An assistant operations officer with the 75th Field Artillery Brigade, Major Kevin Brown deployed to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM with his unit, which became the command and control element for the 75th Exploitation Task Force (XTF), charged with searching for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and conducting sensitive site exploitation (SSE) of all "abnormal" finds in country. These included mass graves, weapons caches and chemical plants. From March until late June 2003, "We were the bastard stepchildren," as Brown described it, "for all things strange within Iraq." Providing C2 for this diverse task force - comprised of over 20 agencies and employing everyone from civilian scientists to military intelligence types - was a considerable challenge, said Brown, one that his field artillery brigade was not exactly trained for. "We were comfortable shooting rockets, but dragging lab technicians and intel folks around the battlefield was kind of a unique prospect." Nevertheless, his unit's expertise in identifying and engaging targets proved most helpful indeed. In this interview, Brown discusses the disconnect between what SSE teams found versus what they (and the world) expected to find vis-à-vis WMD; his personal assessment of Saddam Hussein’s WMD program (or lack thereof); his experience “exercising leadership in an extremely painful environment”; and what he considers a significant XTF accomplishment: “We took this massive prioritized target list of data, the genesis of which was all forms of intel generated over the years, and we either validated or invalidated the information.” While not personally comfortable concluding that Saddam did not have a WMD program, Brown did say that the XTF disproved “the existence of an active assembly line of chemical rounds being rolled off the plant.”

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