* * *
That fall, as bin Laden accepted, however reluctantly, Zarqawi’s strategy, I was thinking hard about our own. Unless we developed a more effective Coalition program, working with credible Iraqi security forces, we would have limited options. I had already concluded that a strict decapitation strategy was unlikely to work. Top Al Qaeda leaders were well hidden, and their capture or death was rarely decisive. Moreover, a string of effective operations could give us a false sense that we could slowly grind Zarqawi’s network out of existence.
I believed, however, that if we controlled the tempo, rather than merely eliminated personalities, we could halt Zarqawi’s momentum. Then, partnering with a more robust Coalition and Iraqi effort, we could ensure his defeat. Such a campaign design, however, confronted the reality that in irregular warfare, successful guerrillas won by controlling the speed of the war. They forced the incumbent to fight at their pace—slowing it when they were vulnerable by reducing their profile, quickening it when they sensed fatigue or weakness in their foe.
Our campaign would flip this and seek to deny the insurgents this inherent advantage: If we could apply relentless body blows against AQI—a network that preferred spasms of violence followed by periods of calm in which it could marshal resources—then we could stunt its growth and maturation. Under enough pressure, AQI’s members would be consumed with staying alive and thus have no ability to recruit, raise funds, or strategize.
Meanwhile, instead of trying solely to decapitate the top echelon of leaders, we would disembowel the organization by targeting its midlevel commanders. They ran AQI day to day and retained the institutional wisdom for operations. By hollowing out its midsection, we believed we could get the organization to collapse in on itself.
To pursue this strategy, our force needed to operate at a rate that would exhaust our enemy but that we could maintain. Key to this was a regular TF 714-wide regimen, what the Army terms a battle rhythm. Disciplined routines get a bum rap in today’s world, where we celebrate spontaneity and often look for the game-changing sprint to the end zone. But this war was a marathon, and distance running had taught me the importance of pace. Moreover, it was my message to the force that we could not be rattled: In times of both quiet and chaos, we would maintain a calm, disciplined, even rhythm.
This began on a personal level. I needed to have a regular, worthwhile presence as I commanded from the theater and moved locations every few days. When in Iraq, I retired at dawn, slept for several hours, then replied to the day’s first tranche of e-mails. During these quiet midmorning hours, I’d spend a few minutes in the Joint Operations Center, talking to the skeleton staff who planned for the evening’s actions or performed maintenance. Then, come noon, I ran for an hour parallel to the runways at Balad. During summer the pavement baked at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, but I tempered my pace and found every run a good diversion.
During my run or while lifting weights, I listened to audiobooks. I’ve always loved to read a wide variety of books, and I found audiobooks offered the best way for me to digest them. After loading them onto my iPod, I listened through headphones while working out, then used small speakers to continue listening while I dressed. Annie checked out every good audiobook she could find in local libraries and bought me countless others she thought would interest me. My tastes remained eclectic—from Freakonomics to Don Quixote, Moscow 1941 to Intelligence in War—and they made me think more broadly than the constant staccato of e-mail or daily briefs.
After my midday run, meetings began—the first of which became a hallmark of TF 714: Our operations and intelligence video teleconference or O&I. On the surface, the update—we aimed for ninety minutes, but it could run to two hours—looked like the kind of standard review of operations and intelligence that I’d attended in green canvas army tents and that other units held internally. But we created the O&I to tie together a geographically dispersed command, and it differed from other updates in three key respects: its regularity; the size, diversity, and dispersion of the forum; and (made possible by the first two) the richness of information discussed.