Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Hergenroeder served as the operations officer for 1st Battalion, 77th Field Artillery in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. His unit's deployment was announced just before they departed for a rotation to the National Training Center and they moved overseas 10 days after their return. Their primary mission was to provide sensitive site teams and mobile exploitation teams, reinforced by Defense Trade Application personnel, to the various maneuver units within Combined Forces Land Component Command. Hergenroeder notes that everyone deployed to Iraq thinking that it would be only a matter of time before weapons of mass destruction were found, saying, "We had teams naming themselves 'The Smoking Gun' and stuff like that." The entire effort attracted so much support, including from the coalition that, according to Hergenroeder, "It got to almost be a self-licking ice cream cone because there were so many guys supporting about 100 guys actually going out and doing the mission." He says the site surveys became a numbers drill: "Either you were making progress or you weren't making progress," and the effort, concentrating on the numbers, became unfocused. "We were just going from site to site with old intel and it seemed like we were just running around with our heads cut off," stated Hergenroeder. After six months in Iraq, his unit was replaced by one from the Utah National Guard. A substantial challenge within the Iraq Survey Group was its composition of many different type units, different countries and civilians, each with different standards, and Hergenroeder credits Colonel Rich McPhee with making sense of it all. Moved up to battalion executive officer, then brigade operations officer, Hergenroeder returned to Iraq a year later to augment the 1st Cavalry Division's fire support element. Now responsible for fighting the insurgency, he states that personalities and relationships took on a new importance, saying, "One of the things that complicated matters was how much we could share or not share with the Iraqis. They were a good source of information but a lot of times we couldn't let the information out too early." Many of their targets were also politically sensitive individuals, and as time went on more restrictions were placed on operations. "That's frustrating to the guy who's out and about in the street trying to do his job and snatch bad guys," says Hergenroeder. He finishes by observing that many of their lessons learned were simply put in their after-action review files and that they never did a very good job of incorporating information operations.

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