Paper and COIN: Exploiting the Enemy's Documents

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marct,

Well, I know that the Marines train their folks to not only capture and evacuate POWs but to also search for documents.media, especially if it is on a body (breathing or not, makes little difference to the analyst unless the gore makes the info unreadable) and then tag and evacuate them. As for SF folks, one of their main purposes is the acquisition of intel, thus they are highly sensitized to documents, media, etc. Having been in a few mission briefs, litter pickup in and on the objective, time and circumstances permitting, was stressed.
Doesn't always happen, people forget, circumstances preclude it or time inhibits it, but the jarheads and the snake-eaters are pretty good as document vacuums. The soldiers on the other hand, don't seem to include it in their basic skills package. At least that is the answer I got from close on to a hundred soldiers from different units, all 11Bs.
Don't know why.
If you think you are appalled and shocked, you should have seen my reaction on the mountainside outside of Aranas or south at Kandahar.

The early recce missions in Iraq (2003) were horrible in regards to safe-guarding media and documents. There were several instances when large caches of documents and/or computer hard-drives were located at "abandoned" facilites of interest (Al-Kindi facilites come to mind). Because the survey teams were to small the decision was usually made to return the following day with a larger SSE team with lots of security. No security was left to monitor or safeguard the sites. Upon the morrow, when the SSEs returned to the various sites, there had been selective destruction of the documents/computer hard-drives. The SSE missions would sift through the destruction for anything worth a crap, usually finding nothing. Upon RTB, the mission would be filed as "NSTR - Vandalism preclude collection and exploitation", or words to that effect. Always amazed me that the vandalism was so selective and neatly done, with the exact items we were looking for usually laid in a tidy strip in the floor and carefully burned with an accelerant while nothing else in the cache area was even smoke damaged. My deductions of a comprehensive destruction plan conducted by "loyalist stay behinds" was noted but never recorded by ISG intelligence personnel (meaning Colonel/GS-15 and higher, the lower level intel weenies were up in arms about it). Lost a lot of info that way.

Lots of things shock and appall me when it comes to intelligence.

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