Publication

This essay is a first person in-depth review offered by a US battalion commander about post-invasion operations in Iraq. The author portrays himself as a fairly conventional commander seeking, as he puts it, to carry out the traditional Army mission of "destroying the enemy on the battlefield," and analyzes his early errors in executing that mission. Employing a classic technique of counterinsurgency theory that generally has been neglected by the US military in Iraq, he conducted a local census, which proved to be a safe and effective way to find and develop informers and become familiar with people and local patterns.