12 March-April 2007 MILITARY REVIEW
Colonel Ralph O. Baker, U.S. Army
Colonel Ralph O. Baker is currently
the assistant deputy director of the
Politico-Military Affairs, J5, Strategic
Plans and Policy Directorate-Middle
East, under the Joint Chiefs of Staff
at the Pentagon. He holds a B.S. from
the United States Military Academy, an
M.A. from Central Michigan Univer-
sity, and an M.S. from the Naval War
College. COL Baker has served in a
variety of command and staff positions
in the continental United States, the
United Kingdom, Germany, and Iraq.
A
FEW WEEKS AFTER assuming command of the 2d Brigade Combat
Team (2BCT), 1st Armored Division, I found myself sitting in a tacti-
cal command center in downtown Baghdad conducting a brigade cordon-
and-search. The reports ooding in from my battalion commanders were
virtually all the same:
“STRIKER 6, this is REGULAR 6. Objectives 27, 28, 29 secure and
cleared. Nothing signicant to report. Over.”
We spent nearly ten hours searching for insurgents and weapons in hun-
dreds of dwellings throughout our objective area, a bad neighborhood off
Haifa Street that was a hub of insurgent activity—and for what? Ultimately,
we captured a dozen weapons and a handful of suspects.
Much more worrisome to me than the meager results of our operation was
the ill will and anger we had created among the Iraqi citizens who were the
unwelcome recipients of our dead-of-night operations. I had been on enough
such sweeps already to picture the scene clearly: mothers crying, children
screaming, husbands humiliated. No matter how professionally you executed
such searches, the net result was inevitably ugly.
That profoundly disappointing experience led me to a blunt realization:
our dependency on conventional intelligence collection methods and our
failure to understand the negative perceptions our actions were generating
among Iraqi citizens threatened to doom our mission. If we did not change
our methods, and change them quickly, we were not going to be successful
in the urban counterinsurgency (COIN) environment in which we found
ourselves. As a result of that realization, I made two decisions in the ensuing
days that affected the way our combat team would operate for the remainder
of our deployment. First, we would reform the way we conducted intelligence
operations, and second, we would make information operations (IO) a pillar
of our daily operational framework.
My purpose in writing this article is to share with the reader insights and
lessons learned from the reform of our intelligence operations; specically,
what we learned by conducting human intelligence (HUMINT)-centric
operations in a heavy BCT in Iraq. To that end, I want to briey describe the
initial state of my BCT and our area of operations (AO), identify the major
intelligence challenges that we faced, and offer solutions and techniques we
adapted or developed in order to overcome our challenges.
This article was solicited
from the author by Military
Review as a companion
piece to his article, “The
Decisive Weapon: A Brigade
Combat Team Commander’s
Perspective on Information
Operations,” published in
May-June 2006. It is based
on an unclassied brieng
COL Baker presents regu-
larly to leaders preparing
to deploy to Iraq and
Afghanistan.
