The operations officer for 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division in Iraq from April through July 2003 and then, from July though August 2004 the division deputy G3, Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Hensley begins this interview by discussing his visibility on deploying what ended up being the largest division-based task force in US Army history, before moving into a coverage of his brigade's assumption of and subsequent operations conducted in the Karkh and Karadah Districts of Baghdad. Among the many topics he talks about include his understanding of Major General Martin Dempsey's commander's intent; the conduct of stability and support operations while simultaneously waging a kinetic fight; how the Iraqis took to the early rudiments of self-government; the conduct specifically of Operation Longstreet and Operation Iron Hammer; his brigade's three-month extension in the wake of the Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Militia-inspired uprising in April 2004; as well as how both his duties and his perspective changed by going from brigade to division staff. In addition, Hensley discusses a variety of interoperability and intelligence issues; the relationship between information operations and kinetic operations; 2nd Brigade's standing up of the Facility Protection Service (FPS); the challenges associated with working with the Coalition Provisional Authority; and just generally what it was like living, working and fighting for some 15 months in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, which he calls the "center of gravity for Iraq," and its environs. Following his Operation Iraqi Freedom deployment, Hensley went to US European Command, specifically the J33 current operations section, and became involved with Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans-Sahara (OEF-TS), a North Africa-oriented initiative designed to "prevent a Taliban-type government from taking place in some of these countries where we think the government is unstable." As Hensley explains, while "the majority of the military is focused on Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting the fight, we're looking at how we prevent the fight from developing."

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