Well, I've been officially installed as the LOO manager for my unit (Bn TF) in W. Anbar, and we held our first effects meeting to work through the business of what we should be doing with Lines of Operation since we will not be tied to urban areas.
I was honestly apprehensive as we built up to the business of deploying, since I did not serve as the LOO Manager during our Mojave Viper training rotation, and I have honestly been daunted by the mass of organization required to manage the LOOs. When I stopped by our HHQ during my transit into my final home, I wasn't impressed by the mass of spreadsheets, documents, and just plain "stuff" that they had to track. It almost seemed as if it had become the self-licking ice cream cone. When I sat back and said, "man , I hope it never becomes that difficult to stay updated," I made a commitment to make our efforts manageable, sustainable without massive amount of outside support, and related directly to the tactical mission at hand.
I think I can effectively report that the past few years of reading SWJ articles, browsing and commenting in threads, and just interacting with members here has served me better than any COIN academy, CA course, or hip pocket IO training. These are some of the things I learned from you all, and I was shocked when I took stock of our meeting notes and realized that most of this stuff had come out of my mouth:
-We need one common narrative as our theme, and an Iraqi visited or stopped by our partnered forces in one portion of the AO should hear the same theme that he did if he was stopped on the other side, several dozens of kms away
-We need to have an IO campaign as much as we need a tactical plan that involves kinetics. Our Marines down to the private need to understand the basic tenets of it, and it needs to be supervised closely.
-We need to IO ourselves to ensure that the Marines know the purpose of mission, what our theme is, and that although it is still dangerous out there, we must achieve our goals.
-We need to be find a way to make it beneficial, or at least in their best interests for Iraqis in our AO to participate in transparent census operations.
-We need to reach out to gain insight on what the effects will be (tribal) of our presence in the AO.
-Any projects we look to implement must absolutely be sustainable without us around.
-Don't provide false hope or make the promise you cannot absolutely follow through on.
-Iraqis appreciate stories, so we are trying to relate our unit callsign to the lifestyle of the Bedouin who inhabit and transit our AO, so the commander can tell a good story during the intial social hour of any key leader engagement.
-Key leaders we were trained to look for during our pre-deploy training are not the same types of folks who are key leaders in our AO, so we need to start with a revised expectation.
This is just the tip of the iceberg I'm sure, but thanks SWC...my time spent here previously was in fact spent wisely.
