Lieutenant Colonel Michael Gabel deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom as the 11th Aviation Regiment's fire support officer from January through June 2003, and then transitioned in theater to become operations officer for the 41st Field Artillery Brigade where he remained until redeploying in March 2004. In this interview, Gabel discusses in great detail his unit's predeployment training, additional training conducted in Kuwait, his role in the regimental planning process as well as a number of specific missions the 11th Regiment conducted during the ground war, including a remarkable firsthand account of the infamous deep-strike attack that conventional tells us was such a failure. Not quite so, says Gabel. "I don't have the exact numbers but I remember everybody saying we really didn't get anything, there wasn't anything there. Well, the revised battle damage assessment was fairly high, not as high as we wanted to train to, but it wasn't anywhere near the negative that it was reported throughout the corps. So I think the effort to get the positive sides of the story out weren't done as well." Indeed, despite the battle damage and battle losses suffered in this attack, which, as he points out, was "the greatest deep attack by an Army unit in our history," Gabel says that the deep-attack mission is one the Army should absolutely not abandon. In addition, Gabel hails the survivability of the AH64 Apache helicopter, talks about the conduct of zone reconnaissance missions, describes his battlefield visibility while flying in the command and control helicopter, and discusses a wide variety of often challenging logistics and coordination of fires issues. He then moves into his time with the 41st Field Artillery Brigade, based at Camp Dogwood near Baghdad, during which he participated in Task Force Bullet and ultimately policed up some 56 million pounds of captured enemy ammunition. Additional challenges included cross-boundary synchronization of operations. In closing, Gabel stresses the need to plan for worst-case, not best-case, scenarios, and for the Army to improve its ability to tell its own story.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited