Suffolk team gives military options to help it decide

FORT EUSTIS

When Iraqi insurgents began sending rockets into Baghdad's Green Zone from the nearby Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in late March, the U.S. military had to respond.

Over the next couple of months, the Army and Air Force experimented on the fly, trying different battlefield command structures and new ways of sharing control of aerial equipment.

Some of the experiments proved successful and the attacks began to wane.

This summer, another military team moved into Baghdad. It came from U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Center for Operational Analysis in Suffolk.

The team's mission: Figure out exactly what was happening in Sadr City, both on the ground and in the air. The members were looking for what was working and what wasn't. They wanted to capture this information in the hopes of educating future fighters.

Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Crutchfield and his 10-person team spent weeks in the United States and Iraq, interviewing hundreds of service members at all levels and compiling reams of documents.

In the months since their report was completed, Crutchfield has taken his Power point show on the road to military commands and schools in the United States and abroad. This week, he brought it to Fort Eustis.

Though U.S. forces most likely won't face the exact situation again, they may well face elements of it. Crutchfield's report gives them a menu of proven techniques from which to draw.

The overall mission, he stressed, is to explain, not dictate.

"I can't tell the services what to do," he said. "I don't look at it that way."

In Sadr City, an area of Baghdad several miles from the Green Zone that is controlled by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the United States had plenty of high-tech weapons, including Apache helicopters and aerial drones carrying cameras and Hellfire missiles. The trick was having the right equipment at the right place at the right time.

Crutchfield's group found that success came through new ways of looking at both command and control and the traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission played by the Predator and Shadow drones overhead.

For example, by giving direct control of the drones to the Army brigade commander on the ground, via expanded video capabilities, the military could react in seconds to a threat, rather than the several minutes a traditional command structure required. This meant more insurgents hit with more missiles before they had a chance to fire their rockets.

By extensively mapping the Sadr City area, down to numbering the individual buildings, and by choosing which weaponry to use where ahead of time, the military could better zero in on actual threats and minimize civilian casualties.

The center's report on Sadr City will gradually make its way through military channels, and may show up in training and even doctrine.

Crutchfield has little time to reflect on this, however. His team is headed back to Iraq next month at the request of Gen. David Petraeus' successor, Gen. Raymond Odierno. He said he can't talk about what they'll be doing until after it's done.

Matthew Jones, (757) 446-2949, matthew.jones@pilotonline.com