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Much of my and my command team’s time was spent solidifying the partnerships with the half dozen agencies involved in a single cycle of F3EA. I knew the creative solutions to eliminate blinks would originate from those closest to the fight—and closest to the hiccups.
So while most members of the force were self-starters by nature, I needed them to operate without waiting for detailed instructions or approvals. TF 714’s leaders and I tried to set a climate in which we prized entrepreneurship and free thinking, leaned hard on complacency, and did not punish ideas that failed. “As long as it is not immoral or illegal,” went my frequent refrain, “we’ll do it. Don’t wait for me. Do it.” On nearly every visit across the force, I asked, “What more do you need?” then fought tooth and claw to get team members any resources they legitimately needed. I wanted to leave them with the sense that nothing was impossible, that there were few valid excuses for not accomplishing the mission, and that even those processes not broken needed fixing. I was rarely disappointed and frequently awed by their solutions.
Although some decisions had to be approved by TF 714’s leadership, we pushed authority down until it made us uneasy. More than once I encountered equipment we’d purchased or tactics we’d adopted that made me worry I was negligent in oversight. But I thought of the alternative—corseted centralization—and that squelched my inclination to grab control. At the end of 2005, I listened to the audiobook of Adam Nicolson’s Seize the Fire; it did a lot to clarify why Nelson came to mind as TF 714 redefined itself. “He would create the market,” Nicolson wrote about Nelson, “but once it was created he would depend on their enterprise. His captains were to see themselves as entrepreneurs of battle.”
Rarely did any one thing transform our capacity, and few ideas could be traced back to one person. Rather, after weeks and months of incremental changes, what we had once considered swift was slow, rudimentary, or inefficient by comparison. In order to better triage and translate captured documents, for example, we first hired more Arabic linguists. But we only saw exponential improvement after the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) National Media Exploitation Center contributed a powerhouse of capability we could never have created ourselves. To pump terabytes of images and video to them, we augmented the thicket of antennae on our hangar roof with a grove of huge satellite dishes. We learned to feed their linguists intelligence about raided targets, so they had valuable context to help them parse the material. The operators, seeing greater value arise from captured documents, became more focused and effective at retrieving them—no more trash bags labeled with a sticky note.
As one part of our process improved, a new choke point would appear, and the innovation would continue. TF 714 instituted “exploitation VTCs” by installing cameras in the garagelike rooms where our exploitation teams worked in Balad, so that by video link specialists in D.C. or in other parts of Iraq could weigh in on the material only minutes after it was captured. We developed a “portal,” essentially a Bloomberg-like terminal that stored a library of intelligence on Al Qaeda. We also uploaded instructional videos—“How to Be a Liaison Officer” was one of the best—and posted important memoranda everyone needed to read. The number of people accessing the information soon bloomed to thousands.
The catalyst to turn so many of these concepts into reality was then-Colonel Mike Flynn, TF 714’s J2 or intelligence chief. After I sought his appointment, he joined our force in July 2004 and for the next three years would direct every aspect of the intelligence that is the lifeblood of counterterrorist and counterinsurgency operations. Mike was pure energy, and it infused his aquiline face and posture. With neatly parted dark hair, a sharp jaw and nose, and a lean athletic build, he looked spring-loaded. In conversation, his eyes locked your gaze and his passionate, raspy Rhode Island clip quickened when he hovered over a notepad. He had an uncanny ability to take a two-hour discussion or a thicket of diagrams on a whiteboard and then marshal his people, resources, and energy to make it happen. The green notebooks he kept—filled with elaborate notes and printouts of slides and images—were bulging compendiums of TF 714’s conceptual growth.