Major Doug Watkins served as the brigade judge advocate for the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division in Taji, Iraq, from December 2005 through December 2006 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Upon arriving in Iraq, Watkins went through a good but too short handoff, explaining that much of what he was responsible for - detainee operations and fiscal law issues - were areas which he had not dealt with previously. He conducted the legal reviews on over 1,000 detainees throughout his deployment and managed all aspects of around 170 Article 15-6 investigations. He also supervised a legal team which did nothing but handle claims for the brigade. Watkins admits, because of the legal workload in Iraq, "I worked about 18 hours a day for the whole year." Detainee operations were challenging, in part, for the fact that the maneuver units knew their locales and were quite good at identifying the bad guys, but the gut feelings that lead to detaining many of the bad guys did not rise to an objective legal standard for detention. "To counteract this," says Watkins, "I started bringing in the battalion intelligence officers and conducted classes on what kinds of packets needed to be put together and what would help them make their packets legally sufficient." It was also frustrating to operate in a culture where there was a good deal of fraud and corruption. Watkins talks about dealing with differing sources of funding and all of the various restrictions which accompanied, saying that, "The most problematic was operations and management funds." He discusses being surprised by the amount of legal support he was required to provide to the Iraqi Army, noting their lawyers dealt with death benefits but did not provide their commanders with legal advice or other support. He states that the rules of engagement are very good and very liberal and that difficulties occur when applying them to an enemy who does not look any different from the surrounding civilian population. He also states that being in a maneuver brigade and running your own legal section is much better than being part of a much larger division office. He closes his interview by saying programs such as the Command and General Staff College should not focus too much on the current fight, but that the Army should better prepare its soldiers for counterinsurgency with solid doctrine, tactics and techniques.

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