My Share of the Task(81)
“The Fallujah Brigade is completely ineffective,” Jim Mattis said at the meeting. “They’re broken, probably beyond repair.”
The meeting felt surreal, as we held it in a room inside Camp Fallujah, a base bristling with American military power. Just a short distance away sat an entire city, increasingly opaque and inaccessible and under the sway of insurgents. The agreements that established the Fallujah Brigade and the political sensitivities in the background prevented the Marines from setting foot inside the city. Abizaid made it clear we could not allow the situation stand.
“We need to hit some targets,” he said, hitting the table with the edge of his hand. He was looking to us.
To hit with precision within Fallujah, a city we had no ability to enter that summer, would draw on TF 714’s existing capabilities, and some not yet developed. Two incidents in particular reflected the changes. First, the actions of Briggs, Hollenbaugh, and Boivin alongside Marines reflected our growing relationship with conventional forces. Second, our employment of every piece of technology, combined with painstaking analysis, meant we could develop and strike targets with increasing speed and precision. By the fall of that year, when the Marines had forcefully recaptured Fallujah, TF 714 was a different force.
The process began slowly and out of necessity. By early summer, our intelligence on Fallujah had been reduced to a trickle. The violent reprisals of the insurgents snuffed the few sources who lived there and made recruiting new ones almost impossible. But in the near term, we were at a loss for credible on-the-ground insights into how the city’s power vacuum was filling, and the enemy amassing there.
Of most value was our increasingly sophisticated employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with the Predator being the most common version. These remotely piloted aircraft, equipped with video cameras on their underbellies to transmit live feeds back to the monitors in our Joint Operations Center (JOC), allowed us to watch locations or vehicles for extended periods. We had used UAVs before, but with uneven results. When I took command in 2003, for all of Iraq we normally had access to just one Predator, which we augmented with a helicopter we had outfitted with a camera on its fuselage.
The control of the few UAVs that did exist that June was still an awkward process. The Air Force viewed UAVs as a strategic collection platform and was inclined to centrally manage them, which it could do given the limited number of systems. The technology allowed for Predators to be physically based, launched, and recovered in theater but piloted from distant bases, even from the United States. Downlinked video could be viewed and analyzed anywhere the correct equipment existed.
Unlike surveillance of larger or more static targets, TF 714 missions normally required constant surveillance of people or moving vehicles, often looking to identify subtle movements or specific mannerisms. TF 714 teams would direct the Predator to look at a building or follow a car—usually a white sedan in a country where white sedans were ubiquitous.
It was a fascinating situation in which new, emerging technologies made dispersed operations possible, but our processes had not yet figured out how to effectively leverage them. We quickly recognized the need to fully integrate every available intelligence source, both operationally and psychologically, into our force and spent the next few years perfecting approaches that would do that. Ultimately, we used a combination of liaisons, constant communication, and eventually the formation of SOF Predator units, to create the close partnership needed.
As wartime often does, the challenge had moved two of Green’s key leaders in the country to act. Lieutenant Colonel Steve was the commander of the Green squadron in Iraq, based in Baghdad.* Also in Baghdad, then-Major Wayne Barefoot was acting as the intelligence chief for the Iraq country task force, TF 16. Steve had come to Green directly from the conventional Army—not through the Rangers or Green Berets. He retained more of a regular-army style in his appearance and command than some of his peers but he earned respect in Green through consistent performance and later commanded the unit. Wayne came to the command from tracking Islamic extremist groups in the Philippines. He was one of a very small group of analysts who, in January, had told me with confidence not only that Zarqawi was in Iraq, but that they saw signs of an incipient, violent jihadist network taking root there. At the time, many of their peers disputed that analysis.