The first public excerpt of my new book, Still Broken, which recounts my time as an intelligence officer for the Defense Department, where I worked on (and in) Iraq for the Defense Intelligence Agency. The book tells the story of my time there, encountering the kind of political manipulation and incompetence that continue to cripple our efforts against terrorism and in Iraq. I hope you'll check it out, and this passage doesn't really need any introduction:
The first sign of trouble came during the transition from the outgoing personnel to our group, their replacements. For the life of us, we couldn’t figure out what the hell they had been doing.
“It’s a database, see, with all the names and locations of potential shithead activity in this area, and it’s taken a lot of time to develop, and—”
“Okay, okay, but how much actionable material have you produced?”
“...Actionable?”
The whole point of a counterinsurgency mission is to utilize actionable intelligence, which is basically what it sounds like: intelligence you can act on, either strategically or, more likely, at the tactical level. In-country Defense Department intelligence is heavily weighted toward supporting the shooters, but the group we replaced seemed to be providing a circular function, in that they produced materials for . . . one another. Nothing was broadly important enough to pass up to leadership, and nothing was specific enough to pass down to units.
It became apparent that our assignment was not the counterinsurgency mission we’d anticipated. To some extent we were set up as a new and unique group from DIA. Our leadership told us that we were the largest cohesive DIA group to deploy to Iraq, as previous volunteers had been sent to fill individual slots in a wide variety of operations. We were supposed to be the connection between the field and the DIA element in DC, and we had just spent months learning about the history of the insurgency, beneficial and ineffective COIN techniques, and the intricacies of Iraqi tribes, religious groups, militias, and political organizations. This knowledge was supposed to make us a crack team of area experts, able to assist action units in the front and support the Iraq team in the rear (back in Washington). We were geared up to apply social network theory, create a better understanding of the insurgency and its accelerants, use a variety of analytical tools that would help identify insurgents and pinpoint the most crucial members of various groups, and employ our strategic acumen to assist policymakers. We were the heavy hitters, DIA’s contribution to the Combined Intelligence Operations Center or CIOC (pronounced sy-ock) -- the hub for U.S. intelligence in Iraq. But when we settled in, we realized that there was basically no mission for us. . . .
