* Met the Director of CALL today -- COL F. Also an Armor guy, so there's always a little bit of a connection and play the name game. I'm not always the best judge of character based on first impressions, but he struck me as being a sharp cookie. On yesterday's weekly status meeting (50 people calling in from around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and even the Philippines -- we have one person embedded with counter-insurgency forces in Mindanao), he asked some questions that indicated he really understood the theater and challenges of bringing troops and material back home.
* Met the Research guys. These are the guys who will make money for me. One of the best ways us TODs can help out a unit is to assist them in getting the latest and greatest information about any topic. Let's say for instance, that a unit commander has just received a tasking to provide border security but his men don't have much experience doing this. He might turn to me and ask me to help find the best practices and lessons learned from past units. I would first look up in the system myself to see if any products exist, then pass it on to the research group back here at Leavenworth, who would scan a variety of sources and databases and send results back to me. As short as a day later, I could provide that commander SOPs, unit handbooks, after action reviews, and even tactical procedures that are so new even the training centers haven't gotten them yet. The funny thing is as I spoke with the research guys, I completely understood their concerns about needing to understand my context, what form I wanted the results in, the urgency, etc, because I've been in their shoes with my civilian day job and have also been in the requestor's shoes.
* Everywhere I go, people keep saying, "We've been expecting you." It's a really weird feeling, especially in the Army, where you are usually just another social security number. With so few TODs and each one needing to get as much training as possible in 5 short days, there is a litle more personalized attention I guess. And most are higher level -- LTC on the average. I went to see the Joint Operations guys (essentially our counterparts, but focusing on the interaction between Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and local host nations) today and there was a Chinese navy Lieutenant Commander! 3 seconds after meeting him, he was speaking to me in Mandarin, and for a second, I wondered if he was perhaps some sort of exchange officer. Nope, US Navy, but he was born in Yunnan province, has an MBA, and speaks perfect English. Nice to know that that someone born in the country our nation considers one of the next global rivals can rise to that position of authority. He also said that he had been waiting a while to meet me.
* Finally sat down with my analyst to talk about my collection plan. The relationship between a TOD and his analyst is an important one. The analyst is kind of like the shooter -- the brains creating the master plan. Meanwhile, a good TOD is necessary to bring back the data the analyst needs to draw the bigger picture. One way of thinking about it is that each TOD's observation is like a little BB hole. By itself, it doesn't make much difference or say much. But, taken as a group, patterns become apparent.
JW is a retired colonel, has deployed to numerous combat theaters, and has been doing this job since CALL was founded, over 19 years ago. Obviously, since he has all that experience, I tried to say as little as possible and just listen. He started by wanting to know my background and civilian experience more. He asked me if there were any collection target areas I was interested and I told him there were three:
1. Tactical or maneuver-oriented small unit observations that would get me out of the divisional operations center and around in sector outside the wire. I'm here to observe firsthand, not to just parrot what others tell me and if I learned anything from consulting, it was that it's easiest to understand a problem when you see it for yourself.
2. Interactions with the local Iraqi security forces or population. I sort of sold my background in Asia working with other cultures, but personally would consider it a lost opportunity if I came all the way here and didn't try to understand what the Iraqis themselves feel. I also want to see if we are really doing a good job really arming the Iraqis to govern themselves, or if it's lip service and we are just letting them be the face on the patrols and the ones stacking boxes, but not learning principles of leadership or logistics systems for instance. I read a really interesting comment from one of the other TODs yesterday. He observed that one golden rule is to not fraternize with the common soldiers of the local host nation. That seemed counterintuitive to me becauseI've always operated on the concept that if you want to test ground truth, go to the lowest level where policy gets put into action. But, the logic here was that it causes your host officer to lose face, it makes you look less important, and that the ground truth was not always ours to have -- that is, we do have to go through the lens of the leadership.
3. Success/failure of equipment fielding. Simply, I like cool stuff. Although not a technical person by trade, I do like to offer concrete, actionable assessments on stuff and this would be something I could really get my hands around. How the newest body armor feels on the average infantryman, how remote bomb sniffing robots could be repurposed to do other things...
He was surprisingly open to all of them and then asked me if I was open to one more: assessing the success of our information operations campaign. This is all the flyers, psychological operations messaging, and interactions to win the hearts and minds of the locals. I told him I was if it's something I can manage.
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