From March to August 2004, Major Kevin Kennedy served as the executive officer of 1st Battalion, part of the 9th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, and spent the entirety of his nearly six-month deployment in downtown Baghdad, primarily the Karkh District (to include the once-infamous Haifa Street) in the Iraqi capital. During this time, Kennedy's battalion was engaged in full-spectrum operations: everything from rebuilding local infrastructure, restoring electricity and working with local contractors to tracking down criminal elements and former regime loyalists, as well as training Iraqi security forces. With respect to the latter, he observed that they "never suffered from the lack of desire or enthusiasm for what they were doing. Their biggest problem was training and equipment, which over time got better." Discussing stability and support operations in general, Kennedy noted that, for his unit, solid intelligence gathering techniques were far more important than "going out and kicking down doors, pulling people away and throwing them in a detainee cell. Really,” he added, “our success hinged on how well the Iraqi people received us – and the soldiers understood that.” In this interview, Kennedy also talks about the employment of civil affairs and psychological operations assets, shares a variety of insights into Iraqi cultural mores, and highly recommends that the Army offer negotiation training – such as the kind he received at the Joint Readiness Training Center – down as far as the platoon sergeant level, “because they were the ones doing it on the street.”

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