The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  I had a couple of black sea urchin needles taken out of my feet, was given some vinegar to reduce the pain, bandaged them up, put my boots back on, walked over to the two soldiers I had just helped pull out of the ocean, and asked if they were okay. They both thanked me and I then headed back down to my LLVI team’s position at the end of the airfield. I arrived there about 22/2300 hours; it had been a long day.

  OC showed up early the next morning and asked me to walk him through what had happened (he apparently tracked it on one of the division’s nets). Good to know our guys were keeping track of us!

  We continued to operate for the next few days until, as quickly as the division was deployed, and in a far more orderly fashion, we flew home.

  My entire time on the island lasted about a month. The operation itself was a mess, but demonstrated how badly our military needed to get better at joint operations.

  I learned a lot:

  • How little intelligence was paid attention to during this type of operation;

  • If you’re going to do this sort of operation, you either have to be overwhelming or stay home;

  • Joint operations are very messy. We even had our own command and control problems within the 82nd Airborne, one of our best;

  • Soldiers will rely on themselves and their leaders if they trust them. We were fortunate to have strong trust within our platoon.

  I also learned to try to be patient and understanding with my colleagues. It’s not so easy, but whenever I’m tempted to come down hard on someone who seems to have screwed up, I take a deep breath and think back to Lieutenant Colonel O’Connell in 1983. When I heard from OC about how my deployment was reported to him (that I had just jumped on the plane with no orders to do so), he could have relieved me on the spot. Blessedly, he looked again, and saw something he liked.

  Had it not been for his patience and vision and extraordinary leadership under some difficult pressure, I’d probably be renting surfboards at Second Beach in Middletown, Rhode Island. He is where I get the quote I use routinely when I counsel young people. “A leader is responsible for helping others see something in themselves and then helping them maximize their potential.” He did that in spades for me.

  That said, and lest you get the impression that he’s a softie, I received many a tongue-lashing from OC, and it was invariably as tough as anything I got at home. Maybe it’s something about Rhode Islanders—is there an independence and toughness in the people that come from that state?

  As most stories do, the Grenada story grew legs over time. Some said that I violated orders; I never did. That I jumped on an airplane to go to war; I did. That if it wasn’t for the rescue of the paratroopers, I might have been court-martialed; I doubt it.… Believe me, an ass-chewing from O’Connell was worse than any court-martial, and he gave me many. However, our platoon performed well on Grenada. We were there for only a few weeks, and the Cubans weren’t that effective at anything.

  Overall, the mythology of the Flynn Deployment to Grenada would live with me for my entire career, but when I look back it was what you would expect and want of a young platoon leader. Not only were the results successful, but the experience showed me that it’s vital to give your mid- and junior-level officers and Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) plenty of running room. They are the keys to winning modern war, as was later proven in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  There’s a broader point, having to do with ideologically driven regimes and movements, and it is crucial in understanding today’s war. We captured a lot of documents in Grenada. They were brought back to Washington and are now in the National Archives. They tell a fascinating and important story, with great attention to little details, especially about the indoctrination of the populace and the close working relationship with Moscow (they are closely related, of course). Like the Soviets, the Grenadian Communists were confident of their ultimate victory—the “laws of history” guaranteed it—and they wanted to be sure that their part in the story was properly told.

  Today’s Radical Islamists have the same conviction, and are similarly at pains to document their intentions and actions. As I told the German magazine Der Spiegel in late 2015, talking about the Islamic State, “They document everything. These guys are terrific about it. In their recruiting and in interviews, they ask ‘What’s your background? Are you good with media? With weapons?’ It’s this kind of well-structured capability they have that then evolves into a very, very unconventional force.”

  There are many similarities between these dangerous and vicious radicals and the totalitarian movements of the last century. No surprise that we are facing an alliance between Radical Islamists and regimes in Havana, Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing. Both believe that history, and/or Allah, blesses their efforts, and so both want to ensure that this glorious story is carefully told.

  Grenada turned out to be a turning point in the Cold War because the defeat of the Communist regime there was the first time that a country had entered the Soviet Empire and was then removed from it. According to the Brezhnev Doctrine, named after the former Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev, once a country had embraced Communism, the laws of history dictated it could not change its political system. Grenada showed the doctrine was false.

  After Grenada, I went on to serve in my first of three training assignments and my second tour at Fort Huachuca (the Army’s Intelligence Center). This assignment gave me my first glimpse into future warfare. I was assigned as one of the instructors to teach intelligence in low intensity conflict and multinational operations. The time frame was in the middle of the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan and we were watching their operations like hawks—learning all we could about how the Russians were being beaten by this very difficult but what appeared to be poorly organized foe in the mujahedin, an enemy we would face almost twenty years later. I then went on to an assignment in the Pacific—the 25th Infantry Division (Tropic Lightning). This opened up my eyes to the type of enemies we saw across a wide swath of the Asia-Pacific rim. There were many, and still are. These were formative and important tactical intelligence and training and education assignments.

  I was eventually promoted to major and sent back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina (where I served for over sixteen of my thirty-three-year career and at all grades, lieutenant to brigadier general). It was the summer of 1994, and things were building up again in the Caribbean on another island, this time Haiti, which we would address under Operation Uphold Democracy.

  I was the chief of war plans working for the G3, Director of Operations, of the 18th Airborne Corps, eventually working for an officer by the name of Colonel Dan K. McNeill, who went on to be a four-star general. I was lucky enough to work for him three more times in very critical and impactful assignments later in my career. If there was one officer who had the most impact on my success in the Army, it was General McNeill—bar none. He still stands as one of our most combat-capable senior leaders and one who was respected across the entire joint force—achieving four stars having never served in the Pentagon—an amazing example of leadership and high moral character.

  The commanding general of the corps at the time was Lieutenant General Hugh Shelton, who would go on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was a superb commander.

  We planned the final parts of the operation to seize Haiti’s airfield and subsequently fight the Haitian military (a third-rate group of thugs), as well as some Cubans who were also on the island. It was a real mess, but this was my first taste of Joint and Multinational and Unconventional Operations at the joint task force level.

  Haiti is a miserable place in many ways, but I had a great experience. I learned an enormous amount about how to view intelligence while deployed in combat, far more than I saw as a platoon leader in Grenada. I learned about integrating intelligence with operations, I learned about how a small insurgent force could hold off a much larger and more organized military simply due to knowing the indigenous and physical terrain, and I learned just how poorly th
e U.S. intelligence community was set up to support war fighting. We got very little from “national intelligence,” something that I would see years later in a place called Iraq.

  After returning from this Haiti deployment, I was called in for what I expected would be a routine meeting with Colonel McNeill. Surprise! He told me I was going to be assigned to Fort Polk down in Louisiana, a place known locally as “Snake Central,” because of the abundance of wildlife. At the time, this was very unusual. I hadn’t been back in Bragg more than six months and here I was being told I’m going to move. He told me to go see the G1 (head of personnel), who would explain everything. I thought I was being exiled.

  There had been an unexpected shake-up at Fort Polk. The senior intelligence trainer was being relieved of duty and I was going to replace him. Looking back, there were two unusual things about this: one, the position normally went to a lieutenant colonel and former battalion commander, someone with much more experience than I had (I was still a young major), and two, I was being reassigned with less than a year on station from one base inside the United States to another. Normally assignments of a year or less would be to places like Korea … but unusual things happen, so I went home to inform my wife we were being assigned to Fort Polk (she almost killed me).

  Again, one learns different things throughout one’s career. For me, this experience taught me about myself, my family, my abilities, and gave me a renewed sense of confidence in our Army and our institution. This is all hindsight; at the time, I thought my career was ending and we would live out our days at Snake Central.

  However, the assignment to Polk turned out to be game changing for me. I had the honor and privilege to observe, and work alongside, some of our very best military leaders (and, alas, some of our very worst). Among the best were men like then Colonels Stan McChrystal, Dave Petraeus, and J. R. Vines (retired three-star and commander of the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, in Afghanistan). You couldn’t work alongside such giants without developing a passionate commitment to do everything possible to give them everything they needed to win, and from my standpoint it was evident that on-the-ground intelligence and our overall intelligence system just weren’t giving them what they needed.

  We were overwhelmingly focused on big tank battles and still trying to get past the Soviet Union, seeking an enemy that would fight us on the plains of somewhere. Our Army found it hard to change and the intelligence system was no different. We were planning and training for big land battles as in World War II, even though we’d been badly beaten up in Vietnam by a well-organized network. There were many late-night discussions at Polk about how to fight against guerrilla forces, breaking the connectors that made them an effective network, and then destroying them piece by piece. This was the beginning of the development of a truly effective system to win such wars. It required much better technology, a greatly increased tempo of activity by our forces, more skilled and operationally savvy intelligence officers, interrogators, and fighters, and a new approach to battle: decentralizing decision making in order to put the talents of American soldiers to their maximum effectiveness.

  The bottom line was that intelligence would be vastly more important. And there I was!

  This new approach took formal shape under Stan McChrystal in Iraq over a decade later. It’s what enabled his Task Force 714 to do so well. But it didn’t happen quickly, and it really didn’t get going until we realized we were losing in Iraq. The pieces were plugged in one at a time. Among the things I brought to the intelligence system for the joint force, and to those commanders rotating through Fort Polk’s elite training center, was a rarely used approach that turned out to be crucial for the next two decades of war fighting. It was simply called “Pattern Analysis.”

  Pattern Analysis is a very detailed form of intelligence work that requires the complete breakdown of an enemy’s cell structure, much like a doctor would break down a disease to find a cure. As I look back on my two years of training twenty combat brigades at Fort Polk, this type of work would eventually pay off when we started fighting al Qaeda and its ilk.

  One thing more on this assignment to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk: I learned how ineffective our human intelligence and interrogation operations were. They were essentially nonexistent, poorly executed (if at all), and had to be scripted into the live training that we did. I resolved to fix it, but such intelligence wasn’t taken seriously until we got to Iraq—and made serious errors in judgment at a place called Abu Ghraib that still impact us today—and started losing.

  We had a long way to go, but no matter how brilliantly we organized ourselves, no matter how accurate our focus might be, the fundamental requirement for good intelligence was and is total commitment to the truth. I know this seems obvious; any sensible American realizes that bad information will automatically lead to bad decisions, bad strategy, and likely defeat. Yet some of our most famous intelligence officers, military or civilian alike, have found ways to rationalize the production of seriously misleading information for our policymakers. If you want to see how it works, maybe in greater detail than you have time for, have a look at that small masterpiece about intelligence during the Vietnam War, War of Numbers, written by a CIA analyst suitably named Sam Adams.

  Adams carefully studied our intelligence on the Vietcong, and found that if the numbers were correct, there were very few of them left, since the number of deaths and desertions greatly exceeded the level of recruitment. This was palpably false, and Adams relentlessly exposed the nonsense for the better part of ten years, all to no avail. CIA and the military had their numbers—numbers that showed we were winning the war—and would not change them.

  Adams was right, but the official numbers were endorsed over and over. How could this be?

  Part of the answer is that the intelligence community was not being honest about the gains that President Lyndon Johnson and the commanding generals (William Westmoreland was the most famous) were claiming to the public: Vietcong shrinking, America winning. So even when Adams and others presented more accurate data—showing the enemy was much stronger than we admitted—it was dismissed.

  Nowadays we call this “politicization of intelligence,” but its older name is “don’t deliver bad news to your leaders.” You don’t want to be that messenger. And so you just keep quiet. This is what appears to be going in our intelligence system today regarding our fight against Radical Islamists—and it all starts at the very top of our government. The president sets the tone and the priorities. This doesn’t surprise me. The policymakers in the administrations of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not want bad news either. This was particularly evident concerning Iran’s role in the war.

  As I look back, at least President Bush finally realized that we were losing the war against al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and he decided to change our strategy. Despite other strategic errors in judgment by his administration, this shift in strategy and significant changes of leaders allowed us to win in Iraq. But to no avail, because winning is only temporary if you don’t sustain your success. Everyone that has paid attention to the unraveling of the situation in the Middle East realizes today the tragic error in judgment when President Obama made the fateful decision to pull out our forces in Iraq in 2011. This decision led to the rise of the Islamic State and the significant and dangerous increase in Iran’s proxy war involvement across the region and its near-takeover of Iraq as a surrogate.

  Intelligence is a tough business. Most information I gave to my commanders over my many years as an intelligence officer was bad news. You develop a resiliency, and you also develop a knack for taking one for the team—but thankfully, I worked for superb leaders during most of my career, who respected my judgment and my advice.

  That said, I detest those who distort the truth in order to make their superiors happy. Neither I, nor my colleagues, played that game. In the end, we were able to devise a winning strategy against AQI because we were willing to face the truth even wh
en it was unpleasant. As I said early on, I was always comfortable being a square peg that could not fit comfortably in its assigned round hole. I remained a maverick to the very end.

  2

  War Fighting

  The Iraq War was the template for what followed in Afghanistan and Syria. Although we were in Afghanistan first and initially “won,” Iraq became the main effort—the priority. Once that happened, we lost sight of what we needed to do in Afghanistan. Despite the great commanders and soldiers we were sending into that theater, Iraq quickly came to consume everything. Practically all resources (at least the good stuff) were diverted to fight an enemy that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11. And our enemy was not a foreign army in the conventional sense of war fighting. This was a guerrilla war. The enemy was an extensive network of combatants out to kill us. We were up against a checkerboard of Iraqis, foreign fighters primarily from Arab countries enlisting local tribes, and Iranian killers and intelligence operatives providing the training, funding, and weapons to their friends in Iraq.

  We were unprepared for this revolutionary battle.

  Our commanders and soldiers needed to know, in granular detail, who we were up against. They needed a clear understanding of the mash-up enemies’ interaction. Were we fighting the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist state? Was this a national uprising against us, or an alien occupying force? Were there national leaders, or were there so many tribal, ethnic, religious, and regional divisions within the country that we needed very different tactics to establish order?

  In traditional warfare, armies determine the winner and loser of battlefield conflict. One side wins and the other side surrenders. There is a victor and a vanquished. Not so in a guerrilla war where, counterintuitively, the better you do—the more enemies you kill and capture—the worse things can get. Just look at the Soviets in Afghanistan. They killed countless Afghan and foreign jihadis. When it was over, there were more enemy fighters than before. Why? The jihadis say that if we kill one of them, ten new fighters rush to fill the void.