When I last served in Iraq in '04-'05, my TF did not have attached PSYOP assets, and we had a large swath of Western Al Anbar to deal with. The only time we received a TPT to employ was during Fallujah 2.0.

This problem was compounded by the fact that our entire IO plan was driven by the Fire Support Coordinator (and he did a fine job with what he had), who's background in IO consisted of several seminars held at Camp Pendleton.

I hear you guys, but for whatever reason, TPTs are limited in quantity like CAG, HETs, mineclearing teams, and linguists/translators. We were fortunate to get the TPT for a named operation, although we clearly knew we had a need for it.

Truth be told though, there were inconsistencies between the PSYOP elements of our IO campaign plan (which we felt was in psynch with HHQ), and advise given by the TPT lead. When you're prosecuting kinetic and non-kinetic operations on 2-3 hours of sleep a day, and your TPT lead is advising you (as the IO officer) to try a particular approach, it's tough to see the forest. I chalk that up to the simple dynamic that fatigue drives well-intentioned people to minimize the number of decision points they have to face. The result is that we sometimes defaulted to a certain approach simply because it was familiar and worked before. In truth, we realized during AARs that had the TPT been integrated sooner, the lead Soldier wouldn't have been required to propose approaches that seemed "pretty far out there". He would have had more time to change our behaviors during planning and work from a number of COAs that had already been kicked around.

This is a long reply, but I just wanted to throw out some of the things that I saw cause friction.