Brigadier General Michael Tucker was the former commander of 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division in Iraq from April to July 2003. The area of operations under his command was east of the Euphrates River and Baghdad, specifically the districts of Adhamiyah and Thawra (which is Sadr City) Rusafa and 7 Nissan. After relieving the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the mission changed and they were forced to find a place to move into. After settling into their AO, there was a need to stabilize the environment. They spent time setting up the Iraqi police force and organizing neighborhood councils, which included everything from buying police uniforms to finding suitable and objective candidates. It seems Iraqis with character were hard to find because of the blatant corruption within the cities. In fact, corruption permeated throughout all of the areas into waste management, medical waste management and stolen building materials. Nation building became extremely frustrating because the soldiers would design, fix or build something, only to have it destroyed the next day. During this time, the Tucker's brigade was also working on sources of information and intelligence. Getting the intelligence did not seem to be a problem, but sorting out the real pieces of actionable intelligence was. One particular event was Operation Task Force Bullet, where they began harvesting the ammunition abandoned by the Iraqi Army in open fields, under mosques and schools. The Iraqi people were trying to pilfer the ammunition because they knew it would be valuable to the insurgency. It became a race against time to gather intelligence from the ground up on where to find the ammunition before the public got to it. Other issues that came into play were how the soldiers demonstrated character and adaptability, because a lot of this work was out of their occupational specialties. Trying to soothe the Iraqi population and getting them to trust their own police and security forces was a hard thing to do. In their case, the embedded media helped to this end by sending the right messages across to the Iraqis. Looking back, all of the missions and actions required more cultural awareness than the US Army has today. Tucker believes that cultural and situational awareness should ultimately guide the Army on how to attack a problem, when to change command, and how to gauge combat power. Everything depends on it and the basis for learning it should be to learn the language. Tucker ended with this quote: "Stability and support operations are not jobs for soldiers, but only soldiers can do it."

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited