With the 720th Military Police Battalion during its June 2003 to March 2004 deployment to Tikrit, Iraq, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Rangel served as the executive officer. For his second tour, from June 2004 to February 2005, Rangel was executive officer for the 336th MP Battalion and was stationed in Ba'qubah. In this interview, Rangel talks about the training assistance provided to Iraqi police forces and, in addition, about force protection measures, detention operations, forward operating base establishment and the conducting of raids. "We found a lot of individuals," Rangel said, "found a lot of weapons systems, found a lot of money. But in my opinion, the high payoff task was turning these guys and getting information on the blacklisted guys, finding out who were the high-ranking Ba'ath Party members, the high-ranking military officers." While with the 336th, Rangel was involved with the special mission of detaining members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq organization. Of the 720th, he considers that unit to have “set the standard in terms of employment of MPs on the battlefield” and working police intelligence. Rangel speaks at length, too, on the serious pressures being placed on Army Reserves, which have been become an “operational” rather than a “strategic” asset. “They’re under-trained, under-staffed, under-resourced,” he said, “and then you ask them to go to war and to do it a couple times. If that doesn’t take the most dedicated individual, I just don’t know what does. It’s a horrible feeling to go in harm’s way, period. But, if you go into harm’s way thinking you’re the redheaded stepchild of the military, that’s not a good thing. Either we make the conscious decision to train them and compensate them for that training or we have to say, ‘We need a damn Active Duty Army large enough to handle what we’re going to do.’”

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