In command of the Long Range Surveillance Detachment (LRSD) out of the 110th Military Intelligence Battalion, 10th Mountain Division, Major Robert Schexnayder deployed to Afghanistan from July 2003 through May 2004. Initially working in the border areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan, interdicting routes that were being used to send insurgents into and out of the country, he and his LRSD later became operationally controlled by Task Group Aries, a French Special Forces organization that was based at Spin Boldak in Kandahar Province. Schexnayder talks at length about the tactics, techniques and procedures he observed with the French that the US could possibly learn from, such as how they conduct desert and long range motorized reconnaissance. The French were not, however, too concerned about being covert, he said, and were also not too keen on making detailed contingency plans. Their thinking was, as Schexnayder explained, "'If we plan for something bad to happen, we'll jinx ourselves and surely it will happen. So if we don't plan for those things, it won't happen.'" He discusses LRS operations in great depth: how it was doctrinally unsuited to the "asymmetric, non-contiguous counterinsurgency" they found themselves waging in Afghanistan, as well as how their US brigade did not always use them to their highest degree of effectiveness. Schexnayder also talks about changes to LRS doctrine, namely making LRS more mobile, that came about as a result of a subsequent conference held back in the United States. He closes by saying that this was a good mission. "All the members of my detachment got a French National Defense Medal," Schexnayder added, "which I think is the first time they've handed that out since World War II to an American unit en masse. We had good relationship with them. I never got into any political discussions with them, and that was probably a good idea. They were a great group of guys and we enjoyed it."

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