The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  That said, this was collaborative, transparent intelligence sharing in a more rapid fashion than warfare had ever seen. General Stan McChrystal was the principal driver of this revolutionary intelligence system, and thus turned Task Force 714 into an unprecedented instrument of modern intelligence warfare. He allowed me and my intelligence team complete autonomy when it came to crafting innovative techniques and procedures to rapidly transfer knowledge on one of the most complex and dangerous battlefields we had experienced in decades.

  Our objective was to ensure that when one of our special operations teams captured someone, they received immediate feedback. When I arrived, guys we captured were just being dropped off, large bags of captured “stuff” were being thrown into a closet, never to be exploited for intelligence, and we were simply too slow. That was it! This would never allow us to understand all the dimensions of this field of fight we were on.

  I wanted to amass information against the enemy we were capturing on the battlefield. The only way to defeat them was to get to know them better than they knew themselves, and we did. As we spoke to multiple detainees (many senior members of AQI and even those al Qaeda captured in Afghanistan or in friendly Arab countries like Jordan), we began to clarify the one-million-piece puzzle of this very effective enemy we were facing.

  In Iraq, we got them to talk about each other. We would then go back and verify things on the battlefield. We would use unmanned surveillance to check on things we were learning in the interrogation booth, and we would direct human sources to go check out what we learned from these guys.

  All of that led us to get smarter and then move faster than they could cope with. This was fusion of intelligence in the interrogation process with advanced communications technology and effective operations on the battlefield. In the end, we operationalized intelligence to increase knowledge for our tactical to strategic decision makers. This type of intelligence warfare was and remains a critical component of how to destroy Radical Islamism today and those enemies we will face in the future.

  As you can see, interrogations were enormously important, and as the new system evolved, we increased the number and quality of our interrogators. All our hard work led to a new kind of intelligence system that constantly meshed with our actions. Intelligence had to drive operations, if possible within a single day, because the terrorists were very fast. For us to dominate the battlefield, our fighting teams must have the most significant and up-to-date intelligence so they can pinpoint their next logical attack. For that to happen, we couldn’t do intelligence the old way; there simply wasn’t time for the information to move through the various bureaucratic levels, nor could our fighters wait for guidance. We had to do something quite different: the intelligence people had to be linked together with our operators, and they had to get the results of their fighting almost immediately.

  There was still more to do. We needed to get rid of the bureaucratic bottlenecks, within our task force and more broadly within the various military services, and perhaps most difficult, between the three-letter intelligence agencies that were working, analyzing, and fighting, but doing so in their own stovepiped systems: National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and so forth. This meant undoing the traditional chain of command, because our men in the field had to be able to act on the intelligence they were getting. The terrorists were fast, and we had to be faster.

  Two examples bring this need for speed to light. The first is the use of a national jewel called the National Media Exploitation Center (NMEC) located in Washington, D.C. This organization was doing some amazing work. They were taking captured material and turning it around to us as fast as they could (in days and weeks at that time—and this was fast—but it had to be faster). Between myself, and then-director of NMEC Roy Apselof, we figured out a way to build an “electronic bridge” directly between NMEC in Washington and our task force HQ in Balad, Iraq. Once we got this “bridge” in place, we exponentially sped up our exploitation process and turned information around, now in minutes and hours instead of days and weeks. This adaptation broke through so many layers of bureaucracy, was done without orders and long bureaucratic processes or permission, and helped us accomplish our mission. It was accomplished only through personal relationships; sadly, the entire war had to be fought like this. Left to its own traditional devices, the bureaucracy, at all levels and, maddeningly, at every opportunity, would crush adaptation and ingenuity.

  The second example was more tactical but just as effective. In the early days during interrogations we would bring paper maps into the interrogation booth. The maps would be used with the detainees to get them to point out locations of certain places we were interested in finding out about. One day, we were sitting around talking about the use of Google Maps by some of our operators and tactical units because the larger imagery system wasn’t working fast enough to respond to our requirements. Google Maps was a relatively new technology and a software that was available on the open market. One of our great interrogators asked, “Why can’t we use this technology during interrogations?” Instead of asking why, we turned the question into “Why not?” So we did. And at first, we did Google 101: we literally taught detainees how to use a mouse with a laptop. Then we went Hollywood and put up large, flat-panel screens in the interrogation booths. Overnight, we got exponentially more fidelity of the locations we were interested in and much more accuracy for our targeting. Better still, the detainees actually liked using it. It seemed fun to them, it reinforced their fears and suspicions that the Americans knew everything and could see everything, and it made the interrogations faster. The resulting information could be electronically tracked from the interrogation booth, right out to the analytic floor, and in a digital flash right down to the operators on the battlefield.

  It was an amazing application of technology, and shows you that real innovation can be conjured up by smart, highly motivated American soldiers on a battlefield. We were trying to save our operators’ lives, destroy our enemies, and win the damn war. To do this, our network had to be faster, more agile, and more relentless than the enemy network we were facing. We were, and that is why we eventually won.

  In sum, Task Force 714 was drastically transformed. To be an effective action arm, the operational units had to be coordinated with a robust intelligence capability comprising several of the three-letter agencies of the intelligence community. Actionable intelligence had to lead the way in the fight against AQI—that was then and remains the case now.

  Interestingly, pushing our decision making down into the midlevel officer and NCO ranks mirrored our overall strategy of moving out of our secure bases and immersing ourselves in the society. While we never stopped our hunt for the terrorists’ top leaders—Zarqawi headed the Most Wanted List until we finally killed him—we worked harder and harder to dismantle the terror network. This meant that our midlevel leaders tracked down their action officers at the core of the AQI network. Once we learned how to do it, it was really no contest. Good as the terrorists were, our guys were better trained, better equipped, and were part of a better, faster, and more devastating network.

  Sometimes we got super-lucky and captured men who came over to our side. Or pretended to. I generally preferred to capture the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, hoping to recruit some of them to our side. My youthful sortie into violent misbehavior had taught me that some criminals can be brought over from the dark side, but many of the terrorists that we did capture wouldn’t convert. Members of the Islamic State, the bad guys in the Taliban, and al Qaeda in Iraq, the vicious killers who reported to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, often proved unreformable. To make our task even more difficult, lots of them were gifted fakers, and jumped back and forth from our side to the terrorists. They fooled a lot of us, me included.

  There are many examples of terrorists who pretended to cooperate, while they were actually betraying us. One, we’ll call George, due to Department of Defense cen
sorship, was one of the earliest examples. He was in Zarqawi’s inner circle and in early fall 2004 we discovered he was one of the runners for AQI. This meant he had direct access to Zarqawi and his henchmen, all of whom were prime targets for us. If we could grab him, and convince him to work with us, the payoff might be enormous. So we mounted a major operation to accomplish this, and after several failures we captured him one night in a bar.

  By that time, our interrogators had gotten much better, and I had developed considerable confidence in their findings and recommendations. I was delighted to hear from them, and after a few interrogations I was informed that George was coming around. I was asked by our HUMINT team (human spies, as opposed to SIGINT, or intercepted communications), for permission to put him back out on the battlefield as an intelligence source. The team felt strongly that he would work for us.

  We took the risk. Later on, we would have gone much slower, but at that point we had very little good HUMINT targeting Zarqawi’s inner circle and practically no overhead ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) or even good SIGINT.

  It started well. George provided us with some good intel for a few weeks, stretching into approximately three months. It was basic information, precisely what we needed to target the al Qaeda network: safe houses, IED locations, names and identities of other AQI operatives. Then suddenly we received word from another detainee that George had been involved in a meeting with Zarqawi himself and he had not reported this to us. Nothing more devastating could be imagined, and it checked out. Worse yet, he somehow realized that we were on to him, because when we reached back out, he did not show up. We did that multiple times over about a week. He’d fooled us.

  Once we established he was back on the side of Zarqawi, we knew we had to hunt him down to either capture or kill him. He was inside our detention system, so he knew how we were working to turn detainees and we could not afford to have him out there talking too much. If the terrorists knew our methods, they could outwit us just as George had.

  We made it a priority to find him, partly to try to convince him to come back—an unlikely long shot to be sure—but mostly because it was terribly dangerous to have such a man on the loose. He knew too many things about our methods, after all, and we didn’t want him educating Zarqawi’s men. They were tough enough without giving them an additional helping hand.

  We found him one night in Fallujah in early winter 2005. He and a couple of others were hiding in a house in the city. It was too dangerous for our operators to go in after them. The intelligence was excellent that evening. We were certain he was in the house, and we decided to destroy the building and kill all inside. We did.

  We had no regrets about killing George and his cronies. Having him off the street was a good thing and it sent a message to our enemies that we would hunt down anyone that turned his back on us.

  Our whole team had every reason to be proud of our accomplishments in Iraq, but some credit has to be given to the terrorists. They had the upper hand on several occasions and in several different areas, which according to the rules of guerrilla war should have produced victory. It didn’t, for several good reasons:

  • They unleashed unprecedented violence on the local populations (keep in mind that Saddam was plenty violent but the terrorists were even more so);

  • They proved unable to cope with our strategy, and starting in places like Anbar Province in Iraq in 2007 and Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2010, the local tribal leaders and their people could clearly see that;

  • They were exposed as liars regarding us. When we invaded Iraq in 2003, al Qaeda and their supporters told the Iraqi people that we had come as the latest wave of foreign imperialists, and that we intended to add them to the masses of people around the world subject to the American imperium. We weren’t doing so, of course, we just wanted to win and go home. As they got to know us better, the Iraqis recognized they had been deceived.

  General McChrystal tells an important story in his memoir. It’s about a conversation between one of the very finest British special operators, Lieutenant General Sir Graeme Lamb, and his favorite detainee, Abu Wail, the religious emir of Ansar al-Sunnah (aligned with AQI, mostly made up of Iraqis too), which was a significant element in the uprising against us. There were very bad vibes between the two; as McChrystal says, “given half a chance, the emir would saw Graeme’s Scottish head off.” But they talked every couple of weeks, and Wail was treated with respect: he was taken out of his orange prisoner garb, dressed in traditional clothes, his handcuffs and chains were removed, and there was a full teapot. The epiphany came very quietly:

  “You know,” he said matter-of-factly, “you’re a force of occupation, and don’t try to tell me differently. That’s how we see it—and you are not welcome.” He explained to Graeme … that guidance from the Koran was that he must resist the force of occupation for years—for generations even—if it threatened the faith and his way of life. He paused … “We’ve watched you for 3½ years. We’ve discussed this in Syria, in Saudi, in Jordan, and in Iraq. And we have come to the conclusion that you do not threaten our way of life. Al Qaeda does.” (Gen. Stanley McChrystal, My Share of the Task, p. 248)

  Similar turning points were reached all over the battlefield. There was a fairly reliable template: Anbar started turning around in September 2007 (the start of the Awakening plus additional Marines and Army troops and expanded operations) but the violence didn’t subside until the following spring. The Awakening then expanded, but it wasn’t easy to see. Indeed, the overall level of violence didn’t noticeably decline until the fall of 2008 as Baghdad, Diyala, Salahaddin, and other cities were subjected to large-scale Multi-National Force-Iraq Coalition operations and supported by tribal forces.

  The Iraqi Awakening—and similar successes in Afghanistan—might have gone even faster, and proven more durable, if we had more aggressively challenged the doctrines of al Qaeda and the Taliban. There were numerous Iraqi imams who rejected the revolutionary doctrines of the insurgents. Chief among them was the most important Shi’ite religious figure, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Sistani exemplified the “moderate” Muslim. From the earliest days following the invasion, he ceaselessly counseled cooperation between Shi’ites and Sunnis, even calling for calm and understanding after the bloodiest sectarian attacks. His was the strongest and most revered voice in the Iraqi Shi’ite community, and we should have echoed it. In like manner, we should have denounced the Islamists’ embrace of suicide terrorism and their constant efforts to provoke a sectarian civil war.

  This did not happen in either Iraq or Afghanistan, nor is it happening today anywhere in the Middle East. It should. There are plenty of Islamic religious leaders who, like Sistani, detest the radical jihadis. Yet senior American policymakers, ever since 9/11, have shied away from any criticism of Islam, repeating, despite all manner of evidence to the contrary, that “Islam is a religion of peace.” This insistence on denying the existence of jihad led President Obama to the absurd claim that the Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.

  We’re not going to win this war by denying what’s in front of our collective nose. It’s long past time for us to denounce the many evils of Radical Islam. The people in the region know it well, as anybody could see by looking at the millions of Iraqis and Afghans who risked their lives to vote in their respective elections despite the jihadis’ promise to kill them.

  Despite our failure to attack our enemies’ ideology, we still defeated them every time we went after them on the battlefield. Their successes invariably came hard on the heels of our decisions to withdraw, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. It’s difficult to find anyone who thinks that the Surge in Afghanistan achieved anything remotely approaching that in Iraq, but I disagree.

  It wasn’t easy, and Afghanistan was tougher than Iraq.

  When we arrived in Afghanistan in June 2009 we found an HQ in complete disarray, while the enemy was on the march. The threats were increasing and expanding a
round the country and we felt the International HQ was under siege. Few of the international officers had even left the HQ to travel outside the compound. And the military systems and processes you would expect to find in order to understand what was going on around the battlefield, especially after eight years, weren’t in place. Frankly, it was disappointing, and after so many years, we suddenly found ourselves starting from scratch—again.

  Upon assuming command, General McChrystal immediately started to tighten everything up. He instilled a sense of discipline into the staff and into the leadership around the country as quickly as he could. Many of the first steps he took were neither welcomed by the international team nor by some on the American side. One of the seemingly minor things was shutting down the alcohol-serving bar inside of the ISAF compound. Here we were in a Muslim country in the middle of a war and the International HQ was holding drinking parties practically every night. Officers, enlisted, civilians, you name it, were carrying on and making all sorts of noise. You could hear all of this in the relatively quiet city of Kabul and everyone knew. The Afghans didn’t like it at all. We weren’t seen as serious, about them or ourselves. This type of behavior certainly didn’t carry that message. The same lack of serious commitment existed all over the battlefield at every major HQ as well as at some of the camps down to at least brigade level. There was too much of an attitude that we’re here to simply participate, get a combat patch, and return home. Instead of merely participating in this war, we needed to instill an attitude that we needed to win.

  This had to stop. We had to get the U.S. forces and the international team back on track and fast. At least that is what we thought we needed.