Captain Daniel Ruecking deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom as the assistant fire support officer of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in March 2003, becoming fire support officer of the 1st "Tiger" Squadron, 3rd ACR later that year. He also took part in Operations Tiger Strike and Rifles Blitz in the troubled Al Anbar Province. However, Ruecking spent much of his time in Iraq functioning in the role of a civil affairs officer. Developing interfaces with the local government and local security forces were important because, "They didn't understand what we were trying to do. I think in general if you talked to most Iraqis at that point in time, most of them believed we were there for the oil." To address this problem, he engaged in a series of active information operations, including televised programming, establishing an independent weekly newspaper and random on-the-street polling of the populace. Ruecking describes the limitations on the local mayor, the minimal effectiveness of the local council, and bolstering the former's authority by allowing him to help prioritize civil affairs projects. "In their minds, democracy means personal liberties and that there's some element of participation there, but I guess they didn't really have much comprehension of the related civic responsibilities." He emphasizes the importance of always projecting strength when dealing with Arabs, and points out how operations like Rifles Blitz made their mission easier with the local populace by clearly demonstrating American strength alongside the enemy's inability to effectively resist. "However much combat power the insurgents thought they had, it was not effective against us when we massed….The insurgency was like water around rocks. They go where you're not," he explained. "In my opinion, they had decided that the area was the rock and they were better off going other places, whether it was the countryside or other cities in the region, Fallujah or wherever else. It allowed us to make the progress locally we really had wanted to make." In fact, he observed, "We made more progress in those couple months than we made in the seven months prior. It was really Rifles Blitz that set the stage for that." Ruecking finishes by stating that, in the asymmetric combat environment of Iraq, "There's nothing more important than personal relationships. In this kind of fight, information is how we win and getting information is all about personal relationships."

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