From May 2003 to June 2004 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Timothy Connelly served initially (and briefly) as the 317th Military Police Battalion signal officer and then for the remainder of his tour commanded the 351st MP Company, having the dual mission of civilian convoy security and convoy escorts from Talil Airbase to the Kuwaiti border and back. The most dangerous convoys, Connelly explains, involved escorting fuel tankers to the Karch Fuel Depot. "It was a 45-minute ride," he said, "and 50 percent of them got hit by improvised explosive devices in the last three months of my mission in Iraq." In this interview, Connelly also discusses in depth what he terms the "big brigade battle with corps on the effective and philosophical use of MP assets." The questions were, "Should we be at fixed points doing commo checks when we have so many mobile assets and so much firepower? Should we be attached to convoys, providing security for the convoys, or should we be roving and securing the main supply routes so the convoys can pass freely?" According to Connelly, "Our assets were so bogged down doing the escort and force protection missions that we lost sight of the real advantage of being a combat support MP company - that we have so much mobile firepower in a unit that is essentially designed to operate somewhat independently." Additionally during this deployment, Connelly's company trained Iraqi highway policemen. As he put it, "we were the special police transition teams (SPTTs) before there even were SPTTs." Upon returning from Iraq - and from August to December 2004 - Connelly served as a briefing officer in the Army Operations Center and, as such, "gave the daily current operations briefings to the Army top brass," an experience he discusses in detail. After that, from December 2004 until July 2006, he served as the G3 plans and operations officer with the 80th Division (Institutional Training) and, in this capacity, focused heavily on preparing to deploy and redeploy over 700 soldiers to Iraq in support of military training teams (MiTTs), SPTTs and Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I). Connelly speaks to the challenges of taking a "non-deploying" institutional training division and readying them "to become one of the main pieces on the tip of the spear for our strategy in Iraq."

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