Upon arriving in theater in November 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Christian of the 98th Division (Institutional Training) was under the impression that he was to be the officer in charge of developing and standing up an engineer school for the Iraqi Army. As it turned out, though, by January, stuck in Taji and with the schoolhouse mission still "amounting to nothing" due apparently to funding constraints, Christian took the initiative of volunteering himself for a military transition team (MiTT) assignment. After "a lot of politicking," he was eventually assigned to the 3rd Brigade of the 5th Iraqi Army Division, based at the Numaniyah Military Training Base. "I was going crazy with that mission in Taji," he said, "and needed to do something else." Among Christian's initial challenges were dealing with a US base commander who "[didn't] like MiTTs and [wouldn't] give them anything" and, even more seriously, a situation he found in which "some of the soldiers who were there … were really not cut out to be on a MiTT. They didn't want it. They were only doing it because they were ordered to do it, not because they elected to do it or thought they could do it. Thus," Christian said, "I had to really negotiate who the right bodies were to put in harm's way so, if they got into a situation, they could survive it." In the absence of a formal mission for his 3rd Brigade Iraqi soldiers, he said, "we created our own." As Christian explained, "We pulled security operations for the Wasit Province, which was the area the unit was located in. We broke it up into sectors and conducted day patrols, security operations and we worked with the local Iraqi National Guard to do border patrols." Specifically, Christian discusses a number of successful missions such as Operation Peninsula, which netted huge caches of weapons and some 250 insurgents in an area that had heretofore been thought of as essentially "dormant" in terms of enemy activity. He also relates the specifics of what he dubs the unit's "greatest success" - a brigade-wide cordon and search operation that the Iraqis received, planned and executed by themselves with no US support. "We sat back and just watched. We pointed out opportunities for improvement, pointed out things they needed to consider in terms of mission planning or mission execution, but they did the whole thing - and at the end of the day, that was what we were there to do." In addition, Christian talks about the unique (and difficult) situation in which his MiTT operated without a counterpart unit and also observes that, while the advisory effort was supposed to be the "number one mission that needed to get done," he heard far more rhetoric to this effect than he saw actual action.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited