Paper and COIN: Exploiting the Enemy's Documents

[marct]

Hi webfoot,

If you think you are appalled and shocked, you should have seen my reaction on the mountainside outside of Aranas or south at Kandahar.

Well, I just managed to pick my jaw up off the ground and, now that I think on it, you're right - I wouldn't want to have seen your reaction then since I suspect you were armed .

The early recce misions 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). .... 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.

Amazing, that . I really do hope that it has gotten better .

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.

If I was being cynical I suppose I would say that of course everyone knew that the Iraqis truly wanted a democracy and none of them would ever support, in their hearts, that horrid, evil dictator, therefore your conclusions must be wrong (I can't believe I typed that with a straight face! ). Still and all, it does raise an interesting issue of ideological stances influencing mission effectiveness.

I noted in the bio in the article that your last posting was in Afghanistan and, along the lines of ideologies influencing mission effectiveness, I was wondering if you noted any significant differences between the various NATO troops and their DOCEX practices?

Marc