Serving as the intelligence advisor on a military transition team (MiTT) in Iraq from January 2005 through January 2006, Major David Longbine was involved in the teaching, coaching and mentoring of the 1st Brigade, 9th Iraqi Army Division's intelligence staff during the mechanized brigade's buildup, training phases and ultimately its participation in counterinsurgency-related combat operations. Among his many other duties were to provide intel support to the MiTT and links to coalition intelligence and training on recon/surveillance, Iraqi Army intel systems and area intel briefs for new MiTTs arriving in theater. Longbine came to the MiTT from 2nd Brigade, 75th Division (Training Support) and describes how it was a "last minute deal" that took him and his fellow trainers from their normal Active Component/Reserve Component role and sent them over to Iraq as indigenous force advisors. He also mentions how his team received no advisor-specific training before meeting up with their Iraqi brigade. Once married up with 1st Brigade, Longbine quickly realized that the Iraqi approach to intelligence is not the same as the US Army's. As he explained, "To them, intelligence is keeping track of what's going on in your unit, not finding and telling the commander how best to kill the enemy. So it was kind of a mindset switch for the Iraqi staff. In fact," Longbine continued, "I had an Iraqi intelligence officer who was the brigade S2. He had been an intelligence officer his whole career and I could never get him to focus on the enemy. He was always focused on trying to find the people in his unit who were selling information to the insurgents or whatever" - essentially doing counterintelligence. Eventually, Longbine asked for and received a regular Iraqi infantry officer who had no prior experience in intelligence, and groomed him accordingly and with much greater success. Longbine also discusses the "very bureaucratic" nature of the Iraqi brigade staff, which was based on the Russian model, and his MiTT's efforts to impose a more Napoleonic structure. Additionally, Longbine references specific examples to make his point that personalities (at least during his tour in Iraq) either made or broke an American unit's relationship with their partnered Iraqis. "In my view," he said, "US battalion and brigade commanders have to be much more sensitive and involved in the training, planning and execution of the mission the Iraqi units are going to do, versus saying that this MiTT is going to handle all that and they're going to do everything I tell them to do. They've got to treat that battalion like one of their own companies. If they don't do that, it'll never be as effective as it should and could be." Longbine touches on initially the "very minimal support that coalition units gave to the MiTTs" and says that his MiTT "went over there under the impression that we were the center of gravity and the spearhead for the exit strategy for the United States. When we arrived, though, that's not what we found." On the contrary, he said, "We were relegated to 'keep them out of our hair' in terms of the amount of support we received." Longbine also discusses how the Iraqis responded to being put into active operations; how they were viewed by the various populaces they interacted with; the difficulties they had with maintaining fire discipline; the importance of treating Iraqi officers with the respect they're owed and learning to speak at least some of their language; as well as the unhelpful cultural biases that US soldiers often brought to Iraq. Longbine closes by offering numerous recommendations for how the American advisory effort can be improved. "I'm not saying it's every unit that goes over there," he added, "but a lot of deploying units go with the attitude that they're going to war, that they're going to kick ass and take names. That's really not what we need to be doing. We need to be letting the Iraqis do that and support them in every way p

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