The Field of Fight

by Lieutenant General (Ret. ) Michael T. Flynn

  As unconventional as the Iraq War was, we mastered it. Afghanistan was a different story. We knew that the Soviets had killed a lot of Afghans, but by the time of their retreat they had created a larger insurgency. It obviously wouldn’t do to simply kill our enemies, even their top leaders. The French had learned this in Algeria and we had some prior experience that confirmed the lesson in the Philippines and Vietnam.

  The basic principle of guerrilla warfare is that the people on the ground determine the outcome of the conflict. And when I say “the people on the ground,” I’m not talking about the terrorists. I’m talking about the resident population. These are the people who will eventually choose the winner and the loser. Their decision is dependent on us getting the information we need from them for our war fighters to use, and gaining their support. And their choice depends on several other factors that determine which way they go.

  First and foremost, the population does not want to get dragged into the fighting at all. They will stay out as long as they can, until they decide which side is destined to win. Only then are their battle lines drawn.

  Notice two things: their decision is not primarily a political, let alone a moral, preference; and the decision is a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s because they choose their side once they decide who the winners-to-be are. Once they throw their support in that direction, that side gains an unbeatable advantage because “support” means the winners-to-be have the critical intelligence and the indispensable manpower they need to win.

  Not that there is no political element involved in this crucial decision; it’s there, but the brutal realities of the war overwhelm their political preferences. Many Iraqis, especially the Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar Province, joined us because they were disgusted by the savagery of al Qaeda. Ironically, they may not have preferred, or even liked, the side they supported. But once convinced it’s the winning side, information flows and support follows. Machiavelli was right when he analyzed this type of strange environment: “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

  Furthermore, the context for picking sides is local, not national or even chosen by regional governments. The decision is made by tribes, clans, and networks. Indeed, the people in one location often made decisions directly contrary to their nearby neighbors just down the road. In practice, it could mean supporting Sunnis in one place and Shi’ites in another.

  We weren’t accustomed to thinking in such a way or acting accordingly. We had to change our strategic war-fighting approach. Above all, we had to mesh with the locals. In practice, this meant that the primary focus of the war had to fundamentally shift from ground fighting to intelligence operations. This doesn’t mean killing ended, it simply required a completely different and far more precise attitude to warfare.

  The Cold War was a bad model for winning the war in the Middle East. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union was tough to penetrate, and recruiting good informers was difficult and dangerous. But in Iraq and to a lesser degree Afghanistan, we were deployed all over the place, and could talk to most anyone. Eventually, we infiltrated the enemy’s networks. Sometimes this turned out to be extraordinary intelligence—bulletproof intelligence, in fact. We ran informants, we ran deception operations, we ran counter-information operations, and we also ran extremely effective interrogation operations. All of these operations required very simple but very smart technology. However, and more important, they required physical and intellectual courage, superb intelligence analysis, and some really savvy, cunning special operators who understood the enemy and the human geography we were facing at that time.

  The breakthrough came in Anbar Province in Iraq, which provided the model for the Surge of U.S. forces, and later shaped our strategy in Afghanistan. In war, things change all the time, and dramatic changes are often overlooked. This is what happened in Iraq in 2006. In the summer of 2006, the Marines prepared a report on the situation in Anbar, which borders on Syria, from which large numbers of foreign terrorists entered Iraq. The Marines’ report was written at a time when Anbar was the bloodiest province in the country and Ramadi was the most violent city. In one report I will never forget, there were over 1,500 AQI terrorist-related murders in the month of July alone.

  Looking back, in late spring of 2006, it was hard to see how this situation could be reversed, especially since requests for additional Marines were denied by the Department of Defense. According to a detailed “lessons learned” analysis by the Marine Corps, top American leaders, including CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid and Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNFI) commander General George Casey, had come to believe that the presence of American armed forces was the cause of the uprising. Believing this, the generals ordered the troops to lay off the cities and hunker down in their forward operating bases in preparation to moving out. Generals Abizaid and Casey had essentially thrown their arms up in the air, and the intelligence report on Anbar reflected their position. When selected parts of the report were leaked to The Washington Post, the generals described the province as “lost.”

  The reality was that despite having the most sophisticated military machine in the history of warfare, we were losing the war in the summer of 2006. We knew it—but some simply could not admit it. The senior leadership began to sense it and I could feel it during many of the briefings I attended, including a major gathering in late summer of 2006 at MNFI HQ. There were so many necessary decisions made that late summer and early fall to change the course of the war that history has already documented and don’t need to be recounted here. But to me, the most important decision came from the White House under President Bush. He realized the war was going badly, that we were losing, and our entire strategy needed to change. The mere fact that he recognized this and proceeded to make the difficult decisions he eventually made is a leadership characteristic our current president lacks.

  President Bush not only changed the strategy, but he changed the commander in Iraq, brought in General David Petraeus and, even more important, he brought in Dr. Robert Gates to be the secretary of defense. These two men changed the direction of the war and the situation was reversed within the next two years.

  Some in the media marveled at this amazing turnabout. Associated Press reporter Michael Fumento wrote:

  How can it be that last year AQI fled the province and now we’ve handed military control of pacified al Anbar to Iraqi forces, in what the AP properly described as “a stunning reversal of fortune”? Further, how could this have occurred just two years after the Marines, who were in charge of Anbar military operations, admitted in a classified report that “there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation” and we were “no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency” or “counter al Qaeda’s rising popularity.” (http://fumento.com/military/anbar.html)

  It certainly looks like an intelligence failure. Here is how the Marines saw it in retrospect from an account by Major Alfred R. Connable.

  By the middle of ’06, Ramadi essentially looked like Stalingrad. We were dropping shells in the middle of the city.… It was a disaster at that point. I argue that mid-2006, the population had recovered from the blow of the destruction of the first Awakening, and they had reached the culminating point with al-Qaeda. They had reached the point with al-Qaeda where they had had enough. So now you had, at a very broad level, the people—not everybody, but the people, a majority of the people in Anbar—were ready for a change. A lot of them were ready to come in our direction, and you saw a change in rhetoric, and I got this because I was reading all the traffic every day and engaging with people. Guys that in 2004 were saying, “Get out, get out of the cities. We’ll take control of everything,” were saying, “You need to secure the cities for us, and then leave.” You saw pockets of resistance against al-Qaeda. (www.marines.mil/Portals/59/Publications/Al-Anbar%20Awakening%20Vol%20I_American%20Perspectives%20%20PCN%2010600001100_1.pdf, p 133ff)

  Fair enough, but if “a majority of the
people in Anbar were ready for a change,” we should have seen it, and acted accordingly. Instead, we produced an evaluation of the situation in Anbar that was misleading.

  Some people will tell you that the Marines’ information was out of date. That if they had written the report a few months later, it would have been closer to the reality on the ground. I don’t believe that. They did intelligence correctly. U.S. intel officers and our operators were out in the field, talking to people, getting a sense of what was going on. The failure was political. We had plenty of information, but we didn’t get the picture totally right. It wasn’t an analytic failure; in my opinion, it was driven—as so many intelligence failures are—by a policy failure from the top ranks. Our senior officers had wrongly concluded that we were the cause of the uprising in Iraq. Therefore, when the Marines asked for more troops, our senior leaders—notably General Casey, the CENTCOM brass, the Joint Staff, and many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s advisors—weren’t inclined to approve the request. The only people who insisted that additional Marines could make a big difference were the Marines themselves. They knew.

  A similar failure is happening today with ISIS and al Qaeda. There’s plenty of information, but it conflicts with the “narrative” of our policymakers. When politicians are wedded to an unreal story line for their own convenience and purpose, the intelligence gets suppressed or bottled up. One disastrous outcome of this willful decision making is the 2015 intel scandal at the United States Central Command in Tampa. This scandal, in which senior military and political officials were accused of ignoring, suppressing, or rewriting intelligence analyses about Afghanistan, is an alarming indicator of policy overreach into a system that must provide truth to power. There can be no winks, no nods, there must be brutal truth telling. Those intelligence personnel who give in to their own personal weaknesses and who are overly cautious because they fear an ass-chewing or worse, are being beyond irresponsible. In combat, their weakness results in loss of life and national defeat.

  Once these changes in Iraq occurred, we did better in Anbar and then throughout Iraq. We had a base at al-Qaim on the Syrian border, where the Marine Corps was trying to block the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq—who were there to kill us—and the flow of Iraqi oil into Syria that was enriching the tyrannical regime of Bashar al-Assad. We were not permitted to cross the border into Syria, even in “hot pursuit” of terrorists, and we eventually figured out that it was necessary to work with local tribes. The tribesmen did not have the same restrictions we did. They lived and operated on both sides of the border. In time, the locals learned that it was better to work with U.S. Marines than with Syrian intelligence. We paid more than the Syrians, so business was a lot better with us. We were not Islamists and therefore did not impose a rigid political or ideological doctrine on tribal areas. In addition, the Marines were vastly better fighters, and it soon became apparent to the locals that we were not going to be defeated.

  One early indicator that we could turn this situation around came on the night of November 2, 2006. Our task force conducted a raid to capture a senior al Qaeda leader in Iraq. He was known to us as the Commander of the North. This meant he was in charge of Iraq’s northern sector, including large parts of the Anbar region, everything north of Baghdad, all the way up to the major city of Mosul. He was a big ticket. Due to some exceptional human intelligence and exquisite interrogation work on the part of our interrogators and intelligence analysts, our operators captured him in his home. Like many AQI leaders we captured, he started to talk almost immediately. By this time, our interrogators had become exceptional and could move information so fast between our intelligence system and our operators that it was a dazzling thing to behold. The Commander was shocked that we seemingly knew more about his own life and activities than he knew about himself. In a matter of a few nights, we pulled out of him the locations of eighteen other AQI leaders that were subordinate to him.

  After only a few nights of interrogations, and with a superb lay down of intelligence and human-targeting information, a decision was made to execute a large-scale operation to capture or kill all of the subordinate leaders. Late November (approximately Thanksgiving), in one period of darkness, our task force operators conducted a series of raids. These raids resulted in all eighteen commanders being captured. Our special operators are amazing and brave warriors—the best of the best. The level of precision they applied, the fact that there were practically no firefights against the capture of any of these AQI commanders, and the intelligence gained from this operation gave us an overwhelming sense that, if we were able to sustain pressure against their networks, we could beat these guys, hands down!

  As our cooperation with local tribes increased, they learned that they had been lied to about our intentions in their country. They had been told that we were imperialists, and that we had come to colonize Iraq. As we worked together, they saw that we had no desire to live in that godforsaken place, and would go back home once we had fulfilled our mission. On the other hand, we were resolved to win, and were not about to suddenly turn tail and leave them to their own destiny. Both convictions were necessary for effective collaboration: we had to be seen as temporary occupiers, not colonialists, and they had to be convinced that we would fight alongside them until we had won—together.

  We established close working relations with the Sunnis in Anbar. Not only the sheikhs who led the tribes, but their people began to believe that we were there to help and their interests and beliefs became our interests and beliefs. Never mind sending our guys to their relatively secure forward operating bases, as our top brass desired; we had to do the opposite. Indeed, we had to flip the way we waged war. We had to invert the relative weight of military operations and intelligence; that is, by treating Iraq (and later Afghanistan) as an intelligence war.

  Before my eventual assignment to work for General McChrystal, I visited Iraq and Afghanistan in early 2004 to get acquainted with his command (Task Force 714), his team, and their current operating style. It was efficient but not effective, and General McChrystal knew it. After a couple of weeks, I came to recognize that this organization had a formidable capability, but they didn’t have the intelligence that they needed. They weren’t even considering it to the degree that they should have. They were focused on traditional targeting, above all, the top level of the terrorist groups (the so-called high-value targets). Capturing and killing top-tier terrorist leaders made us feel good, but it was a failed strategy.

  We had an intense one-on-one discussion one night in Bagram, Afghanistan. Stan was deciding to transfer his HQ team and the task force’s main effort from Afghanistan to Iraq, which was not a small decision—it was April of 2004 and the First Battle of Fallujah was raging and we were losing. Osama bin Laden was still on the run somewhere in Pakistan, the situation in Afghanistan was relatively stable, but underneath this deceptively calm river of Afghanistan was a raging insurgency getting ready to reemerge. A decision had to be made and Stan’s instincts, as usual, were correct. That evening, I said to him, “Your intelligence operations are a small part of your organization and they need to be 8o percent of what you do as an organization. It needs to be the majority of what the task force does because, frankly, what we are facing we don’t know squat about.”

  We had to put together a million-piece puzzle and had no box top to look at to help us. The puzzle was massive and it was in a region of the world and against an ideology that we did not properly understand. The more we tried to place the enemy in a typical conventional box, the more they changed. The more we tried to apply old, twentieth-century tactics, techniques, and procedures to this enemy, the more they adapted to them. We needed to act faster than they could and the only way to do that was to get inside their heads. And an intelligence officer who says he’s inside the head of the enemy is lying if he isn’t either dealing with a former enemy who’s come over to our side, or he’s talking directly to them and discovering what makes them tick.


  This was so important that I couldn’t just delegate the task. I personally got involved in many interrogations and debriefings, especially early on. I wanted to know if the evil I could imagine was sufficient for full understanding, or if I was underestimating this enemy. For many years as an intelligence officer, I always believed that if I could think it, the enemy could think it. And I came to think about some pretty evil things—maybe it was the way I grew up or maybe it came from watching movies or maybe it was just instinctual on my part. But we were facing a despicable foe, one who would rape and pillage women and children, boys and girls, behead for fun, all while watching pornography on their laptops. In fact, at one point, we determined that 80 percent of the material on the laptops we were capturing was pornography. These sick, psychopathic foes were unbelievably vile, but they were also guileful and cunning. If we were to beat them, we needed to outwork and outwit them.

  How did we do it?

  Let’s say we captured somebody who knew something important. That information went at once to everyone in the task force: analysts, interrogators, SIGINT personnel, and the guys in the field. Everyone could then pursue new linkages in the terror network, leading to new captures, new discoveries of documents, computers, and the like. Faster and faster, those discoveries went back into our decision loop. Once we figured out how to do it, interrogators could receive real-time information about which they could query their captives, and if the answers pointed to new action, that would be relayed back to the tacticians and fighters.

  It couldn’t have been done without improved communications technology. Paradoxically, al Qaeda and other terrorist groups understood this very well, and developed new skills using Internet sites to communicate with one another. We had to play catch-up. We’re a lot better today than we were then, thanks in no small measure to the work we did in Iraq first, and then in Afghanistan, but these skills are perishable if not routinely used.