With 2nd Brigade of the 75th Division (Training Support) when the call came in December 2004 to deploy the following month to Iraq to work on a military transition team (MiTT) for a year, Major Paul Esmahan was assigned as a logistics MiTT chief whose responsibilities involved advising, coaching, mentoring and to a lesser extent training elements of the 1st Mechanized Brigade of the 9th Iraqi Army Division, to include medical, maintenance, engineer and recon companies, and later the brigade support battalion. As Esmahan explained, though, from the beginning "it wasn't clear to me what I was supposed to do. I think I served mostly to track what they were doing and to implore them to do things we wanted them to do that they didn't necessarily want to do…. We were also trying to get them the tools they needed to do their job. There were serious limits as to what we could do because of the way things were. They never did end up standing up a logistics battalion. They didn't believe in that organization." As he further noted, "People would say that logistics is an impediment and we need to fix it so let's get some logistics soldiers in there to fix it. But what the overall plan was and how to make it succeed was not well communicated." Esmahan discusses the challenges of working with the brigade combat team that served as his partnership unit, saying that it seemed almost like a "separate entity, a world away from us." He talks about a variety of intelligence and operational issues, how the Iraqis did business as compared to the Americans, how he struggled with getting them to do certain things, and generally how he approached this difficult assignment given all the constraints he had to work under. "'You guys have to beg, borrow or steal,'" was what his MiTT was told by several higher headquarters, Esmahan said. "We were told that we were on our own." He additionally reflects on his working relationship with the Iraqi brigade commander, what the Iraqi soldiers felt about the equipment they received, how they functioned during routine and also kinetic operations, and says that he wished he'd attended the Army's Command and General Staff College before being sent to head a MiTT, not after. Esmahan closes his interview by sharing some less than optimistic feelings with respect to the future stability and unity of the country of Iraq, and stresses that if there is a solution, it lies in a negotiated peace between the Sunnis and the Shi'a. "They have to have a vested interlocking relationship," Esmahan says, "and that has to be the main effort, not the MiTTs or the security. Your security problem will decrease once you have a negotiated peace, if you can get it. Then you can remove the Americans - who they don't want there anyway."

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