My Share of the Task

by General Stanley McChrystal

  Only part of this was due to our not-yet-robust technology infrastructure. Most of it owed to a lack of trust among the participants. In the world of intelligence, information was power, leading people at each stage to ask themselves a set of questions: Should we pass this intelligence, and if so, how much? If we share it, will we lose control over it? Will we get in trouble for sharing this information? Will those we pass it to use it in the way we agreed they would? These doubts cost us speed and often diluted the intelligence, making it less likely to lead to targets.

  An initial and soon fixed example involved the National Security Agency, one of our closest partners, which specialized in signals intelligence. By practice, the NSA provided us with condensed summaries and analyses of the signals it intercepted. TF 714 wanted to see raw intercepts right away, before receiving the NSA’s summaries a few days after the fact. Initially, the agency refused. The NSA was understandably concerned that we lacked the in-house expertise to avoid misinterpreting and misusing unfiltered information. But it also saw the analysis of signals intelligence as its proprietary domain and was reluctant to relinquish that unique role. Discussing this in terms of “blinks” helped us to identify and parse these choke points and to empathize with the viewpoints and incentives of our partners, like the NSA.

  We knew eliminating “blinks” would have a dramatic payoff but would require changes equally significant: They had to be physical, organizational, procedural, and—most important—cultural.

  Indeed, the greatest chance for improvement lay in how people felt about their involvement. Everyone needed to trust counterparts (especially those whom they’d never see in person) and believe in the network premise itself. To spark this, we in TF 714 leaned hard on our operators to use video teleconferencing to improve the frequency and quality of their interactions. We instructed our people to share more than they were comfortable with and to do so with anyone who wanted to be part of our network. We allowed other agencies to follow our operations (previously unheard of), and we widely distributed, without preconditions, intelligence we captured or analysis we’d conducted. The actual information shared was important, but more valuable was the trust built up through voluntarily sharing it with others.

  * * *

  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.

  Mike’s impact was distinct. He arrived as it became clearer than ever that our fight against Zarqawi was, at its heart, a battle for intelligence. And yet when he and I surveyed TF 714’s outstations and liaisons during the first few weeks of his tenure, we found ourselves largely focused on the fix and the finish—the tactical strikes—even though the exploit-analyze portion of the cycle would determine our success or failure. Some time would pass before the whole force—which saw itself as the best tactical and operational wing of the military—bought into this. Our physical expansion that summer sped the process: We weren’t building more shooting ranges at Balad. We were accruing facilities and resources devoted to collecting intelligence and to understanding the enemy. By the time he left, we had a brigade-size force of intelligence people throughout Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. This did not happen easily. We often had to scrounge for analysts and interrogators, and Mike built much of this force a pair or a handful at a time.

  * * *

  This market we sought to create yielded a product that came online that August and allowed us to curb the growth of Zarqawi’s metastasizing network.

  The product in question was, that August, being installed to a group of aircraft whose motley appearance belied their importance. On the cement runways north of our Iraqi hangar, past the sleek black helicopters of the Night Stalkers lined neatly nose to tail, lay our fleet dedicated to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR.* For months I’d been fighting to get more ISR aircraft, and we soon resorted to buying, borrowing, leasing, and modifying an odd array of substi
tutes to create what we dubbed the Confederate Air Force for the amusing diversity of aircraft types. After a visit to Israel in February, I’d wanted SOCOM to bypass the creaky acquisitions process and buy ready-made Israeli models. The air force had objected and promised to field remotely piloted Predators quickly. Frustrated when the air force didn’t follow through, my boss at SOCOM, Doug Brown, suggested that as a near-term fix we buy manned aircraft and retrofit them with the ISR packages.

  We purchased six commercial single-engine, turboprop planes. We gutted the insides of amenities, stripping them down to the metal frames to reduce needless weight—every ounce consumed fuel and shortened the time they could spend over targets—and filled them back up with the necessary communications and surveillance equipment.

  The piece of equipment added that August was the product of the two operators trying not to merely fight the war but to win it. The previous spring, they had come to my office at BIAP and briefed our command that a technology they’d encountered, if slightly tweaked, could prove game changing by allowing us to capitalize on our enemy’s own increasing use of technology—particularly communications devices. Indeed, Zarqawi and his group were the first insurgents in history whose rise and success was inextricable from the emergence of broadband Internet and cell towers. When Zarqawi first arrived in Iraq in 2002, there were hardly any cell phones in use (they were technically illegal under Saddam) but they had quickly spread after the American invasion. They relied on high-speed bandwidth to upload propaganda films to the Internet, as did the recruits and funders who watched these videos. In Iraq, they used cell phones to communicate internally and to terrorize Iraqis by sending gruesome clips of executions and torture phone to phone.

  The potential the two operators described was obvious, and I directed that we develop the capability. After a few short months coordinating with interagency partners and technology experts, our operators had the product in the field. It lacked the elegance of the all-knowing systems depicted in movies, but in the hands of talented operators, it could lead to Zarqawi’s leaders and key lieutenants, who relied on communications to remain networked. To my amazement, the operators invented software that revealed relationships among the owners of captured equipment, giving us a vivid understanding of the enemy’s organization. In short order, it was an accelerant to F3EA and had a distinct impact on those in Zarqawi’s network, forcing them to modify how they communicated and making it much harder to hide in the expanses of Anbar.

  These operators’ mentality and sense of ownership of the outcome in Iraq had also taken root on an organizational level. Shortly after my first visit to the Green compound during the fall of 2003, I had “given” Iraq to them. My guidance was simple: Green would be in charge of TF 16 until we won. They could rotate squadrons and alter deployment schedules, but no outside unit would replace them. We’re not here to fight; we’re here to win. This put whoever was the Green commander in operational control of all TF 16 forces in Iraq—at the time, primarily Green, Rangers, and Special Operations Aviation units. (At the same time, I put TF 328 in Afghanistan, under the rotating command of the Rangers and the SEALs.) Giving the Iraq fight to Green led them to tap their best talent in a way a higher headquarters could not: They brought top officers and NCOs, even when they were technically on their three months of rest, to Iraq to serve in odd but important jobs before returning a few months later to their normal positions within their squadron.

  Our command had come to accept our central role in the fight against Al Qaeda. The next round of that fight was heating up again in Fallujah. Ever since the United States had lost control of the city, Coalition leaders had known we would have to wrest it back. After a long summer, that operation was imminent.

  * * *

  On September 12, 2004, Lieutenant General John Sattler assumed command of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, and I felt like I had another close friend in a key role. John had been General Abizaid’s operations chief at CENTCOM the previous year, and I was fortunate that he was now overseeing Anbar at such a critical moment.

  Beginning with John’s arrival, each Friday I would helicopter down from Balad to Camp Fallujah, southeast of that city, to meet with him and his Marines for informal dinner meetings. I was normally accompanied by T.T., Mike Flynn, and the Green planners and commanders who operated in that area. After landing in a dry field inside their base walls, I met John outside the mess hall. With him was usually a mix of his chief of staff, his director of operations, the regimental commander responsible for Fallujah, and his battalion commanders.

  Inside the mess hall, our group snaked past flimsy white plastic chairs and folding tables covered in Marine Corps–red tablecloths where British and American service members ate dinner. These men and women, bent over their food in conversation on those nights, would in a few weeks take Fallujah block by block. I knew they and their comrades would bear the burden and costs. But I also sensed the cloth from which they were cut, and in their faces I saw the same fortitude and heroism of those who had gone before, at Okinawa, Inchon, and Khe Sanh.

  At the time, the relationship between the Marines and our TF 16 forces remained cool, which was understandable. The Marines had the difficult job of containing and eventually clearing Fallujah, and the value of our operations and air strikes—which had continued steadily since Big Ben—was not always clear to them. Much of the Marine leadership we dealt with that summer had not been convinced that Al Qaeda or Zarqawi was active in Anbar. But the offensive to recapture Fallujah was to be bigger, faster, and nastier than the April operation, and we needed to build relationships in the lead-up. John and I hoped our warm friendship would cascade down the ranks. He made this easy and was an ideal partner. Although a tough Naval Academy wrestler who would soon oversee the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war, John was deeply humble and quick with self-effacing humor. With his friendly, coarse voice, he set a warm atmosphere and had a knack for disarming any stink eyes.

  Designed to build trust, these dinner meetings were low-tech affairs without computers or slides. We talked about the previous week and coordinated upcoming operations. Members of TF 16 distributed targeting folders, which were becoming increasingly advanced. These could consistently show where targets were in the city as well as when and how they moved. As we discussed how to shape the battlefield prior to the inevitable ground assault, the tabletop became Fallujah’s neighborhoods—we turned saltshakers and napkin dispensers into buildings, while knives, laid end to end, became roads that needed to be blocked or taken.

  While our meetings were upbeat, they were not cavalier. TF 16 had accrued a reservoir of credibility from over two months of strikes—so far, a perfect record except for the one bomb diverted into an open field. John knew this. Before he arrived in Iraq, John’s previous post at CENTCOM had made him our point of contact when we sought approval for strikes. But like me, he also understood the stakes: A bungled strike with significant civilian casualties could cause us to lose the independent authority to conduct air strikes—which remained the sole means of interfering with insurgents in what was otherwise an internal safe haven.

  The growing rattle of insurgent bombs—like the one that exploded the afternoon before one Friday meeting with the Marines—was an urgent reminder that a sovereign Iraq could not allow Fallujah to be a staging area from which insurgents were able to prepare increasingly sophisticated and sinister attacks. On Thursday, September 30, a suicide car bomb exploded half a block down the road from a new sewage facility in Baghdad. The families who had just attended the facility’s opening ceremony wandered over to the cordoned-off area. As they often did, children crowded near the site to pick up debris and greet American soldiers. While they loitered, a second car, black, sped down the street. Thirty-five of the curious children were killed when the driver detonated his payload. Ten Americans and more than 140 Iraqis were wounded. In addition to Shia civilians and Americans, reconstruction projects and the contrac
tors building them were targets of Zarqawi’s suicide bombings.

  Between our Friday-evening dinners throughout September and October, TF 16 commanders went to Camp Fallujah to coordinate their targeting with the Marines, who lent key support—providing cordons, putting doctors and triage hospitals on standby, and offering spare barracks for our operators. This level of coordination and cooperation eventually became routine, but in the fall of that year it was not.

  Even as our task force attacked the insurgent nodes in Fallujah, John Sattler wisely enlisted Prime Minister Allawi to exhaust all opportunities to negotiate with the insurgency to turn over the city without an assault. But the negotiations broke down, the insurgents ignored Allawi’s ultimatums, and the Coalition scheduled the invasion for the first week of November.

  With the date set, the task force went into high gear at the end of October. TF 16’s full focus turned to Fallujah, and we transitioned from hitting targets every couple of nights to striking multiple targets throughout the day. We targeted leaders, trainers, and mortarmen in order to eliminate their skilled labor. We knocked out key command-and-control centers and barriers the insurgents set up to channel American vehicles and foot patrols into ambushes and traps. At the same time, then–Major General Rich Natonski, commanding the 1st Marine Division, ran feints at the south of the city, while the Marines planned to bring the real attack from the north. As the British had done there in 1941, the Marines dropped leaflets urging civilians to leave Fallujah. Most did, while the jihadists entrenched and fortified the terrain.

  John later recounted one of the strikes on these insurgent traps that reflected why our continued efforts at partnership were so important. One night just before the offensive, a group of Marine leaders, including John and the ground division commander, gathered in their combat operations center, where they watched videotape from one of the targets hit that day. After the air strike destroyed the initial target, smaller explosions cascaded down each of the roads leading away from it: pop, pop, pop, like chains of fireworks or lines of electrical charges. These were daisy-chain IEDs the insurgents had buried under the road, stringing together bombs for meters on end that would explode together. As the charges continued exploding on the soundless video, the room was silent. The hushed commanders watched, imagining what would have happened had a file of Marines attacked that position with the IEDs still unexploded, waiting in the packed dirt beneath their feet.