably would have if it wasn't for NATO air power. My outstanding analyst skills can be seen at work back in March. Read that last paragraph and you'll know why military intelligence is often just guess work. But hey, I'm just a captain sitting behind an unclassified computer with no access to any of that "secret stuff" at the moment, you can't expect me to be perfect.

A good intel officer is often only right 51% of the time...so they told us way back in officer basic. I'll just keep telling myself that.

And just so we don't all forget, the rebels aren't exactly people the US can automatically trust. If you don't believe me, go watch Rambo III. Libya may just turn out like Afghanistan, but that's probably just the cynic in me.

Assuming Allah doesn't strike down the rebels it appears as if the Gadhafi regime is indeed over in Libya. Is it time to focus our attention on Syria? How long will the Assad regime last? Was the focus of NATO and the US on Libya while seemingly ignoring Syria a strategy that would keep us out of two conflicts at a time? Focus on one before becoming distracted with another conflict? That sort of reminds me of something the US failed to do back in 2003...

Update: This should just about do it.

Kurds continue to push on Diyala

2011-08-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

Time for my paranoid and pessimistic side to come out in regards to Iraq. The parliament of Iraq's Kurdistan has voted to send more Peshmerga forces into the Diyala province, specifically around the towns of Jalula and As Sadiyah. My hope is that this is more of a bluff and that the vote is meant to "encourage" the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces already around Jalula and As Sadiyah to do more about the violence that is reported to be occuring against Kurds in the area.

However, this could actually be a serious move by the Kurds to once again lay claim the the region, by force if necessary. Due to the upcoming pull out of US forces the Kurds likely feel that they can get away with pushing the Kurd/Iraq border farther to the south and are justifying by claiming they are doing it for security puposes.

From what I witnessed of the Peshmerga in 2009/10, they weren't that good of a fighting force, especially the elements in Diyala. Most of their best units were around Kirkuk and Mosul. During discussions about the abilities of the Peshmerga amongst the 1-14 Cav staff about how the Kurds did fend off the Iraqi Army during the '90s the XO pointed out that Kurdistan is mountainous and "a troop of Girl Scouts can defend a mountain pass". The current Iraqi Army would likely sweep away any Peshmerga resistance in Diyala if given the orders to re-take territory from the Kurds.

If the Kurds do become aggressive in Diyala and Baghdad responds by sending more forces to the province, or just order the units in the area to push back against the Kurds, then violence is more than likely going to break out...with the Kurds on the losing side. The loss of Khanaqin may even cause a ripple effect along the entire disputed border.

With luck, cooler heads will prevail, as they did in 2008 when an Iraqi Army brigade (4/1 IA) was ordered into the Jalula/Khanaqin area to push out the Kurdish Peshermerga forces in the region. The IA brigade commander and Pesh commander actually met and settled on the line of control which prevented any bloodshed.

I'm just not convinced that peace will be able to be maintained without US forces looking over everyone's shoulder. For that matter, why is the UN not involved?

Hope in Somalia?

2011-08-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

The flag of Anarchy, Famine, and Chaos

For those of you not following international news, there are some very interesting things occuring in Somalia. First off, there's a nasty famine sweeping the country, which to be perfectly honest, just seems like par for the course in that part of the world. However, due to said famine, fascinating developments have, well, developed.

The most important of those developments is that Shabaab forces have left the capital of Mogadishu. Shabaab, in case you have forgotten, is the Al Qaida linked organization that has been fighting for control of Somalia for a few years now. As you can read in the article, the group's leaders are claiming that the famine has limited their ability to raise support and funding so they have no choice but to withdraw from the city and allow food aid to be distributed. Is this really the case or has pressure from African Union forces and the Transitional Federal Government's troops finally pushed out Shabaab? Perhaps a combination of events? If your organization is really fighting to control the country, why pull out of the capital to allow food to be distributed? Is that an open admission that your militia forces are disrupting aid to the people?

The AU and TFG moved in quickly to those areas of Mogadishu formerly occupied by Shabaab, but not without some violence. Rearguard forces left by Shabaab engaged government forces moving in, but the government is claiming that it now controls most of Mogadishu. Amnesty is even being offered to Shabaab fighters, and if that's not a good sign I don't know what is.

With Shabaab apparently "on the run" or at least conducting "tactical withdrawals" (it's called retreating!), now would be an excellent opportunity for the US to step up and do what it can to help stabilize Somalia and hopefully turn it back into a functioning nation. Of course with our current debt crisis, Afghanistan, Iraq, and a likely refusal of the American people to accept getting involved with yet another conflict, I highly doubt the US will even think about sending anything other than aid to Somalia.

There's also this little incident that many people still remember.

But this is my blog, which means my world. Back in 2009 I wrote a post discussing how I would advance the insurgency in Somalia and potentially defeat the government there. Well, last night I wrote up some notes on how I think the US and allies should deal with Somalia in order to end the Shabaab insurgency and hopefully bring about stability for the country. Yeah, because that has worked so well for us in the past. Anway, here's what I have:

-Naval blockade to focus on defeating or at least disrupting piracy as well as interdict any weapon smuggling from Eritrea or Yemen.

-Hospital ships, as many as we can spare. Treat this like the tsunami in Indonesia, it's a famine afterall.

-1 x division headquarters with at least 2 x combat brigades in the Somaliland and Puntland regions. I'm swagging the number of troops needed for these areas but both Somaliland and Puntland are autonomous regions with little to no violence, just pirates.
-focus on civil affairs/humanitarian assistance
-special ops raids on pirate sanctuaries
-CAPs (combined action programs, you know those infantry squads assisting local security forces created in Vietnam that I've ranted about needing in Iraq) primarily used in those pirate areas along the coast in order to prevent insurgency

-Mogadishu: 1 x division headquarters for the city plus surrounding territory. Minimum 4 or 5 combat brigades to go with it.
-immediately build and occupy as many platoon patrol bases and company combat outposts as possible; occupy with US, AU, and local security forces
-distribute as much aid and food as possible, there's no reason why a battalion can't do a food drop a day, if not more
-key leader engagements with religious, tribal, and clan leadership. Get them on board with the rebuilding and aid distribution, heck, put them in charge of it. We go and distribute or build where they want us to...within reason.
-rebuilding projects should utilize local workers, not hires from some other part of Somalia
-develop the police forces
-African Union troops out front of all missions when possible until local police are capable, then police out front.

-Remaining regions of Somalia: 1 x division headquarters with 4 x combat brigades
-Develop CAPs if possible, COPs/patrol bases if not...we're talking a big area here
-focus on tribes and clans to develop economy and prevent insurgency...utilize the micro grant program that was successful in Iraq
-humanitarian asssistance focus on herding and agriculture
-work closely with Kenya and Ethiopia to lock down the borders and prevent border smuggling

Like I said above, this will never happen, especially with the forces I've laid out (3 x division HQs, at least 11 x combat brigades...that's not even including support, MP, and aviation brigades that would be needed). If we didn't have Iraq or Afghanistan to deal with it might be possible but does the world even give a damn about Somalia any more? But if I were king this is what I would do.

We can even use this guy to lead my future Somalia.

Good info on JRTN

2011-08-07T16:21:00.000-07:00

If you have a few minutes, check out this article about the Iraqi insurgent group Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshabandi (JRTN) written by Dr. Michael Knights and published by the Counter Terrorism Center at West Point.

I've written a few times about dealing with JRTN while deployed to the Diyala Province and Dr. Knights does an excellent job in explaining the history and motives of the organization as well as its potential future.

He also references this blog, which is another reason why you should read the article.

JRTN is a valid threat to a democratic Iraq. The months after US forces pull out will be an interesting time and I'm curious to see what occurs.

How long before this symbol is commonplace in Iraq?

One year ago...

2011-07-31T15:08:00.000-07:00

One year ago today I got on a civilian charter plane at Al Asad Air Base and left Iraq for the third and hopefully last time.

Time really flies by sometimes.

Best feeling in the world is a Black Hawk helicopter taking you away from this

And we're back to pre-CSA normalcy

2011-07-28T10:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a shocker; 3 days after it was announced that US forces would no longer be conducting partnership operations in the disputed zones in northern Iraq a Kurdish politician demands that the Peshmerga be sent to northeast Diyala province to restore order.

Violence was not that high while 1-14 Cav was deployed to the area. From what I have read, violence did not seem to be that high during 2-14 Cav's time, probably even lower. Why would Peshmerga units be needed to "restore order"?

Is it because of perceived harrassment of Kurdish families in the area? Or is this really just a way to maneuver forces for a future land grab in a region with natural gas and oil resources? Hmm, I wonder...

How long before another Khanaqin standoff occurs? Or another Kurdish security officer gets drunk and picks a fight with the Iraqi army?

The CSA era ends in Iraq

2011-07-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

It was announced today by the commander of USD-N (US Division-North, the organization in charge of northern Iraq) that starting next month US forces will end its participation in the combined security areas (CSA) of the disputed Kurd/Arab regions that had been established in February 2010.

For those of you not in the know, during my last deployment with 1-14 Cav it was determined that something had to be done along the disputed "Green Line" between Kurdish and Arab security forces before events spiraled out of control. Violence all over Iraq had decreased dramatically in the past couple of years and the disputed areas in the Ninewa (Sinjar and northern Mosul area), Kirkuk (Kirkuk city obviously), and Diyala (Kifri-Khanaqin area) provinces had to be dealt with and became General Odierno's primary concern. It was decided that "combined units" of American army, Iraqi army, and Peshmerga militia would be utilized in these areas to do patrols, provide humanitarian relief, and conduct raids. Combed checkpoints were also established in spots where Iraqi checkpoints and Kurdish checkpoints were already co-located, in some cases only 100 meters apart.

1-14 Cav established 5 such checkpoints in our "combined security area" and by the end of the deployment each troop was conducted at least one combined mission a day. We were nicknamed the Hamrin Lions since we were in the Hamrin Mountain region and Iraqis area a bit obsessed with lions.

A lot of work went into the Hamrin CSA. Many, many hours wasted on PowerPoint slides and briefings; I'm pretty sure a couple of the assistant S3's gave up on sleep for awhile. I think the S4 went insane at one point trying to acquire and then distribute everything that went into making the checkpoints fully functional. I became increasingly frustrated attempting to conduct combined intelligence meetings between the Iraqi brigade intel officer and the Peshmerga brigade intel officer; I eventually just gave up and met with them seperately. The troops rotated platoons to man the checkpoints in the heat, dust, and miserableness of it all. We all thought it was insane, I didn't think it would work at all.

Only time will tell if the CSA's "worked". They haven't failed yet, and that's a small miracle in itself. With US forces pulling out of Iraq at the end of the year it was only a matter of time before US soldiers could no longer man checkpoints or conduct combined patrols but it's still a little sad to see the program you helped put and keep together end.

Congrats are in order to 2-14 Cav who took the shit sandwich we handed them and ran with it.

Attack on Norway

2011-07-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

What the frak is going on in Norway?

A bomb went off near the Prime Minister's office in Oslo today which has killed at least 2 people with many more injured. CNN.com is also breaking that someone dressed as a policeman has opened fire at a youth camp in the country.

Domestic terrorism? Unlikely. This stinks of Al Qaida or an AQ affliated group seeking retaliation for Norway's role in Afghanistan which has about 400 troops in the country.

Strike a soft target of an ally of your enemy which may cause that ally to leave Afghanistan and others to do the same.

Update:

Death toll up to 17, and a "prominent jihadist" wrote on an Al Qaida-linked forum that the attacks were carried out to punish Norway for deploying troops to Afghanistan.

Update 2:

Norwegian police now state that Islamic terrorism is not to blame, it's good old homegrown, right wing extremists, aka Neo Nazis. Not the first time I've been wrong and likely not the last. bbc.com is also reporting that now 80 dead from the gunman at the youth camp. Damn. Just damn.

Nexus 7? Why not just name it Skynet?

2011-07-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

My friend Cindy sent me a link today from Wired.com discussing Darpa's (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) new intelligence program being used in Afghanistan. The article is extremely long, and I will admit that I didn't read the entire thing, but it essentially discusses "Nexus 7" and the history behind the project.

So what exactly is Nexus 7? From what I can gather it is a massive data analysis tool that allows higher headquarters (what we at the battalion level called "echelons above reality") to sift through thousands of reports and produce "population-centric, cultural intelligence" to determine which areas of a country are stablized or are falling under the sway of the Taliban.

From my point of view as a former battalion level intelligence officer, I see this system as just another way for division level and higher staffs to attempt to feel relevant in the counterinsurgency fight.

I've mentioned it before but it bears repeating...company level units do the most good in a counterinsurgency. Battalions provide the staff personnel to assist with planning and resource management for the companies while brigade and division staffs help provide assets not found at the battalion and company level. Rarely did I ever receive intel from brigade or division that was new or useful to me at the battalion level, just like I assume some company commanders would claim battalion rarely gave them intel that they didn't already know. On occasion, an analyst at division (Chris Ackerman, aka Abu Awesum) would distribute something useful regarding a local tribe or local politics, but for the most part anything I read from division and brigade was just information that they were regurgitating back to me...which of course I had taken from the companies and regurgitated back to them...something the company commanders complained about consistently.

Go higher than division headquarters...in Iraq it was MNC-I and MNF-I (multi national corps-Iraq and multi national force-Iraq which would later merge to USF-I, United States forces-Iraq)...and there was virtually no product or briefing that was useful to me at the battalion level. This was fine, those organizations were about strategic level problems and dealing with issues of tribal confederations and national politics. However, these giant staffs did nothing to help the counterinsurgency fight down at the company level, which is where a COIN fight is won.

So what will Nexus 7 do for the COIN fight in Afghanistan? As I mentioned above all it will likely do is help those higher level staffers feel relevant in a fight that is being fought at levels far below them. Any intelligence or information produced by Nexus 7 will likely cause most company commanders to say something along the lines of, "No shit, I already knew that 2 months ago."

Top 10 "Global Concerns" 2011 edition

2011-07-16T17:12:00.000-07:00

When I first started this blog over 2 years ago, one of my first blogs was a list of my top 10 "global concerns". That list can be found here. It was a list of those areas of the globe I was most concerned would escalate conflicts already occuring or would break out into actual fighting that may involve United States forces. In case you don't feel like following the link the list looked like this:

10. Iran
9. Mexico
8. Syria
7. Nigeria
6. Mali
5. Algeria
4. North Korea
3. The line between Kurdish Iraq and Arab Iraq
2. Somalia
1. Afghanistan/Pakistan

It was in no particular order except for the top 3 were those conflicts or potential conflicts I felt were the most serious. Having little else to do at the moment I figured I would update the list for 2011. My new top 10 is very similar with only a few changes:

10. Iran
Still on the list for the same reasons as in 2009. A nuclear armed Iran scares the crap out of me but I think Iran at this time is only trying to keep the West from conducting military actions against it and is not seriously contemplating attacking anyone...except through proxy.

9. Nigeria
Once again on the list for the 2009 reasons. I dropped it down because I find it likely that Nigeria's security forces can handle the Boko Haram Islamist terrorist group without our assistance. However, attacks in the nation's northeast are on the rise, to include both IEDs and suicide bombers.

8. Algeria
Al Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb has a stronghold in this country that is not likely to be removed any time soon. Where exactly is this stronghold? In the Kabylie region, the same region where the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) had a stronghold in the fight for independence from France in the 1950s. Coincidence? Not bloody likely.

7. Syria
So far the the regime under President Bashar al-Assad has kept a lid on protests in the country which are motivated by the "Arab Spring" seen in many other nations. President Bashar has done this by essentially ordering his security forces and military to open fire on any protesters. If the army ever gets tired of slaughtering its own citizens the regime is likely to collapse which is likely an open invitation for Al Qaida or other terrorists groups to open up shop.

6. Mexico
Jumping up the list this year is our neighbor to the south. Violence is still rising and corruption is still commonplace. How long before the violence begins to spred across the border?

5. North Korea
I don't think I need to explain myself with this one.

4. Somalia
Drops down a couple of slots because it appears that the African Union is slowly gaining control over Mogadishu. Shabab is still a significant threat, however.

3. Yemen
New to the list this year due to the outbreak of what is pretty much a civil war. President Saleh left the country after the Presidential Compound was attacked by Al Qaida in the Arabic Peninsula and their tribal allies and he may or may not be still in control. In the president's absence AQAP and their tribal buddies have taken over parts of Yemen to include the port town of Zinjibar. This one is going to get ugly folks.

2. Kurd/Arab line in Iraq
Not much news from this area recently that I've seen but it's only a matter of time before some drunk Kurd tries to park his car in a marketplace which will then escalate into civil war.

1. Afghanistan/Pakistan
Yeah, fuck this place.

As I mentioned, Yemen is new to the list and Mali fell off. Reason for this is that Mali and Mauritania have been coordinating their efforts against AQIM and appear to be having some success. Ending a blog post with good news? Hell yeah.

I think I've seen enough of New Mexico

2011-07-14T14:10:00.000-07:00

That little guy looks very much like what I looked like yesterday; although I was resting my head on the steering wheel of my HMMWV rather than a keyboard when they finally called ENDEX (end exercise) to the NIE (network integration exercise) that I was O/C'ing.

A quick recap for those not aware: I was an O/C (observer/controller...think military referee) for the past 6 weeks at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The exercise was conducted to test new equipment that the Army may decide to bring into the inventory and evaluate some systems already in the inventory to see how they may be improved. I was assigned to help evaluate CoISTs (company intel support teams) in one of the battalions where actual intelligence soldiers had been assigned rather than the standard method of just assigned non-intel personnel to the job and then training them up on basic intel tasks.

The exercise, while long, was actually pretty good. There were a few hiccups of course, no plan for where the O/C's would stay while in the field and lack of comms between the OPFOR (opposition force) and the O/C's being a couple of them; but overall I enjoyed the time in the field. The unit got some great training and mentoring the lieutenants running the CoISTs was a rewarding experience for me. Hell, I even enjoyed spending a couple of nights sleeping in a HMMWV with the wind, dust, and monsoon rains...the more things suck the more I appreciate a nice bed.

The awesomest (damn straight that's a word) part of the NIE though was the capstone exercise in which company combat outposts were attacked by enemy of around battalion strength. The intent was to simulate a Wanat type scenario but with the COPs fully utilizing their base defense and observation systems which included long range full motion video cameras, infrared cameras, cameras with attached SAW and 240B machine guns, motion detecting ground sensors, and anti personnel mines that only activate when the company CP triggers them. Fucking cool.

My hearing is still a little shot from witnessing every single MRAP open up on the OPFOR with every weapon system available. Fucking cool.

The next night/morning I was on the radio listening in on the O/C's overseeing the attack on another COP and you couldn't hear the O/C's talking because the machine gun fire coming over the radio was so loud and intense. Fucking cool.

Not cool? 72 hours on 5 hours sleep. Time to get home.

AWOL blogger

2011-07-03T07:34:00.000-07:00

I've been somewhere in Eastern Pennsylvania this weekend which is why I have not posted at all. The internet has also been down in my on post hotel back at Bliss and we're headed back into the field on Tuesday for a couple of weeks so I have no idea when I'll get a chance to write anything.

Not pictured, the excessive '70s architecture

Going back to my Yuengling now. See you when I see you.

La Rue Sans Joie

2011-06-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Still enjoying the dust, heat, and boredom of White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico but I have managed to escape for a couple of days for a bit of rest and refit. One benefit of being observer/controller has been a lot of down time (hence the boredom) in which to hammer through my reading list. I managed to finish Pacification in Algeria and have nearly completed the one of the more depressing books I have ever read, Street Without Joy.

Street Without Joy is an account of France's military operations in Indochina, specifically northern Vietnam, during the late 1940's-early 50's. The author is a French student, Bernard Fall, who studied in both Europe and the United States and traveled to Indochina multiple times in the 50's and 60's. Due to his French citizenship he was allowed to accompany French troops on patrols and into Viet-Minh territory. The book is an excellent history of the major events from an outsiders (non-military) point of view. It also has some pretty good quotes, "We need reinforcements, not citations!" and a short but intriguing chapter on the fall of Laos (the French and U.S. did the right thing by bringing in the local tribes to fight the Laotian communists, but used the wrong tribes).

"Here kitty, kitty, kitty..." ("Où êtes-vous chaton, chaton, chaton...")

Looking back, I should have read "Street Without Joy" before I read "Pacification in Algeria" primarily because France's debacle in Vietnam came before the French "oh damn, we won in Algeria but ended up losing anyway" situation, but also due to the depressing nature of "Street Without Joy".

The French attempted to deal with the Viet-Minh in the same military fashion as the Allies dealth with the Germans: fire and maneuver, trap your enemy and destroy him in the open, etc. This of course did not work and time and time again the French sent regiment after regiment into communist held territory attempting to bring the Viet-Minh into a European style fight only to see those regiments mauled, chewed up, and spit out. Operations culminated in the battle at Dien Bien Phu as well as the destruction of Groupement Mobile No. 100 in the battle of Mang Yang Pass.

The interesting thing that I find, however, is not so much France's futile attempts to bring the Viet-Minh to battle, but their use of fortified strongpoints throughout the country, often manned by only a dozen or so soldiers, and often placed in the vicinity of villages. This is one of the key tenements of counterinsurgency operations: small groups of soldiers in among the population to remove the ocean (population) from the fish (insurgents) thus depriving the insurgents of the supplies, reinforcements, information, hiding spots, etc, necessary to fight an insurgency.

Which brings me to an interesting conclusion that I've been rolling around in my head for the past several months. The French established these outposts and they did not have the effect they were supposed to have (preventing Viet-Minh infilitration into "rear" areas). It can be argued that these outposts/strongpoints were placed poorly for counterinsurgency (which they were) and instead of focusing on population centers, were instead placed on strategic points (key terrain in military speak). While the "key terrain" chosen for these defensive outposts would have made sense in a conventional fight, they were useless in a counter insurgency and while they occasionally were near population centers, the soldiers in those outposts did not interact with the population often other than to flirt with the local girls or have their laundry washed. The Viet-Minh were thus able to attack and wipe out these posts one by one with overwhelming force thus forcing the French to slowly withdrawn into a tighter and tighter circle around Hanoi and attempt useless "penetration" operations into communist territory.

So, what the hell am I getting on about?

Any conflict in Vietnam, due to the tactics used by the Viet-Minh...later to become the North Vietnamese Army, and the Viet Cong, would be likely unwinable for intervening powers and the South Vietnamese.

Let's pretend for a moment that the United States actually paid attention to what happened to the French from 1946-1954 as well as took the lessons learned by the British in Malaysia from 1948-60 to heart. In this scenario the United States does not attempt to fight Vietnam like it fought Korea and WWII but instead utilizes proper counter insurgency tactics and techniques; or essentially what the Marines did with their Combined Action Program. If done properly, the Viet Cong would have been cut off from the population and would have eventually been eliminated.

Problem is there were still close to 300,000 NVA regulars running around causing problems. All those CAPs could have been easily overwhelmed by NVA forces even with battalion or brigade level quick reaction forces and air force close air support. I realize that American forces defeated the NVA in virtually every conventional type battle fought, however, the NVA's ability to withdraw back into the jungle and highlands prior to any large engagement would have negated any American attempt to destroy those NVA units responsible for attacking the CAPs, thus allowing for attacks in other areas or future operations against CAPs that were replaced.

The only solution that I can see would have been to have several highly mobile, brigade size, mobile reaction forces that could respond to intelligence of a gathering and consolidation of NVA forces preparing for an operation. The NVA would likely flee and not commit to battle, but it would temporarily remove pressure on the threatened CAPs as well as the battalions in the area and would disrupt the NVA. Combine that with assistance from local tribes such as the Hmong and Montagnard and accurate intelligence on NVA movements could be acquired allowing for interdiction and destruction of those NVA regiments.

Could these tactics have brought victory in Vietnam? The pessimist in me thinks not. The optimist says maybe. But the realist says "this ended over 30 years ago and time machines don't exist so who cares?"

More assassination updates...

2011-06-18T21:09:00.000-07:00

If you recall back in late May I wrote a post about the assassination the director of Iraq's Questioning and Justice Commission. The analyst in me determined that it was likely conducted by the Baathist organization JRTN. There was a lot of good evidence pointing in this direction as I mentioned in that post.

Turns out I might be wrong. According to the Iraqi news agency Aswat al Iraq, which took the information from the AP, the Islamic State of Iraq (the twin brother of Al Qaida in Iraq) has taken credit for the attack.

ISI has just as much to gain by this assassination but I'm a bit surprised it was ISI that conducted the hit. Too be perfectly honest, they may just be taking credit for the attack but may not have actually carried it out.

But as I've mentioned, I've been wrong before and I'm quite certain I'll be wrong in the future.

Possibly short, possibly long hiatus

2011-06-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned back in May, I'm currently TDY to FT Bliss, Texas as an observer/controller until mid July. While I was fully able and willing to post during our train up period when I had lots of wasted free time, my ability to update is extremely limited now that I am actually spending most of my time in the field.

When I'm not in the field (on weekends), and manage to escape El Paso to go back to Sierra Vista (that's not really escaping anything is it), I'm finding myself being way too enthralled with this to keep up on the blog.

So there you have it. A short break (or long, depending on your definition and sense of time) in which there likely may not be any posts.

I think you all will survive.

Another regime falls?

2011-06-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

What in the world is happening in Yemen? I turn my back for a short time and it appears that all hell has broken loose.

On Monday it became apparent that Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula militants took over the town of Zinjibar, a provincial capital in Yemen. The militants most likely...hell most definately...had the help of tribes in the region who are opposed to the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The next day a truce between tribal groups and pro-Saleh forces broke down and fighting around the capital of Sanaa broke out. It appears as if a civil war may be breaking out.

Within days the presidential compound was hit with indirect fire which caused injuries to President Saleh as well as the Prime Minister and several others. President Saleh apparently suffered only minor injuries and gave an audio address on Friday night.

However, events took a twist on Saturday when President Saleh left Yemen to go to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. People in Yemen are apparently celebrating seeing this move as Saleh reliquishing power and are claiming the regime has fallen.

I find it highly unlikely that Mr. Saleh will be able to hold on to power after leaving the country for Saudi Arabia. I also find it highly unlikely that any transition or seizure of power by another organization will be quick or peaceful. AQAP has gained substantial influence in Yemen and a civil war only serves their interests.

This is going to get ugly, quick.

Assassination update

2011-05-31T15:54:00.000-07:00

In my last post I mentioned that the director of Iraq's Questioning and Justice Commission was assassinated and that it was my belief that the Baathist/nationalistic insurgent group Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq Naqshabandi was likely responsible for the attack.

It appears my hunch may have been correct.

Iraqi authorities claimed to have captured the individual responsible for the attack and guess what...he apparently worked for Saddam's intelligence agency. That's the exact type of person that JRTN brings into the organization and the exact type of person who would be interested in joining JRTN. Mr Ali al-Lamy is also the exact type of target for assassination that JRTN would pursue.

I have no doubt that this attack will be blamed on Al Qaida in Iraq which is the Iraqi government's usual boogeyman and many government and security officials tend to forget that JRTN exists (or are in denial), but this attack has all the trademarks of JRTN sending a message.

Back to happenings in Iraq

2011-05-29T17:54:00.000-07:00

There are increasing signs of trouble for Iraq's future which I would like to address. I've tried to be cautiously optimistic about that county's future and the scenarios that are likely to play out once US forces pull out at the end of this year. However, somebody is going around and assassinating, or attempting to assassinate, government officials.

If you look at the list of attacks provided by the blog Musings on Iraq there does not seem to be a clear pattern of the attacks. Some of the folks targeted are minor officials, others are more important. I don't pretend to believe that they are all related; the governor of Ninewa for instance is a Baathist sympathizer, ultra Sunni nationalist, and overall jackass. He was likely targeted by the Kurds. Others are not so obvious.

My swag at it is that many of these attacks are being conducted by Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq Naqshabandi (JRTN) with a couple of them done by Jaysh al Mahdi (or the groups who splintered off from JAM), the Badr Corps, and Al Qaida in Iraq. JAM and Badr have never been hesitant to remove a political obstacle when they saw fit or just take out one of their own who isn't playing ball...kind of like the Mafia. AQI would assassinate folks just to sow chaos, seek revenge, or just attempt to stay relevant.

But most of my money is on JRTN whose Baathist goals have always been to kick start a coup or uprising after US forces leave and then re-establish a Baathist regime in the country. These assassination attempts, especially the ones in Baghdad, Salah al Din, Ninewa, and Diyala provinces, are likely JRTN attempting to "prep the battlefield" for some kind of push later in the year and then into 2012. Killing the director of the Accountability and Justice Commission (aka de-Baathification commission) would certainly be a good move for JRTN.

Worst case scenario for Iraq would for JRTN to only be partially successful. If they are able to kill enough government officials so that essential services and security forces are hampered then a general uprising is likely to occur...but by the Shia. The Shia are unlikely to accept a return of the Baathists and any move by JRTN or other Baathist organizations will likely cause JAM to re-emerge and flex their muscles again. AQI could then easily re-organize under the same banner of "protecting the Sunni" that they claimed in 2006-07 and once again the spiral of destruction will occur.

I do not think this will end well.

Takeaways from "The Village"

2011-05-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

This post is going to go off in a somewhat different direction than my usual posts. I've mentioned previously different counterinsurgent books that I have read in the past, all of them with usful tidbits of information, but have never really shared what I learned from the authors. I'm still in the middle of David Galula's "Pacification in Algeria" but Bing West's "The Village" has several highlights I will share along with my thoughts on those notes. Hopefully I will have learned something in case I ever find myself in a counterinsurgency situation again...or perhaps some future Army officer will stumble across this blog and learn a couple of things.

Here are my highlights from "The Village" which is the story of a group of Marines in Vietnam who were partnered with local security forces in a collection of villages:

"After explaining that the first order of business was turning the villa into a fort, Lam (one of the security force leaders) asked if the Marines could provide the necessary materials. Beebe (one of the Marines) replied...supplies requested by the company would take weeks and perhaps months before arriving. ...Lam said they could build their own defenses...called a meeting of the villagers...asked for volunteers to build the outpost. About forty villagers responded."

- You can't do everything yourself or else the locals population and security forces will become dependent on you and expect everything from you. Your forces may be able to do something better, but if they locals do it themselves they will take ownership of it and likely help in protecting it, whether it's an outpost or a bridge.

"The rifle-not the cannon or the jet-was to be the primary weapon of the Americans in Binh Nghia."

- Good counterinsurgency means getting on the ground and in amongst the population with small groups of soldiers. Conventional, modern weapons like artillery and tanks won't get the job done.

"Thanh believed that the accommodation between the Viet Cong and most of the villagers was based, not upon political ideology, but upon villagers' sense of self-preservation. The Viet Cong were stronger than the PFs (local government backed militia), and it was wiser to obey the stronger side."

- A vast majority of any population is unlikely to be strongly sided with the insurgent group in the area, but will aid them because if they don't the insurgents will punish them, most of the time through violence or by forcing the family out of the area. Find a way to protect the population from the insurgents and the population will turn to your side.

"For them (the Viet Cong) to deliberately kill a villager who refused porter or signaling service would expose their own families to retribution. The choice was up to the villagers, and much depended on how active and aggressive they judged the night patrols (those conducted by the PFs and Americans) to be."

- This may seem to contradict the previous statement but let me explain. The insurgency is made up of people who are part of the population. The insurgents know everyone in the village(s) or neighborhood and can therefore control the population unless another force is there to prevent that. As soon as the population feels safe enough, they will retaliate against insurgents overstepping their power. The tribal swing in the Anbar province of Iraq against Al Qaida in Iraq is a good example of this.

"Thanh was waiting (for the patrol), having heard the firing (from an ambush). Luong spoke to him, identifying one of the dead guerrillas by name. Thanh took out the book in which were recorded the name and affiliations of every adult in the village, with a special roster of those who had joined the Viet Cong. It contained about two hundred names. Thanh drew a neat line through one of them."

- Two crucial lessons here. The first is to have a proper census of the area you are operating in. Preferably the local police force or security force will have done this already; in Iraq the village sheikhs often had a list of residences, but normally outdated. If a census hasn't been done, conducting one should be made a priority, if feasible. The second lesson is to have security force leaders who are from the area and who know the locals.

When I'm done with "Pacification in Algeria" I'll likely do another one of these, maybe a couple more from the other books I've finished recently.

Details on "The Raid"

2011-05-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

The Associated Press has managed to get some details on the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. Anonymous sources of course provided the information but it seems legit, and pretty cool. I won't go over the whole thing but I recommend going to the link and reading the article yourself. Some highlights:

- Everyone involved knew if this mission failed they wouldn't get a second shot since Pakistan would be pissed.

- The Blackhawks used were of course modified to decrease the sound they made. These modifications added weight and due to the high than expected temperature caused one of the pilots to lose control of the aircraft and was forced to do a hard landing/crash.

- The Seals, being awesome, of course planned for contingencies and were able to go forward with the mission anyway storming the house and clearing it floor by floor.

- One of the people shot in the compound was a woman who lunged at the Seals. There were two women in the room with Osama who apparently tried to protect him from the 3 Seals who went in after Osama.

- The working dog who went in with the Seals was named Cairo.

In related news, I've been curious if and how intelligence agencies kept an eye on the compound. It's likely there were CIA operatives in the area but what about UAVs? If UAVs were used, how did the US keep the Pakistanis from seeing them on radar and shooting them down? This bad boy was probably used. That's right, a stealth UAV. I want one.

Wasting taxpayer money in a different location: Part II

2011-05-08T20:56:00.000-07:00

Just a heads up in case anyone becomes concerned...I'm heading to FT Bliss, TX tomorrow for two months. Blogging may be light for a time.

While I do enjoy the desert, I do not believe I will enjoy two months in the desert.

Everyone is on the offensive

2011-05-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

Way back in 2002 the United States conducted a drone attack against some militants in Yemen. Since that attack there have been no more drone strikes in Yemen despite the entrenched presence of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Well, no more attacks until last Friday.

Using a Predator drone that was likely based out of Djibouti we took a shot at Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born (Las Cruces, New Mexico) former imam who has become the spiritual leader for AQAP and who has used his native English and knowledge of the West to heavily recruit new members for Al Qaida/jihad/terrorism as well as contritbute heavily to AQAP propaganda efforts.

Awlaki may be target #1 for the United States now that Osama has been eliminated and I find it interesting that this attack, which apparently just missed the guy, occured less than a week after the raid against bin Laden. Probably just good timing, I highly doubt that OBL just happened to have the location of Awlaki on one of his hard drives that were removed from the compound he was in, but you never know. I do have some legality concerns about the targeting of this guy for death though. He's an American citizen, does the government have the right to blow this guy up with a hellfire missile? Does he not have the right of a trial?

Moving on to Afghanistan where NATO and Afghan security forces just finished defending Kandahar from a two day onslaught by Taliban militants. Somewhere between 60-100 fighters plus 9 suicide bombers attacked over the weekend. Clearly the yearly spring offensive is in full swing and the death of Osama isn't even going to slow those guys down.

It's going to get ugly in southern Afghanistan this year.

Questions likely to never be answered

2011-05-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

Some questions I have concerning the Osama Bin Laden mission:

1) Reports that Osama were traveling between Pakistan and Afghanistan a few months ago, were they true?

2) How aware of Osama's location was the government of Pakistan?

3) Was Pakistan allowing Osama to stay where he was so the US would keep fighting the "War on Terrorism" and therefore keep giving Pakistan "anti-terrorism" money?

4) Will Osama's death in any way affect the Taliban's annual "Spring Offensive" in Afghanistan?

5) Will Al Qaida affiliates seek revenge or will they attempt to distance themselves from Al Qaida?

6) What was on the computers taken from the compound?

7) How many operations are now going to be conducted based off the information gained from those computers?

8) Does the US government realize that by dumping Osama Bin Laden into the ocean they allow for a situation similar to what happened when Megatron was dumped into the ocean? I don't feel like dealing with Osamatron in a few years...

Last known photo of Osa...I mean...Megatron

Kudos to good intel

2011-05-03T22:13:00.000-07:00

I would have posted yesterday or earlier today about the Navy Seals killing Osama Bin Laden and then dumping his body off an aircraft carrier but I was on leave in Washington and was busy catching up with friends so I put this blog to the side. Since half my readers are the friends I was visiting I'm sure you all will forgive me.

The primary thing I want to say about this comes from one of my usual information sites, Wired.com. It discusses the intelligence work that went into getting OBL and how it was an operation that took years, which doesn't surprise me. Catching the big fish normally takes a lot of time and effort. Some of the intelligence gathered came from interrogations that had started back in 2003 of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and in 2005 of aide to former Al Qaida #3 Abu Faraj al-Libbi. The key bit of intel on OBL gotten from these two was the name of one of OBL's couriers.

The article points out that the only bit of information obtained prior to 2007 on OBL's courier was his "abu" name, or in other words, the guy's nickname. Meaning that it is possible some of the information that led to OBL was obtained through torture. The CIA didn't get the courier's full name until 2007...after "harsh interrogation" techniques had ceased. So yes, a tiny piece of the puzzle was obtained through torture, however, anyone who as served in Iraq or Afghanistan will likely tell you that while an Abu name is nice, the real name is better and gets you farther.

Basically what I'm trying to say, and this article is saying, is that it wasn't torture that got us the boogeyman, it was damn good intel work.

More on the Osama situation tomorrow...or the day after, depends on how lazy I am.

Doomed is so much fun to say

2011-04-25T15:04:00.000-07:00

Are the rebels in Libya doomed? Were they doomed from the start or did they just become doomed when despite having Western air power they still couldn't prevent pro-Gaddaffi forces from entering Misrata?

Perhaps they are doomed because they are using really old and crappy weapons, or at least running around and showing off those weapons.

Interesting note in the linked article: the rebels aren't using forward observers in conjunction with the limited artillery they have which means they are essentially firing indiscriminatly...something we condemn Gaddaffi's forces for doing. I love the double standard.

However, despite having horrible tactics and even more horrible weapons I'm not about to count the Libyan rebels out just yet. If nearly 3 years in Iraq taught me anything it's to never count any organization out. If the rebels start to act like an insurgency (which they should) they might have a shot at bringing in a new government. Avoid the stand-up fight, hold on to as much territory as you can in the east, and keep asking for weapons and assistance from whoever will provide it. Saturating any territory that pro-Gaddaffi forces enter with IEDs wouldn't hurt either.

Doomed or not, following the situation in Libya has been professionally entertaining for me.

Hemorrhaging officers: Part II

2011-04-19T12:49:00.000-07:00

Back in January I wrote a quick paragraph based off an article from the Atlantic that discussed why junior officers such as myself were leaving the military, and the Army specifically. The author essentially stated that officers were leaving due to a broken personnel system and frustration with military bureaucracy.

A study from Harvard states the same findings and backs them up with data. I think I may even participated in this study, which I don't expect you to read (I skimmed it). The folks conducting the study sent out surveys to officers currently serving and who have recently left the service focusing on 1st lieutenants, captains, and majors (or their Navy equivalent) in all four branches of the military and found the top 3 reasons for a decision to leave the military were:

1) career control (or lack thereof)
2) quality of life
3) military bureaucracy

I have to say that I agree completely with the results of the study. When I was filling out the survey back in January I determined there were 4 elements for me that led to job satisfaction:

1) enjoyment of the job/position (both overall as an MI officer and the current position/job held)
2) respect for my boss/superior (I don't have to like you, but I should at least respect you)
3) work environment (preferably not hostile)
4) ability to have some say in next position and/or duty station

I would argue that my #1 correlates to both quality of life and bureaucracy, #2 and #3 are quality of life issues, and #4 is obviously related to career control.

My own ability to control my career has been a case of blind luck. I was originally assigned to FT Lewis which I grew to love and was able to leave 502nd MI BN after only a year due to the personnel shifts that occur after any deployment and my stated desire to move to one of the stryker brigades on post. I had no say in the positions assigned to me in 3-2 SBCT but was able to return to FT Lewis due to the officer incentive program initiated when the Army realized it would likely lose more captains than it could afford if it didn't offer incentives to stay. I added two years to my contract in order to return to Lewis after the career course and luckily had some say in my next position, intel officer for the cavalry squadron in 3-2 SBCT. Of course when it was time to leave Lewis again my branch manager completely ignored my duty station requests and sent me to Huachuca, and then when I got here I was placed as a cog in the bureaucratic machine instead of becoming an instructor like my branch manager said I was going to do.

In terms of my other 3 elements, in my nearly 8 years in the Army there have been only a few times when enjoyment of my job, respect for my boss, and a non-hostile work environment have lined up. I won't go into dramatic detail but my time in 296 BSB, the short few months after my last deployment with 1-14 Cav, and my currently position are the only times when the stars aligned. There was a time when I thought tossing tables and screaming at subordinates for minor slip-ups was a required Army leadership trait.

Those "traits" have led to many an inside joke among my former co-workers though.

Marines doing it better

2011-04-14T14:14:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite authors on counterinsurgency practice and theory, Bing West, recently had an article in the Wall Street Journal. It's a short article that discusses a patrol that West went on with a Marine squad in Afghanistan while West was imbedded with the platoon. The tactics of the squad reminded me of the tactics used by CAPs in Vietnam which West wrote about in The Village. (I discuss the book and my thoughts on the tactics used here.)

There are a few differences that I see in the Marines' tactics in this particular case and those used in Vietnam, namely that the Marines are conducting their patrol during the day as opposed to night. The Vietcong tended to do their business at night (I'm assuming, based on my limited reading of the conflict) whereas the Taliban apparently do theirs during the day (Iraqi insurgents in 2009-10 operated in much the same way). Another difference is that the article makes no mention of any Afghan security forces embedded with the platoon and even specifically mentions the squad has no interpreter.

"With no...language capabilities, the platoon knew who was an enemy only when he opened fire."

I am impressed though that the Marines are focused on patrolling on foot instead of driving around in HMMWVs or MRAPs which rarely accomplish anything. I'm also impressed in their restraint; the locals appear to be very hostile and the group on the motorcycles were very likely Taliban fighters, but the Marines didn't engage. This keeps colateral damage to a minimum and also prevents a situation which the Marines in the area may not be able to fix. What if the men on the motorcycles were not Taliban, but instead just a local militia or village protection that were just making their presence known to the Marines? Opening fire on them would only drive a massive wedge between the locals and the Marines.

Not going into the empty house suspected of having an IED inside was also a smart move, a lesson likely learned painfully. In 2007 my battalion (1-23 IN) lost 4 soldiers and an interpreter when searching an empty house suspected of being booby trapped. The entire house collapsed on them when one of the soldiers accidently set off the triggering device hidden under a rug.

Given enough time and resources...namely interpreters and some local security forces...the Marines in this area of southern Afghanistan will likely have some pretty good success in defeating the Taliban. Time is not something the Marines have, however, and unless similar tactics are being used in eastern Afghanistan by the Army then the efforts by this platoon may be for naught. Best quote of the article has to be this one:

"Marine tactics, like Ohio State football, have the subtle inevitability of a steamroller."

Budget crunch? But I need my Burger King!

2011-04-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

Nothing in the news has really caught my eye in the past several days and I'm out of ideas for blog posts on situations of interest from one of my deployments so I figure I'll write a quick couple of paragraphs on where the government/military can save some money, since that seems to be what everyone is talking about these days. It doesn't help that the NHL playoffs start tomorrow which is just distracting me even more. But enough about distractions, where can the military possibly save some money with two occupations going on and the possibility of an expansion of the conflict in Libya?

Getting rid of this absurdity would be a good start...

That picture is from Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. Do they really need a T.G.I. Friday's at KAF? Are the dining facilities that miserable, surf and turf night that brutal, that soldiers/sailors/marines/airmen need this? I find it utterly ridiculous that the US government spent the money to build a facility and bring in a crew just so the troops on KAF can have a little "Americana". Even if TGI Friday's spent most of the money themselves (which is likely), I still find it absurd. You're supposed to be fighting an insurgency, not killing time until happy hour with your coworkers. Camp Victory in Iraq has a fraking bowling alley. What did that cost?

Now don't get me wrong, I don't blame the troops who are stationed at these large bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, I even understand the need for them. You can't expect a Corps or Division level staff to operate out of a small forward operating base and it would be amusing to base a squadron of F-16's out of a combat outpost. I can even kind of see the logic behind an American style restaurant or a recreation facility like a bowling alley. However, money is best used elsewhere. If it is deemed necessary to have food available (that soldiers pay for) that is an alternative to the dining facility, then bring in some locals to operate an establishment.

On tiny COP Cobra we had two places, one was a shwarma stand and the other was a chicken and pizza joint. They cost money but helped break the monotony of the dining facility. It may even seem a little hypocritical to be griping about the amenities on places like Victory, afterall, I spent my first two deployments on large FOBs. My first deployment was even on Victory (no bowling alley or Friday's there yet though) and my second I spent 7 out of 15 months on bases that made up the Victory Base Complex. But my last deployment, as I've mentioned, was at a tiny combat outpost far from anything...and I am better for it. Being away from "the flagpole" in my opinion was far superior to spending a year on a base that might was well not even have been in Iraq.

War, for the most part, is dull. Soldiers and Airmen will be bored, but they get bored back in the States too. Get as many soldiers as you can off those massive bases and on to combat outposts and patrol bases. Those that have to be on the large facilities can go a year without some babyback ribs. Put money and resources into elements that will help defeat the insurgency.

Big booms continue in Iraq: Part II

2011-04-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

Bit of an update on the attack in Tikrit on March 29th that targeted the provincial council. To the surprise of no one, the Islamic State of Iraq (aka Al Qaida in Iraq by another name) has claimed responsibility. In their statement they proclaim that the attack occured "in response to the ‘crimes’ committed in Tikrit’s Prison", but of course do not mention what those crimes are.

I haven't been paying enough attention to understand what is going on in the Iraqi prison system but it wouldn't surprise me to learn of harsh treatment or even torture. However, claiming "crimes committed" as the reason for a violent suicide attack targeting a provincial council strikes me as grasping for excuses by an organization desperately seeking to gain the approval of the population. It also may shed some light on who provided assistance to the attackers in order for this attack to be successful. I may be reading too much into this, but if I were to guess, I would say that a local tribe or tribes assisted or allowed the attack to occur. If a tribal member or members, perhaps even a sheikh, were held and felt mistreated then it would only make sense that this tribe would then enable ISI to conduct the attack in order to regain honor or satisfy the need for revenge.

Like I said, this is only my guess but it's based on my experiences in Iraq.

On a related note, the Chairman of the Security Committee in Diyala Province's Council is claiming that the attack occured in Salah al Din province because security forces in Diyala had foiled a similar plot in Baqubah so ISI was forced to attack elsewhere. I'm skeptical, mostly because I'm not sure the Diyala Emergency Police are capable of foiling anything except roasted lamb and chicken; but I'm really skeptical because I don't believe ISI/AQI is that coordinated in Iraq right now. If you disrupt the network in one city or province, they just are not capable of switching the attack to another city/province. At most suicide bombers would be shifted but from what I saw in Iraq in 2010, even the suicide bombers were local to the area in which they conducted an attack. The attack was conducted in Tikrit because local (or at least provincial) networks and cells planned and coordinated the attack, not because the network was disrupted in Diyala.

Big booms continue in Iraq

2011-03-31T19:38:00.000-07:00

My intention was to write this post yesterday but I was dragged out to see Sucker Punch so I didn't get around to it, and I've been in Casualty Assitance/Casualty Notification training the past couple of days so I am not sitting in an office bored out of my mind and able to blog at work.

Anyway, on Tuesday in Iraq there was an attack against the Salah al Din provincial council meeting which left at least 53 dead. The attack started with a grenade attack against a checkpoint outside the government building and the proceeded with gunmen charging into the building. Suicide bombers detonated inside and the gunmen then killed as many people as they could. Most people appear to be blaming Al Qaida in Iraq for the attack although the group has yet to take responsibility...and this attack seems to be extremely coordinated for that organization.

I have very little knowledge of the tribal, political, or insurgent dynamics of Salah al Din province having been only in that area to go to LSA Anaconda outside of Balad in 2004 and again in 2010 so I'm not exactly the best person to comment on this attack, but hell, like I've said before, it's my blog and that's what I'm here for. If I had to guess, I would say that AQI is most likely responsible for this attack, but they had to have had help. Planning would have taken weeks if not months and somebody would likely have passed off information to either US forces (who are stretched very thin these days) or to Iraqi security forces. My thoughts are that either the individuals who pulled this off had help from a local tribe or government/security forces protecting Tikrit. I wouldn't even rule out JRTN in this attack although they do not usually use suicide bombers (and by "do not usually" I mean "never") and I would expect this attack from then more closer to when US forces are leaving.

Attacks of this nature are going to occur again in Iraq. This article in Foreign Affairs discusses the issue. Unfortunately the link is too a premium article meaning you have to be a subscriber to read the entire thing (boo). It is essentially about how the US needs to be very careful of not pulling out of Iraq too quickly because Iraq is a very new democracy and violence is very likely to occur from those groups and individuals who perceive that they are disenfranchised or that the government is ignoring them. AQI will get the blame, but there are other factors that need to be considered. Emma Sky, a civilian aide/advisor for both generals Petraeus and Odierno, wrote the article so she knows what she is talking about.

I had the honor of actually meeting and briefing Ms. Sky twice in Iraq. Actually I was briefing General Odierno but that's hardly the point. My respect for Ms. Sky is enormous and I was giddy as a little school girl when I met her.

I heart you...

The game is afoot...

2011-03-28T12:59:00.000-07:00

Intelligence reporting, at least according to the Asia Times, has indicated that a certain high profile individual has been moving around the Afghanistan/Pakistan border meeting with key Al Qaida leaders. That high profile individual would be none other than Osama Bin Laden, and his movements have apparently startled intelligence agencies who haven't seen much out of Bin Laden in over two years.

But what the hell is he up to? According to the article, intelligence analysts have a few guesses...which is all we intelligence analysts can really do at the end of the day, guess:

1) Since he is believed to have met with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the founder and leader of Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) a political party and militant organization, it's possible that Al Qaida and HIA are discussing and planning a joint operation for Afghanistan. Taking advantage of a decreasing number of coalition forces over the next few years this operation would be to win the Afghan war in favor of the Taliban.

2) Internal conflicts are causing a rift in the Taliban and Al Qaida ranks forcing Bin Laden to deal with those issues personally.

3) Al Qaida plans on somehow taking advantage of the current revolutions sweeping the Middle East in order to once again get in the global spotlight.

I am no means an Al Qaida or Afghanistan/Pakistan expert but I'm hoping the situation means number 2; number 1 is the most likely; and I fear number 3 the most.

The reporting reminds me a bit of a similar situation 1-14 CAV faced in our last deployment (because I can find similarities to any world event and 1-14's last deployment). The task-force-that-shall-not-be-named-because-I-could-wind-up-in-jail-for-disclosing-too-much occasionally received information that the head of Al Qaida in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, traveled to our little corner of Iraq every once in awhile, the town of Jalula to be more specific.

Why al-Masri was coming to Jalula was a mystery and the task force was not exactly forthcoming in their information and only gave us enough so that we could do our jobs in assisting them. All I knew was that it was believed he had come to Jalula a couple of times in the past and then on a final trip in March (or it may have been February, it all bleeds together) when we actually rolled out with the task force in an attempt to capture him...dry hole obviously.

The squadron commander would sporadically ping me for the reason for al-Masri's reported travel to Jalula. Having no sources or other intelligence collection on al-Masri I could only speculate; al-Masri was a big fish in a quickly dwindling school of fish and I was focused on baracudas in our metaphorical ocean...task force could deal with al-Masri and any attempt to collect would have likely tipped our hand that we knew he was coming into the area.

There could be any number of reasons for al-Masri being in Jalula, the squadron commander's favorite was that al-Masri may have had a girlfriend in the town, a likely scenario. My theory was that it was a way for al-Masri to discuss future operations, hand out funds, and deal with internal divisions in an environment that found AQI cells and networks increasingly cut off from each other due to security measures and capture of leadership.

In the end, al-Masri would be killed in April and the reasoning for his Jalula visits would be buried with him and the secrecy obsessiveness of the special forces.

Company level intelligence in the COIN fight

2011-03-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

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...

Command philosphy spiral: Part II

2011-03-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

Take a look at this article from The News Tribune out of Tacoma, WA. I love the TNT because they cover FT Lewis fairly often and the Stryker brigades regularly. The News Tribune has also sent several reporters over to Iraq and Afghanistan and I really respect their reporting.

The linked article is about a 500 page report that was written following an investigation into 5-2 SBCT (now 2-2 SBCT) and that brigade's actions in Afghanistan in 09-10, specifically the actions of a squad of soldiers who blatantly killed civilians and took human body parts as war trophies. I wrote about this situation here and I placed most of the blame on the brigade commander, COL Harry Tunnell.

The report is not being released by the Army yet (shocking), but was given to defense attorneys representing the soldiers currently being court martialed. One of the defense witnesses, Stjepan Mestrovic a Texas A&M sociology professor, who saw the report discussed the results of the investigation in the article.

A few quotes jumped out at me:

"The brigade was dysfunctional."

"Mestrovic said the brigade nearly failed to gain approval to go to
Afghanistan after it completed its pre-deployment training in Fort Irwin, Calif.
He said Tunnell’s aggressive style created an environment that enabled the
misconduct that allegedly occurred under his command."

"Mestrovic said the review of the Stryker brigade concluded that the
strategy of former brigade commander Col. Harry Tunnell was fundamentally at
odds with the one articulated by the war’s top commander at the time, Gen.
Stanley McChrystal."

COL Tunnell's leadership style and over-aggressiveness led to the incidents involving soldiers at the platoon level. That's exactly what I said back in October. I was also not surprised to learn from this article that the alleged "ringleader" of the killings, SSG Calvin Gibbs, served as part of COL Tunnell's security detail (PSD) before he joined the platoon involved in the incident.

What I would like to know is, why did GEN McChrystal allow COL Tunnell to remain in command when it likely was apparent that 5-2 wasn't in line with GEN McChrystal's strategy and was doing its own thing? Or hell, why wasn't COL Tunnell relieved prior to the deployment when 5-2 failed, or nearly failed, its NTC rotation (something I didn't think was even possible)?

After 3-2 SBCT's NTC rotation prior to our 09-10 Iraq trip I removed two NCO's from my section who made it obvious that they could not perform to my expectations or at the capacity 1-14 CAV needed them to. One of the NCO's was an extremely intelligent individual but would not have been able to handle the leadership requirements that would have been placed on him while deployed. The other NCO was just a shitbag.

Both NCO's were placed in other units in the brigade where, in case number one, be better supervised and not have the pressure of being the lone intel NCO on a combat outpost due to our split operations; or in case number two, not fuck anything up that wasn't vital to the mission. Looking back, moving those two NCO's was one of the best decisions I have ever made and in return I received an outstanding NCO and and outstanding soldier who both did great things during the deployment.

If a captain in a battalion level intelligence section has the willingness to remove underperforming or mismatched personnel, then a general in charge of a theater of operations better have that willingness as well.

When have a few cruise missiles stopped anything?

2011-03-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

There isn't much catching my interest in the insurgency world and I'm not quite ready to dive back into stories of previous deployments so I will continue with my thoughts on current events in the Middle East.

Score 1 for the dictators. The king of Bahrain and his security forces have removed the peaceful protesters (with some help from his Saudi and Emirate buddies) as well as destroyed the memorial arch in Pearl Square that was a rallying point for demonstrators. King Hamad has even gone so far as to blame the protests on Iranian meddling. Yeah, because all oppressed Shia are merely puppets of the Ayatollah. As much as I think the Shia should start an insurgency/civil war in Bahrain, the country is practically a textbook example of the perfect situation for a counterinsurgent (small island, dispersed towns, desert). Yes Kyle, I do learn something from the books I steal from you.

How much longer will Yemen's President Saleh hold out? You know your days are numbered when even your own tribe won't back you up. Generals switching sides and joining the anti-government demonstrators doesn't help your case either. I have a feeling Yemen will be a mess for quite some time.

And then there is Libya. So a no-fly zone has been established, whoopity doo. That no-fly zone is only going to delay the inevitable...pro-Gadhafi forces crushing the rebellion. Don't get me wrong, I want Gadhafi gone, I just don't think destroying Libya's anti-air radar, command and control sites, and combat aircraft are going to do much in the way of helping the rebellion in the long run. Only boots on the ground will stop Gadhafi, and the US is a little busy right now with two other major operations...and I don't see anyone else attempting an invasion and occupation of Libya.

We're going to come out looking like suckers when Benghazi finally falls.

Shia/Sunni conflict in one region, Shia/Sunni cooperation in another...both bad

2011-03-15T17:55:00.000-07:00

So much for peaceful protests. The monarchy in Bahrain has asked for assistance from Saudi Arabia to protect government facilities and the Saudis have obliged, sending mechanized troops to the tiny island nation. The UAE has also sent 500 police to assist the Bahrainian government.

It appears that the Saudis may fear a Shia uprising against the Sunni monarchy...that could potentially spred to Riyadh.

In other news, General Petraeus has confirmed that rocket shipment intercepted in Afghanistan was from Iran and was meant for the Taliban/Al Qaida. He claims that he's not too concerned about the weapons and that any assistance from Iran comes in "measured amounts". Iran is essentially just trying to give us a bit of a bloody nose and keep us occupied, much like they did in Iraq.

How long until EFPs start going off in Kabul?

Something to think about

2011-03-12T12:22:00.000-08:00

News out of Libya is not looking good for the rebel forces. Forces loyal to Gadhafi may or my not have taken the strategic town of Ras Lanuf and are definately pounding the rebels. At this point it appears to me that the only way Gadhafi will be removed from power is by a civil war, a conflict that will likely last for some time.

The Arab League has voted to back the idea of a no-fly zone and will attempt to sway the UN towards authorizing the action. However, the United States and NATO appear to be rather hesitate to carry out a no-fly zone, likely because it will be perceived as the West once again involving itself in Arab affairs.

There is another reason why Western nations should be cautious in assisting the rebels in eastern Libya. Andrew Exum, over at Abu Muqawama brings up the interesting report written by the Harmony Project at West Point. He links to the actual report on his blog which I won't bother to do, but it is a fairly good read. The report is an analysis of some captured Islamic State of Iraq documents discovered near Sinjar (west of Mosul near the Syrian border) in October 2007. The documents are essentially a record of foreign fighters coming into Iraq to fight for ISI and includes in many cases town and country of origin as well as the reason for coming to Iraq.

Not surprising, a majority of the fighters were from Saudi Arabia but a good number were from Libya, northeastern Libya to be precise. In fact, of the fighers documented, 18.8% were from Libya, second only to Saudi and Libya contributed more fighters per capita than any other nation. The most common cities of origin were Darnah and Beghazi...both along the eastern Libyan coast and both are current rebel strongholds. 85% of the Libyan foreign fighters noted that they came to Iraq to be suicide bombers.

Of historical note, Darnah and Beghazi were the scene of an uprising in the mid 1990's organized by the Islamic fundamentalist organization Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) that has ties to Al Qaida.

I of course am no fan of the Gadhafi regime and would love to see him swinging from a lampost in the near future. I also do not believe the current rebellion was started by any fundamentalist group but was a reaction by average Libyans to the protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. However, the West, and the United States in particular, should be vary cautious in assisting a group of people who appear to be more than willing to travel to another country in order to kill Americans.

The NTR, AQI, ISI, SoI, and more awesome acronyms

2011-03-06T16:03:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure I've discussed the tribal dynamics of NE Diyala several times before but a recent incident motivated me to write about the issue some more. The incident in question was an IED attack targeting a tribal sheikh in the Nidah Tribal Region.

The Nidah Tribal Region is a barren wasteland near the border of Iran. It is dotted with small villages and the sole economy of the area is goat herding and smuggling. The Niddawi tribe make up a majority of the people and this tribe was favored by Saddam who moved them to the border area and put them in charge of defending the border from Iran as well as pushing the Kurds out of the region.

Of course, when the Saddam regime was removed the cash benefits of being a favored tribe dried up as did much of the smuggling opportunities as US forces did their best to disrupt smuggling along the border that was aiding the insurgency.

Al Qaida in Iraq and its offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq, moved in and used the Niddawi tribe to smuggle weapons from the border as well as the tribesmen to increase the ranks of the organizations. Many suicide bombers in both Diyala and Baghdad came from the Nidah Tribal Region.

Complicating the situation, the paramount sheikh (the guy in charge of the tribe) passed away in 2005 and three sheikhs were in competition for the paramount role. One sheikh, Haithem Hom (the one targeted for assassination in the above link), apparently sided with AQI which led to his detainment. Another sheikh attempted to stop AQI and set up a Sons of Iraq program in the NTR (Sons of Iraq were the "anti AQI" neighborhood watch established in 2007). Unfortunately, US forces wouldn't help pay for the NTR SoI's and the sheikh quickly ran out of money. He turned to the Kurds who assisted financially but turning to the Kurds made this sheikh rather unpopular among many of his Sunni Arab tribesmen. The third sheikh had some support to be paramount, but never enough to be a serious contender.

Hathem Hom was released from prison some time in late 2006 and much of the violence we had in the NTR we attributed to competition for paramount and the lack of leadership in the area, especially after the primary insurgent leader in the NTR was detained in January.

Haithem was named paramount sheikh of the Niddawi a couple of months ago and I suspect this attack was some kind of intimidation or retaliatory attack, likely conducted by those loyal to one of the other two sheikhs. It's also possible that Haithem has been working with the local security forces to remove what remains of AQI/ISI and this attack was meant to intimidate Haithem back into the AQI fold, or it was a potential pre-emptive attack to keep Haithem from working with the security forces.

Somehow I doubt that Haithem Hom has turned over a new leaf so my money is on intimidation by another sheikh.

Wasting taxpayer money in a different location

2011-02-26T20:30:00.000-08:00

I'm heading to FT Benning, GA tomorrow morning for the Joint Forcible Entry Warfighter Experiment. The exercise is 3 weeks long and I'm pretty sure I'll have internet access in my hotel room so there will be the usual updates from me, hopefully.

But in the off chance that I do not have access to the interwebs or you are just worried about me, that's where I'll be. Hopefully by the time I return to Arizona there will be a new government in Libya.

I fully expect to spend many hours being bored during the exercise...so pretty much the same as when I'm at work here at Huachuca.

...to the shores of Tripoli

2011-02-21T18:18:00.000-08:00

Libya is burning. Pilots ordered to attack civilians have apparently defected to Malta. Soldiers who refused to attack civilians have been killed. Reports are coming out stating Gaddafi has fled the capital to his tribal base in the desert.

All of this because a guy in Tunisia decided he had enough with the regime there and lit himself on fire.

Tunisia, Egypt; Libya and Yemen on the ropes; growing protests in Algeria, Moracco, Bahrain, Iraq, and Iran...the actions of one man has led to a cascading effect not seen since one man shot an archduke in Sarajevo in 1914.

Had a discussion last night with a friend over a beer about the situation and the conversation naturally led its way to our involvement in Iraq. Did US intervention and introduction of democracy lead to this?

In a word...no. Not that the two of us believe anyway. At the most, our actions helped destablize the region which created an environment that allowed these protests to occur, but even that's a stretch. No sane and rational person can look at the current political and security situation in Iraq right now and think, "yeah, that's what I want."

As the revolutions spread and grow my biggest concern is how extremist elements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb are going to react. Will they attempt to increase their influence during the political vacuums that develop? Will they increase attacks against the security forces? Or will they wait and then strike violently after new governments have been formed, a time when those governments will be at their weakest?

A year from now, what will we see?

We're going to need a lot more duct tape and super glue

2011-02-16T15:40:00.000-08:00

In 2003 I watched CNN in my college apartment as President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and others made the case for war against Iraq. Intelligence from British, Italian, and German sources apparently proved that Saddam Hussein and Iraq not only had chemical weapon stockpiles but were attempting a nuclear program as well.

I deployed to Iraq in 2004 fully expecting WMD to be found any day.

During a short stretch of 2007 patrols in northern Baghdad were being hit by IEDs made from artillery shells containing chemical agents. Those artillery shells were believed to have come from a bunker complex that had once housed chemical rounds that had not yet been destroyed by inspectors; it was unlikely the insurgents making the IEDs had any idea the rounds were chemical munitions. Still, the true believers jumped on this evidence. Our battalion command sergeant major even started yelling at me after I briefed this new IED threat; why wasn't the media reporting this "proof" of WMD in Iraq.

A few outdated artillery shells proves nothing and no evidence of a WMD program was ever found.

As the years went by and new evidence surfaced, it became very apparent that, at worst, the Bush administration lied about the intel leading us to invade Iraq or, at best, was misled by false information.

Now the Iraqi defector, and primary source for German intelligence of an Iraqi WMD program, has admitted that he lied about the information provided to German and US intelligence agencies...and he's proud of it. He justifies the lies because it toppled the Saddam regime.

I wonder how the people caught up in the sectarian slaughter of 06-07 would feel about that?

But how do I feel about spending a majority of my 20's either preparing for or occupying Iraq, a conflict which was essentially based on a series of lies, misrepresentations, and the whims of a few folks in power?

Surprisingly ok about it.

I have long ago come to terms with the fact there was no WMD in Iraq and had read enough and seen enough evidence that indicated our leaders were looking for any reason to take down Saddam. My Iraq time came well after the invasion, a time in which the US was attempting to develop a new government, build up the Iraqi military, and deal with a growing and increasingly lethal insurgency. When I returned home from my second deployment the friend who picked me up at FT Lewis asked me if we should still be in Iraq and what our purpose was.

"We broke the vase. It's our responsibility to try and put it back together."

That's how I justify my life for the past 7 1/2 years. What's worse? Invading a nation on false beliefs and information or invading that nation and then abandoning it after you've removed the government and the security forces keeping it together?

Civilian to veteran interactions

2011-02-15T16:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Tom Ricks I stumbled across a blog on the VA website that has an interesting post about how to interact with a veteran if you are a civilian. I've mentioned and linked to sites discussing the gap between today's military and your average American but the VA article is good in that it lists "Do's" and "Don'ts" when talking with veterans.

I especially like two of his "Don't" points: don't talk politics, and don't be cavalier with questions.

The former point is just frustrating to me. I'm just a guy in a green suit (gray/green really), I don't make the policies, I just help carry them out. I don't really give a damn if you're "against the war but for the troops" or if you think the entire Middle East should be turned into a glass parking lot. My comments and experiences shouldn't be used to further your argument or justify your own beliefs.

The latter point is my biggest pet peeve. Luckily, on only a couple of occassions has anyone actually had the nerve to straight up ask me if I've killed anyone or if any of my friends died. Those types of questions are extremely personal and only demonstrate the ignorance of the individual asking the question. Yeah, I've forgotten more memorials in Iraq than I can remember, it's not something I'm comfortable talking about.

My most recent experience with these types of questions occurred a couple of months after my last deployment. I had gone to a bar with a couple of female friends and met up with a couple of their friends, one of whom my friend was interested in. Both my friends wandered off leaving me to have a conversation with this guy who didn't know me and who I didn't know. The topic eventually fell on occupations and the first question asked when he learned I was in the Army was, "so what's it like to kill someone?"

Really douchebag?

I wanted to punch the guy, and after learning of the incident my friend told me I would have been justified in doing so. Not feeling particularly violent I let the comment go and after a short time left the bar but not before listening to this idiot's excuse for not joining the Air Force...he thought it would be weird to drop bombs on people.

Several days later I informed my friend of our conversation. She was appalled and that interaction, coupled with some other "red flags", led to her no longer being interested in the guy. So there ya go folks, piss off a vet and get cockblocked.

That's got to be as good a reason as any to learn how to bridge that civilian/military gap.

Before I end this I wanted to mention that I do have some great friends who, likely without realizing it, have generally followed the advice found in the VA blog. They've listened when I needed to talk, didn't openly judge me, helped me out when I needed it, and have avoided forcing their politics into the conversation...even those friends of mine who I know are against the Iraq conflict. Most of all, they send care packages. More than anything else in the world, more than even Ke$ha, those care packages kept me going.

What I do on Friday nights due to a lack of a social life

2011-02-12T15:15:00.000-08:00

There have been a lack of posts by me despite a plethora of events occuring throughout the world because I have been stuck in an exercise for the past week. The exercise was a culmination event for the BCT S2 course and involved NCO's from the basic NCO course and advanced course as well as 2nd lieutenants from the officer basic course. After spending my time stuck in a trailer from 8 am to 5 pm the last thing I wanted to do was come home and type away for an hour about events.

So yeah, Egypt threw out Mubarak; vote counts confirmed that southern Sudanese want independence; protests occured in Bolivia against President Evo Morales; and fighting broke out between Thailand and Cambodia over a disputed temple.

Lots to write about, but I'm not going to blog about any of that...old news.

Instead, I'm going to post some notes I wrote about a week ago. They are my thoughts and comments about insurgency/counterinsurgency. There is no real order and most of them are just questions that should be thought about when first arriving in country.

- Why are operations / events in Iraq / Afghanistan classified?
(I understand why a specific operation would be classified, don't want the bad guys to know what we are doing, but why are the daily events and attacks classified? Disclosure would prevent incidents like the Wikileaks problem)

- We need to trust our own media and population.
(Goes to the above statement. Our own population needs a better understanding of the fight and the military should trust our citizens to make informed decisions based off that understanding.)

- Counterinsurgency is not just a fight for the local population, it's a fight for your own population as well.
(If your own citizens don't understand what you are doing or don't believe in the cause, you can't do proper counterinsurgency because your government won't give you the resources you need due to the conflict being unpopular, ie., Vietnam.)

- Why is there an insurgency? Not just the network/organization, but what are the motivations of individual cells?
(I struggled with this one in the last deployment. People don't set out to create chaos "just because", there is reasoning and motivation...figure that out and you go a long way to defeating the problem.)

- Social networks can help bring down governments. Can they bring down an insurgency?
(Thinking out loud on this. Can a mayor or local security force commander Tweet his way to victory? Would a Facebook page allow for more anonymous tips from the population?)

- What does the Tribe want?
(Goes back to the question of why there is an insurgency. If grievances can be addressed then less people will be willing to assist the insurgents.)

- How are police departments able to have success against gangs in inner cities? Units need more than law enforcement professionals (battalions were assigned LEPs to help with...well whatever the commander deemed the unit needs help with...ours, the former police chief of Junction City, Kansas, assisted with training some of the local police stations), we need counter gang units assisting at the battalion level.
(A cell or cells in particular areas is likely not made up of hardcore jihadists/idealists. They are often comprised of the local criminal element that has been co-opted by the leaders of the insurgency. They are gangs and thus act like it, just with more powerful weapons and funding. Conducting COIN like a counter-gang operation will likely go a long way to defeating the insurgency.)

- Lawyers, or at the very least, legal specialists, should be pushed down to the battalion level in order to assist with the warrant process.
(One of my biggest challenges and frustrations was the warrants needed to detain and hold individuals. I'm just a guy in a green suit, I have no training on dealing with judges or how to develop a warrant packet. Yet, I was expected to be the subject matter expert for the squadron and provide guidance on how to obtain a warrant.)

- Are warrants a knee-jerk reaction by the host nation to mass detainments conducted by the counter-insurgent? If the counter-insurgent is more careful about detainments and focuses on targeted raids against specific individuals will that mitigate the demand by the government that warrants must be issued for an individual to be detained?
(I just want that asshole who has been blowing shit up off the streets, I don't want to have to deal with weeks and months of evidence collection to get some stupid piece of paper that lets me capture him.)

- Don't get focused on the boom, watch the big picture.
(I've been guilty of this as well, getting too wrapped up about the IEDs going off and not focusing on the situation allowing the IEDs to be emplaced or built in the first place.)

Perhaps the revolution will be Twittered afterall

2011-02-05T16:45:00.000-08:00

Due to the lack of any work/computer space for me in my office and not really having anything useful for me to do anyway, my boss decided that I might as well use my time more effectively than sitting around surfing the internet on my phone and signed me up to attend the BCT S2 course here on FT Huachuca. The course provides guidance and tools useful for those individuals who are going to be a brigade level intelligence officer, but is also a great course for anyone who will be assigned as a battalion level intel officer as I was. I've been really enjoying the course for the past two weeks and part of that enjoyment has been due to the other officers attending the course. We all have excellent imputs based on our experiences; everyone in the class has deployed at some point with the exception of some brand new 2nd lieutenants.

Earlier this week prior to the class starting a few of the majors were discussing the revolutions/protests that have swept through several countries in the Middle East. There was a general concensus that the "domino theory" is bullshit; just because your neighbor country switches to a different form of government does not mean that your country will, or your other neighbor. The US feared the "domino effect" during the Cold War, primarily in Southeast Asia, which was one of the dominant reasons for our little adventure in Vietnam. While some governments in the region did turn communist after Vietnam...Laos, Cambodia, and an attempt in Malaysia...the fall of those regimes didn't trigger some massive communist wave.

A similar reasoning was put forth prior to the invasion of Iraq. If a functioning democracy was established in Iraq than a domino effect of democratic change would sweep the Middle East. I found the idea absurd, it didn't happen during the Cold War and it wouldn't happen now.

(Before you freak out, no, I am not trying to argue that our occupation of Iraq and establishment of a democracy there has anything to do with the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere.)

During this discussion, one of the officers pointed out that very few of the countries in the M.E. really have stable governments. A revolution in one nation could easily trigger protests in a neighboring country, which actually happened. This is in part to a shared culture, religion, and language.

For some inexplicable reason I then pointed out that Bahrain is stable...although of no consequence in the scheme of things.

And because I didn't say "knock on wood" there is now a movement in Bahrain to start a revolution in that country as well. Activists in that country are using Facebook and other social media in order to organize a mass protest on February 14. The demonstrations will be against the Sunni monarchy for the oppression against the Shia majority.

I don't think this "Day of Rage" will get much traction and even if it does, a regime falling in Bahrain won't matter much. The only people who may be affected are rich Saudis and western expats who travel from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain to get there drink on. Bahrain is the only non-dry Arabic country.

Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, and potentially Bahrain. Which nation is next in line for the "Jasmin Revolution"?

As if Afghanistan weren't complicated enough

2011-02-02T16:30:00.000-08:00

So maybe you didn't quite believe me when I claimed Iran was assisting Al Qaida in Iraq. Perhaps you just don't trust Tony Blair and John McCain, afterall, they may just be justifying decisions or attempting to rewrite history. Iran would never support a Salafist/Wahhabist/jihadist (is that even a word) organization whose stated purpose is to eventually defeat/convert Shia muslims.

Maybe this will sway your opinion. It's an article on the Long War Journal discussing the links between Iran and the Taliban. Yeah, that Taliban. The former rulers of Afghanistan who are both Salafist and essentially became the political wing of Al Qaida...although I admit that is likely a bit of a simplification.

Not only do the Afghan police in the southwest of Afghanistan point to Iran as a source of support for the Taliban and Al Qaida but a recently captured Taliban leader from that part of Afghanistan claims he was recruited as well as trained in Iran by Iranian Qods Force (Iranian special forces).

My hope is that Iran is only backing the Taliban in order to keep us busy in Afghanistan and therefore unable to think about invading Iran. I highly doubt that Iran wishes a return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and are likely only assisting them just enough to be a pain in the ass to US forces but not enough to threaten the Afghan government, much like Iran's probable support to Al Qaida in Iraq.

I just wish this would come back to bite Iran, but that seems unlikely to me.

Blowing up and rebuilding villages: Part 2

2011-02-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

Just to be different from other blogs out there, I'm going to refrain from discussing Egypt today and instead just link to Wired.com and an article on the continuing discussion of LTC Flynn, 1-320 field artillery battalion, and the destruction of three (not just one as was originally reported) villages.

Here's the link to the article. It discusses LTC Flynn's reasoning for why the villages needed to be destroyed and the effort to rebuild them. Take a look at the article if you are so inclined.

Two quotes really stuck out at me:

"We’re not there to terrorize the population,” he says. “The people talk about the Russians bombing their villages and say the Russians never did anything for us. They say, ‘That’s the difference between you and the Russians."

Just wanted to point out that as much as we may screw up, we're not as bad as the Soviets who really didn't seem to give a damn about the population. At least we're trying to help.

"A reporter from the Daily Mail, who Flynn says wasn’t at the meeting, reported that Flynn threatened them (the villagers): Either turn in the homemade bombs, or he’d blow up their houses."

A reporter getting the situation wrong, taking something out of context, or just expressing a hidden agenda? Say it isn't so. I've been burned by reporters.

The Revolution will not be Twittered: Part 2

2011-01-28T11:33:00.000-08:00

Just in case you haven't been paying attention Tunisia recently had an uprising which ousted the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali regime. This "Jasmine Revolution" has since spread to other nations such as Algeria, Yemen, and Egypt. Currently, the Egyptian government appears to be the most vulnerable and has cut off the internet, set a curfew, and brought in the army.

I have two concerns right now. The first is my usual concern that people in this country will view the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter by the protesters and think these protesters are like them and think like them. Just because a group of people uses the same website you do does not indicate that they want the same things; i.e., the revolution may not be attempting to establish a liberal democracy. 1979 Iranian Revolution come to mind?

The second concern is that the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian Islamic Fundamentalist organization tied to Al Qaida, is supporting the protesters. I fear either a fundamentalist Islamic regime friendly to Al Qaida being emplaced or several new insurgencies created by these revolutions.

While I do not like dictatorships, the evil that I know is far better than the evil that I do not know.

Updated: Seriously, I just need to let Diyala go

2011-01-26T15:07:00.000-08:00

Update: because I'm an idiot who doesn't check his notes before posting...

Below is a cut a paste of my previous post about an Iraqi source naming the most dangerous groups in Diyala Province. Mentioned was the al Awda Party, which I confused with the al Hadba Party. Awda is fairly dangerous due to it being made up almost entirely of former Baath Party members but I've never known them to conduct attacks in Diyala. I wouldn't even have known them to exist in 1-14 Cav's operating environment except for a troop commander who claimed they were in As Sadiyah and Jalula and were trying to run party members in the election of 2010...which I think he was actually wrong about.

So I apologize for the mix up. My goal is to be as accurate as possible and I'll be sure to check my notes from now on. Everything else is as accurate as I can remember.

An interesting article today from Aswat al Iraq. If the link doesn't work it is because the site is currently experiencing server problems which normally are not an issue.

Aswat al Iraq is a news agency in Iraq that was created in 2004 and does a fairly decent job of reporting the news in Iraq.

The article is a quick report of three armed organizations that a "security source" believes pose the greatest threat in Diyala Province. Those three groups are Ansar al Sunna (AAS), al Naqshabandia (JRTN), and the al Awda political party.

Now, I fully realize that I have been away from Diyala for 6 months now (that long really? Time really flys) but unless events have radically changed in the province I have serious issue with that statement. The only group I agree with is JRTN, and it surprises me that this source would admit JRTN is a threat.

JRTN is a fairly secret organization whose leadership is primarily made up of former high ranking military officers and Baath Party members. Their entire information campaign is that they only attack US forces and their goal is the removal of the US military from Iraq and then an establishment of a Baathist regime as the Iraqi government. While our Iraqi counterparts fully admitted the existence of JRTN and worked with us to remove the leadership, they rarely stated in public that JRTN was much of a threat and every time we detained a JRTN leader we had to fight tooth and nail to keep them detained. Either Iraqi authorities are beginning to realize that JRTN should be a focus or this source was Shia who already recognized that JRTN, a primarily Sunni group, was a potential threat to the current Shia dominated government.

The listing of Ansar al Sunna makes me laugh. AAS was all but eliminated as a viable threat in Diyala over the last few years. There were a couple of cells in Baqubah and reports of limited activity in the Tibij region just west of Jalula in 1-14 Cav's area but for the most part they lacked funds, weapons, and personnel. The activity they were reported to be conducted was kidnapping for ransom...a tactic used when a group has no outside funding and needs quick cash. The AAS boogeyman was normally trotted out as a red herring in an attempt to distract US forces or put out disinformation, for whatever reason. This was done a couple of weeks after the Jalula carbomb that killed 2 soldiers in July '10. After my section had laid out those responsible for the attack with the help of C troop and a few of those we believed were responsible had been captured, Kurdish leadership began reporting that AAS was actually to blame and pointed fingers at Arab miliary leaders as ordering the attack. Those leaders being the head of the Jalula Emergency Response Force and the 4th Brigade Intelligence Officer (my partner). It was, in my opinion, political maneuvering only but they managed to convince both the A and B troop commanders.

Mentioning the Awda Party as an armed threat baffles me a bit but doesn't surprise me. The Awda Party is a Sunni political party that was formed in the Ninewa Province became extremely powerful because they run a pro Arab anti Kurd platform, a platform that reminds me of the platform of some Neo Nazi organizations that claim they are not "anti black" they are just "pro white". They showed up in Diyala around September '09 with one of the leaders being the former mayor of As Sadiyah who was the political rival to the current mayor...who was Kurdish.

Awda operates exclusively in Arab-Kurd contested areas and in the Ninewa Province the party was so inflammitory that violence has broken out, mainly when the provincial governor (Awda Party member) attempts to force visit villages that are clearly controlled by the Kurds. Our squadron commander viewed the group as good for democracy in the region as it gave the local Sunni Arabs a voice and the group would work to put Sunni Arab interests on the table. I viewed them as a potential spark in the ethnic powder keg of the Hamrin Area Combined Security Area. While as far as I know, no violence was caused by the party while we were there it's possible the group has armed itself and my be acting as militia to counter Kurdish influence.

Interesting to note is the lack of groups mentioned. No mention of Al Qaida who conducts the majority of the spectacular attacks in the province and no mention of Jaysh al Mahdi or the Jaysh al Mahdi Special Group. Not totally surprised JAM or JAM SG aren't mentioned since they only attack Americans but they were the organizations primarily responsible for the sectarian violence of the past along with AQI. Give the group an inch and they'll take the Province. Not mentioning AQI may indicate that even the Iraqis believe AQI is all but dead in the area, potentially a good sign...or burying heads in the sand.

Just because the idea is crazy, doesn't mean it isn't correct

2011-01-24T19:25:00.000-08:00

As the old saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." I fully believe this statement when it comes to international policy and certain nations aligning with seemlingly odd partners. Take for example Iran and Venezuela, WWII's Germany and Japan, and Iran and Al Qaida.

Wait...what?

I believe I've blogged about Iran and Al Qaida before, I made a hint at a possible partnership towards the end of this post, and I may have written about it more extensively in other posts...but I'm too lazy to try to sift through and find it.

Anyway, I'll provide a brief and simplistic description of a possible Iran/Al Qaida partnership and why some people find it absurd:

Al Qaida is a primarily Sunni organization whose goal is removal of US forces from the Middle East, destruction of corrupt Arab governments, defeat of Shia dominated Arab governments, establishment of an Islamic Caliphate uniting the Islamic world, bankruptcy of the West, and finally, military defeat of the West.

Iran, being a Shia dominated country with a Shia dominated government, should feel threatened by Al Qaida and seek its elimination along with other jihadist organizations that threaten Iran; and to an extent they do. A little known fact was that Iran quietly approved of the US/NATO invasion of Afghanistan to eliminate the Taliban and remove the Al Qaida threat because both organizations were a destabalizing and threatening presence on Iran's eastern border.

However, with the invasion of Iraq there soon grew a very large and potentially threatening American military presence on both Iran's western and eastern border. I can only guess, but I assume that the Iranian leadership saw this development and determined that in order to prevent the US from invading they must keep us as busy as possible in both Afghanistan and Iraq, not too busy so that we would depart immediately and leave two very unstable countries bordering Iran, but but busy enough that we would be too distracted to even think about invading Iran as well.

There were some indications that Iran allowed Al Qaida members to pass through Iran to get from Afghanistan to Iraq, where they were welcomed by the terrorist organization Ansar al Islam. The Shia militia Jaysh al Mahdi leadership was given training in both Iran and Lebanon (training conducted by Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran). Weapons and the ugliest of all IEDs, the EFP, were smuggled from Iran into Iraq.

Most people assumed that Iran would not help Al Qaida and their Iraqi franchise, Al Qaida in Iraq, due to AQ's stated goal of removing Shia governments. However, the first two goals of AQ likely appeal to Iran; removal of US forces from the Middle East and destruction of corrupt Arab governments, many of whom, namely Saudi Arabia, are rivals of Iran. It seems reasonable to me that Iran would assist AQI, namely with limited safe haven and some weapons, especially after it became clear that AQI in no way could defeat the new Iraqi government, but could still hurt US forces in the country. As I mentioned in my post linked above, there were indications of Iranian involvement in three suicide attacks targeting 3-2 SBCT towards the end of the deployment.

Now former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has linked Iran and Al Qaida during a testimony to the Iraq Inquiry. These are essentially the same statements made by Senator John McCain back in 2008. Statements that he was mocked for. Perhaps those sitting in their comfy offices and who have never been to Iraq or Afghanistan do not have a full grasp of the situation or the realities on the ground.

Do not underestimate a nation that perceives itself as surrounded. They are likely to seek allies you would not expect.

Movers and shakers

2011-01-23T13:34:00.000-08:00

A couple interesting of events in Iraq the past couple of days that I would like to highlight.

The first, Shia cleric and annoying fellow Muqtada al Sadr returned to Iran after coming back to Iraq following a 4 year study in Qom, Iran. "Uncle Mookie", as we referred to him back in '06-'07, created or at the very least co-opted the violent Jaysh al Mahdi militia but left for Iran to study theology in the hopes of becoming an ayatollah. He returned to Iraq earlier this month after Prime Minister Maliki began forming the government.

I am no means an expert in the larger politics of Iraq or the Shia in general as a majority of my last two deployments have been Sunni threat focused, but I do have to wonder about this back and forth movement. Did al Sadr show up to try to sway or possibly control Maliki? Was he there to deliver a warning? Or did he believe it was safe to come back only to be told to find his way back to Qom, perhaps by the Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani himself who does not want Sadr causing more problems?

The other interesting development is the founder of Ansar al Islam has said he wishes to return to Iraq. Ansar al Islam is a terrorist organization that operated in Kurdish Iraq during the late '90s up to the invasion. The group attacked Kurdish targets in an attempt to form an Islamic Caliphate-type government in the region. After the US-led invasion the group assisted foreign fighters and Al Qaida in entering the country and soon changed its name to Ansar al Sunna and spred its influence into much of northern and central Iraq. AAI/AAS worked on an off with AQI, sometimes working towards the common goal and sometimes in violent conflict with the other organization.

Mullah Krekar's desire to leave Norway may just be due to pressure from Norwegian authorities, afterall there is a great quote in the article from the Norwegian foreign minister who states "Nothing would please us more", referencing Mr. Krekar's leaving. However, there may be more to the situation. In my last post I mentioned that an Iraqi security source claimed AAS was one of the three primary armed threats in Diyala Province. Is AAS gaining power and influence due to the perceived weakness of AQI? Is Mullah Krekar's desire to return to Iraq a desire to lead his organization once again?

It's probably the Norwegian food driving him away.

Seriously, I just need to let Diyala go

2011-01-22T19:36:00.000-08:00

An interesting article today from Aswat al Iraq. If the link doesn't work it is because the site is currently experiencing server problems which normally are not an issue.

Aswat al Iraq is a news agency in Iraq that was created in 2004 and does a fairly decent job of reporting the news in Iraq.

The article is a quick report of three armed organizations that a "security source" believes pose the greatest threat in Diyala Province. Those three groups are Ansar al Sunna (AAS), al Naqshabandia (JRTN), and the al Awda political party.

Now, I fully realize that I have been away from Diyala for 6 months now (that long really? Time really flys) but unless events have radically changed in the province I have serious issue with that statement. The only group I agree with is JRTN, and it surprises me that this source would admit JRTN is a threat.

JRTN is a fairly secret organization whose leadership is primarily made up of former high ranking military officers and Baath Party members. Their entire information campaign is that they only attack US forces and their goal is the removal of the US military from Iraq and then an establishment of a Baathist regime as the Iraqi government. While our Iraqi counterparts fully admitted the existence of JRTN and worked with us to remove the leadership, they rarely stated in public that JRTN was much of a threat and every time we detained a JRTN leader we had to fight tooth and nail to keep them detained. Either Iraqi authorities are beginning to realize that JRTN should be a focus or this source was Shia who already recognized that JRTN, a primarily Sunni group, was a potential threat to the current Shia dominated government.

The listing of Ansar al Sunna makes me laugh. AAS was all but eliminated as a viable threat in Diyala over the last few years. There were a couple of cells in Baqubah and reports of limited activity in the Tibij region just west of Jalula in 1-14 Cav's area but for the most part they lacked funds, weapons, and personnel. The activity they were reported to be conducted was kidnapping for ransom...a tactic used when a group has no outside funding and needs quick cash. The AAS boogeyman was normally trotted out as a red herring in an attempt to distract US forces or put out disinformation, for whatever reason. This was done a couple of weeks after the Jalula carbomb that killed 2 soldiers in July '10. After my section had laid out those responsible for the attack with the help of C troop and a few of those we believed were responsible had been captured, Kurdish leadership began reporting that AAS was actually to blame and pointed fingers at Arab miliary leaders as ordering the attack. Those leaders being the head of the Jalula Emergency Response Force and the 4th Brigade Intelligence Officer (my partner). It was, in my opinion, political maneuvering only but they managed to convince both the A and B troop commanders.

Mentioning the Awda Party as an armed threat baffles me a bit but doesn't surprise me. The Awda Party is a Sunni political party that was formed in the Ninewa Province became extremely powerful because they run a pro Arab anti Kurd platform, a platform that reminds me of the platform of some Neo Nazi organizations that claim they are not "anti black" they are just "pro white". They showed up in Diyala around September '09 with one of the leaders being the former mayor of As Sadiyah who was the political rival to the current mayor...who was Kurdish.

Awda operates exclusively in Arab-Kurd contested areas and in the Ninewa Province the party was so inflammitory that violence has broken out, mainly when the provincial governor (Awda Party member) attempts to force visit villages that are clearly controlled by the Kurds. Our squadron commander viewed the group as good for democracy in the region as it gave the local Sunni Arabs a voice and the group would work to put Sunni Arab interests on the table. I viewed them as a potential spark in the ethnic powder keg of the Hamrin Area Combined Security Area. While as far as I know, no violence was caused by the party while we were there it's possible the group has armed itself and my be acting as militia to counter Kurdish influence.

Interesting to note is the lack of groups mentioned. No mention of Al Qaida who conducts the majority of the spectacular attacks in the province and no mention of Jaysh al Mahdi or the Jaysh al Mahdi Special Group. Not totally surprised JAM or JAM SG aren't mentioned since they only attack Americans but they were the organizations primarily responsible for the sectarian violence of the past along with AQI. Give the group an inch and they'll take the Province. Not mentioning AQI may indicate that even the Iraqis believe AQI is all but dead in the area, potentially a good sign...or burying heads in the sand.

The Google Machine as an intel tool

2011-01-18T13:18:00.000-08:00

Open source intelligence, in my opinion (of course it's my opinion, it's my blog), is one of the best and most under utilized of the intelligence collection functions. OSINT as it is known in the intelligence community, is the process of collecting information from publicly available resources such as newspapers, magazines, the internet, etc.

The other "int's" (SIGINT, HUMINT, etc) often receive far more attention in training and in the field despite the vast amount of data that can be gleamed from open source. All too often commanders, executive officers, and S2's (myself included) demand intelligence collection and analysis be done using the other "int's" as well as the government's secure internet server when a couple hours on 'Google' may give the same, if not better, results.

The Army devotes entire MOS's and weeks long courses to the other intelligence functions but very little focus is given to OSINT; perhaps one class of a couple of hours duration at best. More time and effort should be spent teaching the value and resources that can be used of open source.

I bring this all up because at the moment I'm remembering a situation 1-14 Cav faced this last deployment in which OSINT assisted in helping.

We had a rather problematic JRTN cell (or cells, I'll probably never know) that liked to hit our Strykers with command wire and victim initiated IEDs on the main route from Jalula to Qara Tapa. B Troop rectified the problem initially by detaining two of the key individuals we believed were responsible for the attacks and Special Forces rounded up a third. This helped for a few months but unfortunately two of the detained men were eventually released and IEDs became a problem again a couple of months after their release.

The B Troop commander, always looking for a fight, was not too upset by the attacks because they never caused any damage or injury with the exception of the occasional busted tire or mild concussion. He began his own little information operations (IO) campaign in an attempt to cause the JRTN cell to make a mistake and get themselves caught. Whenever one of the local leaders in the area commented on the attacks, Bronco 6 would mention that he was glad the IEDs were hitting his vehicles as opposed to the police, Iraqi Army, or civilians because if the IEDs went off on Strykers, no damage would be caused and no one would get hurt. It was his way of saying to the insurgents "keep it up dirtbags, you suck at it anyway."

I fully understand, as did the B troop commander, that we were getting hit because we had established patterns on that particular route. It was the quickest road from FOB Cobra to two of the combined checkpoints that were manned by B troop. The insurgents knew that we would use that road often and consistently. All they had to do was wait for a convoy of Strykers to go by, knowing that in a couple of hours those same Strykers (or the Strykers those Strykers were replacing) would come right back down that road. I made a large assumption that the individuals who planted the IED were likely still in the area filming the attack because that's what JRTN did for both propaganda purposes and for proof of the attack to get paid.

But where were those individuals hiding?

The answer would come late in the deployment from a weekly product created by an organization not affliated with my brigade. The product was a rollup of the messages, videos, and propaganda posted on the internet by the different insurgent organizations operating in Iraq. I found myself on the contact list for this product when I discovered a friend of mine, who had gotten out of the Army, was in theatre working as a contractor and I noticed her name at the beginning of an email chain. She in turn sent me this product weekly which happened to be made by a guy I went to the career course with...another under utilized intel tool, networking, remember, it's a small Army.

Back to the point...on one of the products was a link to a website that showed an attack against an American Army vehicle somewhere in Diyala Province. The website was a JRTN site and since my squadron was the only one with a JRTN problem so I figured this had to be one of our attacks. The site even mentioned which cell conducted the attack, 2nd platoon / 2nd company / 101st brigade (JRTN names its cells in a military manner). I passed off the link to B troop who then went out to the site and based off the video were able to determine exactly where it was filmed from.

Thanks to open source and the internet, we now knew the location of where insurgents were filming the attacks as well as confirmed our suspicions that JRTN was the organization behind the attacks (previous beliefs that JRTN was behind the attacks were just guesses, very good guesses but guesses nonetheless). This video made my week and what was really great was I was able to thank the individual who sent me the product in person when the squadron was redeploying and I spent several days on the base where this product was produced.

Unfortunately we were unable to catch those responsible for the attacks in the short time we had left, but we did pass this info off to 2-14 Cav and when you can give a replacing unit hard evidence and proof of the operations of an insurgent organization that's always a good thing. The only thing that really frustrates me about the entire situation was that I had to get this open source product from an outside organization and not from my brigade. I don't expect Brigade to have an open source section, but they should be tapped in to the organizations that do and be passing on that information.

Blowing up and rebuilding villages

2011-01-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

I've meant to post a couple of times this week but Civilization V is destroying my free time. Stupid addicting game. If I had a dedicated desk and computer at work I would blog from there (hooray for wasting taxpayer money!) but for the time being I can only jump on a computer when our division NCOIC is away. Some of you may be thinking that I should just take over the NCOIC's desk since I outrank him, but I'd much rather him have the desk since he actually does work.

So anyway, check out this blog post from Tom Ricks. It's a discussion from a correspondent in Afghanistan about a village wiped out after the Taliban had taken it over and U.S. forces determined they just couldn't allow that. Look at those before and after pictures...wow. We basically destroyed a village in order to save it.

A few wars ago, or even a few years ago, the commanders on the ground would have likely said something along the lines of "well that sucks for the people but the enemy was there, so too bad." This time the battalion on the ground did the absolute correct thing and worked to begin rebuilding the entire village. They even went about it the right way; instead of just throwing money at the villagers and calling it mission complete they worked with the local government, contractors, and the villagers themselves to rebuild the village. The battalion even put in the extra effort to get deeds to the land for the villagers.

Hopefully this turns into a success story.

Update on Diyala

2011-01-09T13:24:00.000-08:00

Being the curious individual that I am and having put a lot of effort into the security of Northeast Diyala Province I am always wondering what exactly is going in that little corner of the world. Some would prefer to forget; I, on the other hand, like updates.

However, getting up to date info on the region is difficult unless something goes boom and since I promised my warrant officer that I wouldn't attempt to email our replacements I am forced to get what little news on the region from unclassified sources...like the interwebs.

Stryker Brigade News is normally a good source for news links on the various Stryker brigades operating around the world and that site linked to a news story about 2-25 SAAB (Stryker Advise and Assist Brigade, basically the "non combat" Stryker Brigade Combat Team) and their first 100 days in Iraq.

The news of course is boring...no real change for 2-14 Cavalry from what 1-14 Cavalry was doing. They still man the combined checkpoints with the Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces and deal with the Kurd-Arab tension issue that is paramount to the security of northern Iraq. One bit that did jump out at me was that there are three bilateral checkpoints, Kurd-Arab controlled, that have been established and have posed no issues. That's a good sign to the region. One of those checkpoints was being set up as 1-14 Cav was leaving and it's nice to know that not only is it still functioning, but the Kurdish and Arab leadership have agreed to two more. A good step forward in my opinion.

In non Iraq news: Southern Sudanese voters headed to the polls today to determine if South Sudan should declare independence from the rest of Sudan. It will be interesting to learn if the referendum passes and if it is seen as legitimate. This is a development that I will attempt to follow closely as violence could easy break out, especially over the oil fields that seperate north from south Sudan.

Timbuk...where?

2011-01-08T14:21:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, there's a pretty good article in this month's National Geographic about the Malinese city of Timbuktu. I even managed to find it online for you guys. The article is primarily about the history of the city and large amount of ancient texts and manuscripts in the hands of its citizens, libraries, and mosques. The city has so many books and scholars because of Timbuktu's location along the caravan routes from Egypt to Western Africa. It's a very good read if you have the time.

A map for the geographically challenged. Timbuktu is the city in the middle of the country.

What interested me the most was the discussion in the article about Al Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb and that organization's influence and effect on the region. AQIM has kidnapped many westerners in the area and held them for ransom which has severely decreased tourism for Timbuktu.

Also included is a paragraph on how AQIM spread its power in Mali. The group's leader in Mali, Mokhtar Belmokhtar "Belaouer" (Algerian-French slang for "the One-Eye"), gained the protection from the tribes of northern Mali by marrying the daughter of one of the more powerful chiefs. The Malinese Army doesn't conduct operations against him because some of Belaouer's men assasinated an army colonel in Timbuktu in from of his family.

Marrying into the tribe is one of the primary means of Al Qaida linked organizations and other terrorist organizations gain access and protection in the areas they wish to operate. It occured in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and virtually every place AQ has attempted to establish itself. They tried it in the Anbar Province of Iraq but they apparently overstepped their bounds, either due to the tribes in that area disliking the idea of foreigners marrying their daughters, or because AQ leaders demanded the marriages thus angering the tribal leaders.

The assasination of the colonel as an intimidation factor is also very familiar in Iraq and in 1-14 Cav's old operating environment as well. A very similar situation occured in the Tibij area of our OE which was just across the river from FOB Cobra to the west. I don't recall when, but I believe just prior to our arrival, an Iraqi Army lieutenant colonel was tortured and brutally killed by the local Al Qaida in Iraq cell outside his home in front of his family and many of the local villagers also witnessed the incident. After the assassination, the cell leader called the nearby Iraqi Army battalion intelligence officer and told him what they had done. The intel officer and a patrol arrived on the scene just as the cell members were leaving. In the coming days the cell would text message several of the IA officers and warn them that they would be next if they continued to target the AQI cell. That IA battalion was the most ineffective and challenging battalion to work with in the brigade we assisted due to the intimidation they faced.

Never underestimate the ruthlessness of your opponent...or the effectiveness of his tactics.

Hemorrhaging officers and an apathetic nation

2011-01-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

Don't have much for you guys but since it's been a few days since I've posted I'll throw out some articles that I read today that I found interesting.

An article discussing why officers are leaving the Army. The author points to a recent study that polled both officers who are currently serving and who have recently left the Army. Multiple and long deployments are not necessarily a factor for the exodus of our best officers but it is a issue. Painful bureaucracy, standard promotion times for everyone with no regard to merit, and a broken career management system are primarily to blame. I couldn't agree more. When choosing my next assignment I was asked for a list of 15 "jobs" of a list of around 40 or 50 openings; that list was apparently ignored and I was sent to Huachuca to be an instructor. Not horrible, but not really what I wanted. Then, when I arrive here, someone up at G1 (personnel) decides I'm not going to be an instructor but a nameless cog in the Intel Center bureaucratic machine (Not quite nameless, but close. My military boss called me by the wrong name yesterday).

The second article is about the volunteer military and how out of touch American citizens are with that military and the current wars. People cared about Vietnam because they were drafted and sent over there, or they had a relative or close friend who was. The population was affected by the conflict which in turn shaped politics. Today very few people (around 1% of the population) serve in the military and most folks often do not know anyone deployed. The conflicts do not touch them or matter; taxes are not raised and goods are not rationed. The Army went to war while the country went shopping.

Thanks to Jake "The Snake" for the links.

Pretty good article in the latest National Geographic on Timbuktu that I'll likely write about in a day or two.

A New Years Eve in Iraq

2010-12-31T18:15:00.000-08:00

I'm going to continue with the theme of posting some of my thoughts on holidays including what I was up to a year ago while deployed on this day. New Years isn't much of a holiday but it fell at an interesting time during the deployment.

On New Years Eve we hit 5 months deployed with another 7 to go. The major holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas had passed and I was searching for a new milestone in which to look forward to in order to motivate myself through the next several months. I still hadn't been on leave yet but that wasn't happening until late March...3 months away. There were two major events that I settled on as milestones, the Super Bowl in early February and the Iraqi elections in early March. The Super Bowl would provide an opportunity to relax for a few hours and have a couple of beers (yes, they actually let us have beer, 2 beers to be precise...but of course it was crappy beer); and the elections were the key event of this deployment.

But the elections were over 2 months away and there was much to do. 8 of our high value targets had been captured up to this point and another 6 persons of interest detained as well. I'll be the first to admit that on a few of the captures 1-14 had nothing to do with them, but a capture is a capture and in many cases it was the intelligence we developed that led to their arrest.

In late December the Squadron was planning heavily for the combined checkpoints that we would eventually establish in mid January. There were a lot of meetings, briefings, and PowerPoint slides put together. We were also working an operation to target those individuals we felt would likely attempt to disrupt the elections, which meant pretty much all our bad guys. General Odierno (the senior officer in Iraq) was coming in a couple of days so a brief had to be put together. To top it all off, we were also developing plans on how to bring the rest of the Squadron up from FOB Caldwell to COP Cobra over the next couple of months and how best to deal with the overcrowding and lack of workspace (an issue mitigated when the military training team on Cobra was reassigned freeing up their living and work space). To say we were busy would be an extreme understatement.

The night of the 31st I went to bed around 11 pm or so not remembering or caring that it was New Years Eve.

At midnight I woke to the sound of an explosion. My immediate thoughts as I looked at my watch (11:59 pm) was that it was an extremely unusual time for indirect fire to be occuring. As I was groggily saying "WTF" to myself I heard a cheer which I thought came from the SF compound. This only compounded my confusion as there was no reason why anyone would cheer during an IDF attack.

A second explosion and a second cheer jolted me out of exhaustive incomprehension as I realized it was the SF team setting off some kind of explosives for New Years.

Rolling over and falling back asleep I thought to myself, "fucking Green Berets."

Christmas cheer for a deployed intelligence officer

2010-12-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

I don't have my notes on me at the moment so dates mentioned in this post are going to be vague at best...

As I blogged about just after Thanksgiving, the holiday season while deployed is usually business as usual. I tend not to get too excited and the only thing to look forward to is a chance to sleep in, relax a bit, and get a really good meal.

As the intelligence officer, all I wanted for Christmas...and the rest of the year...was a really good capture.

I thought we had it about a week prior to Christmas when one of our high value targets (HVIs) was detained at a checkpoint outside of Muqdadiyah which is a town of mixed Sunni and Shia but also out of the Squadron's area. The individual was believed to be a key leader in AQI around the As Sadiyah area and I was thrilled about his detainment because interrogations may have led to information about the organization in the area. I was not the only one to believe this and as soon as the task force created to target and capture Sunni threats heard of this man's capture they had him transfered from Iraqi control to their control. The Iraqi Army brigade intel officer was also pleased but his joy was tempered (the man never really had any joy that I saw anyway) when he learned the task force had custody. He wanted our target in Iraqi custody as soon as possible. Normally I would find this a sign that our target had friends in high places and would bribe his way out of prison, but this individual was a little different.

He had been detained previously, a couple of months before 1-14 Cav's arrival, and had been accidentally released by the task force. Having proved that we were incapable of keeping this guy once, MAJ Mustafa wanted to ensure his detainment by keeping him in Iraqi custody.

Well, mistakes happen...and sometimes they happen twice. Our target was shuffled between a couple of organizations and somewhere along the lines it was mistakenly believed that he was not a wanted individual. So he gets dropped off by helicopter at FOB Warhorse (the brigade headquarters) and told by the base defense cell that he is not a wanted individual. Base Defense takes their word for it and without asking Brigade...or the unit on the ground where this guy is from (1-14)...they decide to release him. Base Defense took him right outside the gate and let him go. D'oh.

I was pretty pissed, the squadron commander was pissed, and the Iraqi Army intel officer was really pissed. Every few weeks MAJ Mustafa would bring up this target and give me updates on the rumors going around. He was an American spy; he worked for the CIA; he worked for Special Forces; he was on my pay roll (this one I found amusing); or he had a letter from the Americans saying he shouldn't be arrested. Every time MAJ Mustafa brought him up I told him that he was still wanted and that he should be arrested, I don't care what kind of letter he had. Or, he could just shoot him and that would solve the problem.

The situation put me in a foul mood; my Christmas gift had been taken from me, but an email would soon change everything a couple of days after Christmas.

The email would come from the task force and was sent to our incoming operations officer (his time as troop commander was over and he was taking over as S3, the current S3 was acting as the XO and the S3 since the XO had injured himself and had been sent back to the States). The email was sent to him because he had worked closely with this task force on a few other missions previously in the As Sadiyah area. The message originated from the task force's sister task force in Baghdad (I'm being cyptic about these task forces because they are classified and I would get in real trouble for naming them...just think special forces).

The message was a picture and an interrogation summary of an individual detained in Baghdad just prior to Christmas. The individual wasn't who they were targeting but happened to be at the location where the raid occured. They kept him because he was rather suspicious and as it turned out just so happend to be...

...this guy, who I believe was our number 1 target at the time. As I mentioned in the post that I linked to, my brigade had been targeting him in the previous deployment and we had spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to capture him; he essentially fell into our laps. I was so happy that I teared up. As you can read from my post about him though, my joy tempered when I learned through his interrogation reports why he became an insurgent, but that would come in a few days. For the time I was ecstatic.

It was honestly one of the best Christmas gifts I ever got.

Iraqi government formed...finally

2010-12-21T21:59:00.000-08:00

Iraq finally has formed a government, it only took the political coalitions 9 months to do it.

As much as I am attempting to see this as a positive sign I believe the insurgency is going to get a bit of a boost. The Sunnis essentially got screwed in this election and I would love to write a detailed blog about it but my notes rarely covered national level politics and I've forgotten most of the players. I may attempt to piece together something from memory in the next couple of weeks.

So the Sunnis got screwed, Maliki was able to form a government with the backing of Muqtada al Sadr's anti-American coalition (honestly I believe he's really more anti-occupation than anti-American), and the insurgency is likely to gain from the large number of Sunnis who have grown weary of a Shia dominated government that continues to shut Sunni politicians out of the political process.

It all goes back to the Sunni Red Line and what is going to drive the Sunni population over it. The Sunni Red Line is that incident or series of incidents that finally drives a majority of the Sunni Arabs to turn their backs on the government, the local security forces, and US forces and fully support the Sunni insurgency (AQI, JRTN, 1920s RB, JAI, ISI, IAI).

Although, there were some analysts in Iraq who claimed that there is no Sunni Red Line. If the blood orgy of '06-'07 didn't drive them completely away, nothing will; Sunnis will just continue to be shoved around. I agree somewhat, Sunnis will take a lot as long as they have an outlet to vent their frustrations, such as the media and a few outspoken political leaders, but a population can only take so much abuse from its government.

This may warrant further discussion.

Continuing drama in Somalia

2010-12-20T17:00:00.000-08:00

Some interesting news coming out of Somalia the past couple of days, and especially today.

Quick explaination of the current situation in that country as I know it, and I will admit that I am by no means an expert in Somalia: Shahaab controls most of the country and much of the capital of Mogadishu; Shahaab is an Islamic fundamentalist organization with ties to Al Qaida. Hisbul-Islam is another Islamic fundamentalist organization but one that does not approve of Shahaab's ties to foreign groups; they control parts of Mogadishu and bits of the rest of the country. The African Union, a military force composed of several African countries, occupies Mogadishu attempting to prop up the Transitional Federal Government, the government backed by the West and which controls a few blocks of the capital and not much else. Other players include Puntland and Somaliland which are autonomous regions in the north part of the country that are essentially stable...but they really don't matter.

As you can see I am a bit fascinated with Somalia much like I was fascinated with Afghanistan in the late 90s back when the only group standing in the way of the Taliban was the Northern Alliance. Yeah, I was into Afghanistan before it was cool...I think that makes me some kind of foreign affairs hipster.

Anyway...a few days ago Shahaab continued its control over Hisbul-Islam held territory in Mogadishu. These two groups have been on again/off again allies brought together by their ideology and goals but seperated by Hisbul-Islam's suspicion and distrust of foreign influence...namely Al Qaida, although several leaders in Hisbul-Islam also have ties to Al Qaida. Distrust of foreign influence is deep in Somali culture where the clans and tribes will fight amongst each other for power until some foreign power comes along and tries to take over Somalia in which all the tribes then band together and fight the occupier, which has occured quite often in Somali history.

Having lost most of it's control of Mogadishu Hisbul-Islam has surrendered to Shahaab and agreed to a merger. Hisbul-Islam's leader, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, may or may not have a position of power and influence within the organization.

Here are my thoughts: while the merger of the two organizations creates a more united front against the African Union and potentially may gain more influence amongst the population, I see this surrender as a good thing, especially if Sheikh Hassan is given any position of power. Shahaab has sought closer ties with Al Qaida and may be on the verge of becoming an affiliate of that organization, the leadership from Hisbul-Islam may attempt to block those ties and the leadership of Shahaab is likely to become fragmented. This merger also allows the African Union to focus its resources on defeating one organization as opposed to two...not that I believe the AU is capable of defeating Shahaab, even a fractured Shahaab.

Of course I also wouldn't suprised to see in the news in the next few months that Shahaab is changing its name to Al Qaida in the Horn of Africa.

Much needed puppy post

2010-12-18T15:03:00.000-08:00

Puppy!

This blog tends to be a bit depressing and I'll be the first to admit that. It's difficult to write about insurgencies and violent attacks in other countries and make it fun, although I do attempt to add some humor to my writing. So today I'm going to take a bit of a break and write about puppies.

The reason puppies are on my mind is due to this article from Stars and Stripes, the military's daily newspaper. It discusses the increasing presence of adopted dogs and cats on bases in Afghanistan and how leaders are often turning a blind eye towards the strays. General Order Number 1 specifically states that animals will not be kept as pets or mascots in theatre. It's supposed to protect the health of the soldiers since stray animals in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely carrying all sorts of diseases and it would be a bit of a waste of government resources to send veterinarians to all these places in order to care for these animals.

However, this rule often gets broken and it's only natural for soldiers to start taking care of a stray puppy they find. In 2004 my little corner of Camp Victory consisted of about four units' motor pools and one very friendly stray dog who was cared for by everyone. She boosted our morale and was useful in chasing off people she didn't know...a wandering soldier is often a soldier up to no good. Unfortunately after a few months she disappeared along with her puppies; most likely the base animal control discovered her and had her destroyed.

In 2009 on COP Cobra some of the Iraqi Army soldiers took care of a small pack of dogs and in a way adopted them as mascots. This was odd since most Arabs dislike dogs but whatever, inshallah. Even the MiTT and SF team kept a couple dogs around on their respective compounds. This of course drove our S3 nuts as he was a stickler for the rules and dogs just weren't allowed, but the MiTT just ignored him when told to get rid of the animals and nobody was going to tell the SF team to get rid of their dog. Hell, just to piss off the S3 the MiTT acquired a turkey and kept it around for shits and giggles.

It wasn't long before one of the Iraqi's dogs had puppies, and damnit they were cute. So cute that tough, hardcore, manly American soldiers would break down into fits of "aaawwwwww puuuuuuuppppies!!!!" when passing by the little things and one soldier was even found rolling around the dirt with the puppies.

They looked a lot like our little guy here

This drove the S3 into a fit of anti puppy rage. He ordered that anyone caught touching the puppies would get an automatic Article 15 (military punishment). This guy just hated puppies for some reason.

In January the MiTT was replaced and the new MiTT was brought into the anti-puppy way of thinking. Eventually, after the gap in the wire was fixed, all the dogs were removed from the base. The reason we waited until the gap (I haven't mentioned that have I? For about 6 months there was no razor wire on about a 100 meter stretch of the berm) was fully wired off was because not only did we have our resident dogs, but a couple of packs of stray dogs would often wander onto the base. No point in removing animals if more will just take their place. Fixing the gap also prevented the roving pack of donkeys from straying onto the base. You read that right, not only did we have wild dogs, but wild donkeys as well. That would have been an awesome mascot.

We still had a couple of dogs to keep our morale up. 1-14 was fortunate enough to have 2 or 3 military working dogs on the base and the MWD soldiers would often bring their dogs around the offices to keep our spirits up. Nothing like petting a dog to remove any hostility from a bad day. Whenever our first XO would flip out about something stupid, which was often, one of the captains would call up the MWD guys and have them bring their dog up to ops. A few minutes petting the dog and the XO would be settled down and we could go back to being productive.

There were also a number of Hesco cats running around the base. They were named Hesco cats because they were often seen on top of the Hesco barriers placed everywhere on the base. However, these cats were extremely skittish and while good at keeping down the mouse population were not very good at being social.

How about one more shot of our puppy...

Yaaahhh!!!

Recent events making me wonder

2010-12-16T14:12:00.000-08:00

Once again a number of stories on the interwebs have caught my attention so I of course must share them with my loyal readers.

I'll start with The Long War Journal's Somalia page. It's an update of the near daily occurances in Somalia. Pay special attention to dates November 27, 28, 29, 30, December 2, 5, 8, 11, 12, and 16. Look at those casualty numbers for civilians caught in the crossfire between African Union forces and Shaahab. I don't think the AU is going to get the results they want by accidently killing more civilians than they do Shaahab fighters. While Shaahab is likely to blame for many of the civilian deaths (mortars tend to end up in places you didn't expect) the AU is going to get the blame.

Next up is this story from CNN.com about a border patrol agent killed in Arizona yesterday. He was killed in a shootout with bandits who target illegal immigrants. Three things about this put me on edge: 1) there is enough immigrant traffic that bandits are able to sustain their operations, even 18 miles north of the border; 2) violence is clearly migrating north of the border; 3) this attack occured one mountain range over from where I live.

Third, is a threat by an Iranian general that American generals will be targeted and killed in revenge for the Iranian nuclear scientists who were attacked last week. The article is from Foxnews.com so I'm taking it with a grain of salt and I doubt that this general speaks for the government but there is likely a lot of anger over the terrorist attack that killed one of the scientists and injured the other. Do I think Iran is capable of conducting an assasination attempt here in the U.S.? I doubt it, but Iran does have a tremendous amount of influence with certain insurgent organizations and militias in Iraq; namely Jaysh al Mahdi and the Jaysh al Mahdi Special Groups as well as a couple of other, more violent Shia groups. All of these organizations have access to EFPs and could obtain knowledge of the movement of one of our generals meeting with a key Iraqi political or military figure. Not sure Iran has the cojones for an attack of that much political magnitude however.

Finally is this report from Iraqi authorities claiming Al Qaida in Iraq is planning suicide attacks in Europe and the United States this Christmas holiday. My blog post about Al Qaida using affiliate groups discusses the reasoning behind this potential operation. However, I'm finding this information hard to believe, partially due to the source. Iraq may be cooking the intelligence books in order to attempt to make it appear that AQI is still a significant threat, not only to the Iraqi government, but the West as well. From my recent experience, AQI is all but finished. While they will continue to be a minor threat in Iraq and carbombs and IEDs will continue to go off, the organization lacks leadership and has for the most part alienated the Sunni population. I find it unlikely that they will be able to rebuild their force and reputation and be a threat to the Iraqi government. I also find it unlikely that AQI would waste valuable money, time, resources, and suicide bombers to conduct an attack against the West when they so desperately need all those things currently in Iraq. While the attacks against Spain in 2004 led to Spain pulling its forces out of Iraq and the attacks in 2008 in London likely hastened the U.K.'s removal of most of their forces, any attack now will likely backfire on AQI.

But I'm not an insurgent with a potentially global reach and I've been wrong before.

The Mad Mortarman

2010-12-12T13:45:00.000-08:00

Mortars suck. I absolutely hate mortars. For me they are the single most fear inducing weapon in Iraq because a good mortar team can strike when they please from where they please and have an excellent chance of escaping capture. Unless the mortar team is close enough and you are paying extremely close attention to hear the launch from the tube the only warning you get for an incoming round is when it strikes.

If you are on a large enough base sometimes there is an early warning system and a "big voice" to provide you a few seconds to find cover before the rounds start coming in. That's assuming the system is working.

In 2004 I was utilizing a Port-O-John when the "big voice" went off indicating rounds were incoming. Being deployed for several months already I had come to terms with the possibility of dying. I had not come to terms with the possibility of dying in a Port-O-John. It's moments like those that you find yourself pleading with God.

I'm too awesome for this to be my tomb

Rockets don't bother me as much despite the whistling noise they produce when they are flying in. Even IEDs are not that scary because they usually can be avoided with some good pattern and route analysis. When not avoided armored vehicles typically stop the blast.

At the National Training Center at FT Irwin, CA they have a name for the mortar teams that plague the battlefield and harrass the units training for war: The Mad Mortarman.

He's named that due to his skill in evading capture and hitting you when you least expect it, or in some cases when you actually expect it but can do nothing about it. The Mad Mortarman roams the desert striking when helicopters are refueling, update briefs are being conducted, and at 2:30 am when all you want is some much needed rest. He has been a thorn in the side of every brigade that has gone through NTC since its creation in 1980.

Nearly every base in Iraq has its own Mad Mortarman striking at whim and causing momentary chaos much like when an ant hill is disturbed; FOB Cobra was no exception.

5-1 Cav warned us when we first arrived that there was an indirect fire threat to Cobra but the base had not been attacked since July. The S2 really only gave me a vague hand wave as to where the attacks were coming from and every person I asked had a different opinion as to the point of origin (greatest acronym in the Army, point of origin = POO). I didn't give it a second thought and determined to figure out the problem if it became a problem.

It became a problem in October. The first attack the team only hit us with one round, and it was a dud. Two weeks later they struck again with more rounds, not duds this time. About two weeks after that in November we were hit a third time. We now had a pattern, but the location of the attacks were in debate. Our systems for determining locations of IDF attacks weren't functioning properly. Were the attacks coming from the river to our west or the hilly, broken terrain to our east?

We searched both areas. Conducted patrols through the villages near the river and asked the locals for information. Set up ambushes in the days after the attacks. Set up a sniper in one of the guard towers. Kept a hot gun (our own mortar team) set up on random nights. The SF team even attempted to walk from the FOB to the likely attack site but were thwarted by wild dogs who gave them away. We were reacting, not forcing the enemy to react to us.

The FOB was hit a fourth time in late November. The squadron commander was becoming impatient. It was only a matter of time before someone was injured or killed. By now we had at least determined the general area where they were hitting us from. C Troop searched the area numerous times to attempt to find the exact location or possibly the tube. We were unable to keep a constant hot gun up due to manning constraints and how stretched thin the squadron was but due to the two week pattern established we set one up on the days likely for the next attack.

The likely nights came and went. Staff officers joked it was only a matter of time before the next attack and we should all hang out up on the roof of HQ just in case. Maybe a round would wound us and we could go home. Another joke was going around that the squadron commander was the culprit because he was never at Cobra when the attacks occurred.

It was decided that the squadron needed to conduct a practice drill just so we would be prepared for the next attack. Artillery simulaters would be used, ops would call the mortar crew with the coordinates, and then the team would simulate counter fire...no rounds fired. Only one thing went wrong that night...the mortar crew fired live rounds. Lucky for us the target was an empty island in the river.

Attacks against the FOB ceased until March.

The Iraqi Army was convinced that our accidental mortar shot showed that we were willing and able to shoot back so the mortar team was scared off. I figured they had run out of rounds. Helping was an operation just prior to Christmas in which the Iraqi Army and the SF team captured a couple of individuals likely responsible for the attacks. Firing those rounds was probably the best mistake we ever made that deployment.

IDF attacks shifted in January to targeting the combined checkpoints we had established with our Iraqi Army and Kurdish Peshmerga partners. A combination of mortars and rockets were used in those attacks and it is likely that the individuals hitting our FOB were not the same as those hitting our checkpoints. Vague patterns were set in those attacks but the attack locations were almost always different. The rounds were wildely inaccurate most of the time and generally were nothing more than a nuisance.

Cobra would only be hit a couple of more times. On March 13 PFC McLyman was killed when a round struck near the dining facility. It was the first attack since November and threw us all for a loop. Her death was the Brigade's first death from enemy contact in the entire deployment, 7 months in. The Iraqi Army brigade established a guard tower at the attack site and manned it during the night. In April a rocket would be fired at the FOB from an entirely new location but that was the final attack against the base during 1-14's deployment.

As I was sitting around at another base waiting to redeploy back to the States I learned that Cobra had been hit again by mortars...from the location we had been getting hit from. I sighed and said, "well, it's 2-14 Cav's problem now".

Damn that Mad Mortarman.

Coloring Books and COIN

2010-12-11T14:57:00.000-08:00

One of the smartest things ever said during 1-14 Cav's 09-10 deployment can be credited to our Fire Support Officer:

"If you want to win over a village/town, get the women and children on your side".

I'm almost positive he stole that idea from someone else but since I do not know who, he gets the credit. When he wasn't wasting time watching Lady Gaga and Tool videos on YouTube or beating up his interpreter the FSO could be a rather valuable staff officer.

You may be thinking that women and children don't matter in a male dominated society like Iraq but that would be incorrect. Women control the home and have tremendous influence over their husbands...much like every other society. If the wife isn't happy, the husband isn't happy. Many of our minor insurgents (IED emplacers, random shooters, etc) were pushed into the insurgency by their wives because the husband had no job. The insurgency was a way for a man to earn some money for his family, get him out of the house and his wife's hair, and maintain his honor so in many cases you had the women of the family pushing the men out the door to find a job, any job. This created an enormous recruiting pool for the different insurgent and militia groups. If the women are not against your forces then they will not encourage their men to attack you.

Children have influence in that they become teenagers...the prime recruiting age for insurgents. If the children of an area have little or no hostility to your presence then when they age they are not likely to develop any hostility, and the insurgents lose potential recruits.

So what did 1-14 Cav do to get the women and children on our side? Well we did what we could to assist the local economy. Many units used the money available to them to create job programs in towns in order to give people jobs such as trash cleanup, canal dredging, beautification, etc. Unfortunately those jobs are not permanent and end as soon as the unit leaves country or a few months after. At best the follow on unit continues the job program but obviously the jobs are not permanent and when the money stops flowing the jobs are done and the individuals are unemployed again. 3-2 SBCT, and from what I heard much of Iraq in 09-10, took a different approach and gave out "micro grants". These were grants of up to $5000 to individuals to either start a business or improve an existing business. We also developed projects to improve the marketplaces of certain towns. The hope was that the businesses would then hire more people (create jobs) and remain viable long after U.S. forces left (stimulated economy).

Did it work? Hard to say after only a year. A few of the businesses failed, but many were thriving when we checked up on their progress. Luckily each battalion had experienced commanders who had seen previous "quick fix" ideas fail and were willing to attempt the long term approach, even if they were not able to see the benefits.

Our C Troop used another method as well, this one aimed at the children of As Sadiyah and Jalula. The troop commander, along with our civil affairs attachment, came up with the idea of having the local police go to the elementary schools and talk to the kids about the police's role in the community. The police would then hand out coloring books and crayons. It pains me to admit it due to my animosity towards the old C Troop commander but the idea was a brilliant counterinsurgency strategy. The police gained confidence in their patrolling by having U.S. soldiers present with them and were also able to increase their ties with the community and gain "face time" with the town's children (who often make excellent sources according to many police officers). The kids gained understanding of the role of the police and learned that these men were not a bunch of scary brutes, but individuals to be trusted and who can help if a problem arises. The kids then go home and talk to their parents about what they learned. Plus who doesn't love coloring books?

The C Troop commander often talked about seeing many of the children on the streets during follow on patrols who upon recognizing the soldiers who brought them the police and coloring books would run up to them to show them their completed books. Those coloring books made better COIN weapons than our rifles.

New standard issue COIN weapon?

Building a global terrorism network

2010-12-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

My apologies for not posting anything for over a week now. One of my goals has been to post at least once a week but to be honest I just couldn't think of anything to discuss. I'll wrack my brain this weekend and go through my notes to see if there is something interesting from the deployment to write about.

In the meantime, here's a good article about Al Qaeda and that organization's attempt to expand by "acquiring" other groups whose ideals and tactics are similar to AQ's. An examples being the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat which became Al Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb. Al Qaida benefits from these affliates by gaining new members and another organization that can then attack Al Qaida's enemies. The affliate benefits by the addition of a new money source as well as the potential for trained personnel being sent to the group.

Al Qaida in Iraq expanded it's influence in Iraq in much the same manner. Organization leaders would approach small gangs and offer them money and weapons in exchange for attacking targets designated by AQI. As time passed the gangs would be given more and more instructions and after awhile the gang's leader would be replaced by someone chosen by AQI. A new AQI cell is born. In a few cases smaller organizations would even claim to be AQI in order to gain "street cred" or further intimidate the populace. I believe this was the case in As Sadiyah during my last deployment; a couple of gangs who had been cut off from AQI leadership and funding but who still claimed the moniker in an attempt to maintain control.

But back to the article: one sentence in particular jumped out at me...

The attacks emerging from Yemen have led some U.S. officials to believe Al
Qaeda's affiliates are more dangerous than the organization's core, isolated as
it is in the Pakistani hinterlands.

I do believe I mentioned something along those lines in a previous blog about AQ targeting cargo aircraft.

As for me and my future job...while I was under the impression that the Army was sending me to FT Huachuca to be an instructor the Army decided it had other plans for me. I am now the Training Division XO, a division of the Training, Development, and Support directorate of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence. When I figure out what the hell that means I'll let you know.

Iran, Iran so far away

2010-12-01T17:34:00.000-08:00

About two days ago somebody attacked two of Iran's leading nuclear scientists, killing one of them. The NY Times online has most of the details of the attack. This is all very interesting to me because it is clear that the attack was meant to disrupt Iran's nuclear program, or at least it's clear to me. The question is, who did it?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims the Zionist regime (Israel) and Western governments (U.S.) are to blame for the attacks. I highly doubt there was a team of special forces soldiers who went into Iran undetected and were able to conduct this attack, there are other options though...

Iran does have a number of terrorist organizations that operate in the country, but they are primarily ethnic minorities who are seen as separatists: Kurds, Azeris, Ahwazi Arabs, and Baluchis. Iran has claimed that the CIA funds and backs some of these organizations. While I despise the idea that my country would back terrorists, this is something I definately see the CIA doing, especially since there is a tremendous amount of evidence that Iran is conducting a proxy war in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan as well.

But these groups are ethnic minorities who are seeking either more autonomy or seperation from Iran, why would they conduct a bombing against scientists, especially when other targets would make more sense? Did the CIA persuade one of the groups to conduct the attacks in exchange for more money...or perhaps Mossad did...those pesky Israelis.

I will remind my readers of the recent computer virus attack against the Iranian nuclear facility. The idea was ingenius really which leads me to believe that the United States didn't conduct that cyber attack...I just don't think we're smart enough for an assymetrical attack like that. We're more of the big scary brute saying "ME SMASH!" and sending in some F-16s to blow the site up. We didn't and so therefore I believe we didn't deliver the virus either. Israel, however, is much more sneaky and has a lot more to fear if Iran goes nuclear.

I sleep better at night telling myself that America does not fund terrorist organizations, even if those terrorist organizations are attacking nations hostile to the U.S. Israel, however, can do whatever it damn well pleases and I really won't think twice about it. I'd prefer the blood to be on their hands.

Bah humbug

2010-11-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

The Holidays are a great time of year and a wonderful part of this country's culture where family and friends gather to enjoy each others company, enchange gifts, and eat as much food as possible. Between Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and occassionally Ramadan every so often; there are more than enough opportunities for people to gather and remind themselves what they are thankful for.

But what about those military folks in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere who can't be with family and friends? How do they celebrate and what are some of the customs they follow?

I've been very lucky when it comes to holidays and my deployments. In my three trips to Iraq I have only missed one Christmas with my family (technically it was two since in 2006 I spent Christmas in Kuwait going home on leave but I did make it home the day after Christmas). Thanksgiving I have not been so fortunate and have spent Thanksgivings 04, 06, and 09 while deployed.

2004 Thanksgiving was the most challenging for me as it was the first Thanksgiving that I spent away from home. The line into the dining facility was long...very long; something I would learn to adjust to for each holiday meal. I really didn't expect to enjoy the meal but the cooks had really gone all out, as one could imagine a holiday on Camp Victory with Corps headquarters being. As I sat in a large room that my battalion had reserved for us I looked around the room at the other officers I had spent the last six months with as well as the soldiers of the platoon I led. I realized that I was with my family. Not my real family of course, but an adopted family whom I now had a different kind of bond with. It gave me pause and I reflected at how far we had come. Future deployment Thanksgivings would become a time in which I was able to relax and evaluate how far I had come, both in terms of the deployment and as an intelligence professional.

Christmas came early for the 502nd MI BN as we left Iraq in mid December and departed Kuwait on December 23rd giving folks a chance to spend Christmas with their families. Thanksgiving 2006 was spent much the same way as 2004, standing in a long line but enjoying a great meal with good friends and comrades, the evening I reflected and prepared for 7 more months of Iraq (which would later turn into 10 more months). Christmas 2006 I left Iraq to go on leave and spent the day in Kuwait, which actually had bearable weather for a change. The food was once again good and I enjoyed the fact that the next day I would leave the middle east for a nice break.

Thanksgiving and Christmas 2009 were situations that I had yet to experience; holiday meals where the work stress was high, the tactical situation challenging, and all on a base where we regularly had our food rationed.

They would turn into two of the best holidays I have ever had. Thanksgiving started as a regular day until the XO, a gruff man to say the least, looked into the office and asked what we were doing:

"Uh, just maintaining situational awareness sir."
"It's Thanksgiving damnit, it's a limited work day, stop working."

He left and I gave a shrug to my soldiers and told them to go take the day off. I would spend the rest of the day reading and watching Melody Tunes. That night we had the best meal COP Cobra had ever seen, at least in my opinion. The local insurgents were kind enough to not be too active that day as well.

Christmas was much the same except this time I knew it was a limited work day so I was able to sleep in some (much needed), watch Top Gear, read, and get some end of tour awards completed (with 7 months to go!). The meal was as wonderful as Thanksgiving and the two holidays gave us all a much needed breather from the rigorous work schedule that I felt was wearing people down.

Do I enjoy spending holidays in Iraq and away from family and friends? No, of course not. But I will also admit that Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2009, spent on a far flung and tiny combat outpost far from anything resembling a Salsa night, was possibly the best holidays I've ever had.

Snakes (I mean bombs) on a plane

2010-11-22T20:33:00.000-08:00

I once again have access to an internet connection after my short little road trip down to Arizona. Not sure how long it will last so after this my next update may not be until the weekend when I can leech off my parents' connection.

So anyway, I'm going to fall back on a topic that's a couple of weeks old. I find the recent attempt to set off bombs on FEDEX and UPS planes rather interesting. It's actually a fairly good plan assuming the companies don't screen the packages for explosives, which I wonder why they wouldn't. Set the explosives off with the a cell phone and if it's timed right you have a plan destroyed mid-flight. Even if the plane is on the ground that's still a powerful image.

Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has claimed responsibility for the attacks and has also stated they plan on continuing attacks targeting the U.S. economy.

All this makes perfect sense to a terrorist organization. What I don't understand is why AQAP? AQAP fled Saudi Arabia to Yemen and has been under pressure from a combination of the Saudi and Yemenese security forces. If I were to guess, AQAP was ordered by Osama Bin Laden or some other high level Al Qaida leader to conduct these attacks in order to help recruit new members as well as take some pressure off Al Qaida prime (my own name, has a better ring to it than Al Qaida Was In Afghanistan But Is Now In Pakistan).

Al Qaida prime, while not exactly on the run in Pakistan, can't exactly expand and is forced to use affiliate organizations to attempt attacks. Al Qaida in the Islamic Mahgreb appears to be focused on gathering resources such as money and weapons and may not be currently capable of conducting attacks such as bombing airplanes...or may just have other priorities like expanding its influence in Africa.

Why hasn't any Al Qaida affiliate attempted an attack from Europe or central Asia? Was AQAP the only group who had the resources or ability to conduct these attacks? That doesn't seem to make sense since the attacks only really require some explosives, some cell phones, and American planes. Perhaps there are not any regular flights of American package transportation planes in central western Africa or central Asia.

This falls right along with the overall plan of Al Qaida: drag the west (U.S.) into guerrilla warfare that saps the willpower and morale of the military and population, disrupt the economy of the west, expand influence in Africa and Asia, remove the goverments of those countries Al Qaida has influence in, establish a caliphate, and then take down the West. Simple.

See you when I see you

2010-11-16T21:27:00.000-08:00

I'll be on the road for the next several days as I make my way to Arizona and once I arrive my connection to the internet will not be likely for a little while?

So, no posts are likely until around Thanksgiving. You're all heartbroken, I know...all 3 of you.

Things that make me want to kick puppies...or dig up GEN Westmoreland and kick him

2010-11-12T18:14:00.000-08:00

The long wait for an Iraqi government is over. An agreement was reached and the new government will form with Maliki once again nominated as Prime Minister...

...oh for fuck's sake. Iyad Allawi's coalition walked out of Parliament the next day when promises were not kept for the first day of session. The whole situation would be comical if the country wasn't falling apart while the politicians bickered.

Moving on. Over at Stryker Brigade News there's a short article about an article from the Christian Science Monitor about COL Harry Tunnell, the commander of 5-2 SBCT while they were in Afghanistan. A little while ago I had written a blog about this officer and how it's possible his attitude, command climate, and ideas about how to fight the insurgency in Afghanistan led to a platoon of soldiers murdering civilians.

The article contains a quote that when I read it a few days ago I started yelling at my computer screen. The quote is from a paper he wrote while recovering from being wounded in Iraq in 2003-04. Every time I read it I still twitch a little:

Military leaders must stay focused on the destruction of the enemy. It is
virtually impossible to convince any committed terrorist who hates America to
change his or her point of view – they must be attacked relentlessly.

Really COL Tunnell? The insurgents you faced in Mosul hated America? They were
actively attempting to reach the United States to defeat our way of life?

I will admit that in many places in Iraq...and definately Mosul...there were foreign jihadists who were there to specifically attack American soldiers and establish a fundamentalist caliphate in Iraq. However, the vast majority of "terrorists" were primarily fighting to remove the occupation forces and then defeat the "puppet government" that we had established. A very small percentage of those fighting U.S. forces saw the conflict as a continuation of the global fight against "American Imperialism".

The attitude of COL Tunnell, and unfortunately too many others in positions of power in the military, directly leads to a heavy hand that alienates the population, drives people into the waiting arms of the insurgency, and prevents the military and government from creating a cohesive strategy that focuses on the local issues that fuel the insurgency.

I don't even want to think about how people like COL Tunnell make the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan much more difficult for the rest of us. May I never had to serve under this man.

Ok, off the soapbox now