An individual augmentee attached to Marine Regimental Combat Team 1 (RCT-1) from July 2004 to March 2005, for most of his deployment Major Any Dietz served as RCT-1's information operations (IO) officer. During Operation Phantom Fury (Al Fajr), however - the November 2004 combined-joint assault to retake the Iraqi city of Fallujah - he was RCT-1's fire support coordinator (FSC) and, in this interview, discusses his role and this decisive urban operation as a whole at length. Prior to the fight kicking off, Dietz was involved in the IO aspects of prepping the battlefield and clearing the city of its civilian, noncombatant population by means of everything from loudspeakers and radio messages to handbills, leaflet drops and sonic passes. Once things began to go kinetic, he coordinated and cleared all close air support (CAS) and indirect fires in the RCT-1 battlespace, the majority of which were danger close missions. "Depending on who you ask," Dietz said, "we ran 340 CAS missions, fired about 4,000 rounds of artillery into it, and didn’t have a single case of fratricide, so I think a lot of lessons for years to come are going to be drawn from this. I’ve never seen artillery fired that accurately,” he added. Dietz also ran the 1st Marine Division’s Target Processing Center controlling all counterfire missions and had the additional duty as the regiment’s public affairs officer, all of which he recounts in great detail. Looking back, Dietz describes how IO could have been more effectively employed prior to, during and after Phantom Fury, remarking that “we spent a lot of time reacting to what the insurgents were putting out rather than being proactive and better supporting the scheme of maneuver because we had limited resources.”

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