Major Tom Vogel, in this second of two interviews concerning his Operation Iraqi Freedom deployments, discusses his service as the current operations officer of the joint operations center (JOC) for the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula (CJSOTF-AP) headquarters located in Baghdad from January to May 2004. He begins this interview by stating that, despite his title, he was actually the director of the JOC. Beyond monitoring and directing current operations, Vogel was also responsible for coordination of operations through multiple areas of operation (AOs), noting that while the JSOTF had no AO of its own, it operated everywhere. They were heavily involved initially with the training of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Vogel explains that they were very involved in gathering intelligence, saying, "I've heard more than one general officer say that 90 percent of their actionable intelligence came from special operations teams." He says that we should have seen the insurgency more clearly and that we were slow in transitioning from unconventional warfare to the foreign internal defense mission. Vogel closes this interview by stating that the single biggest step in building rapport with indigenous forces is by genuinely caring about their success.

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