Major Nicole Stanford served as the assistant operations officer for the 311th Military Intelligence Battalion and commander of that battalion's Alpha Company in Kuwait and Iraq from February 2003 through January 2004 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In this interview, she talks about being in charge of receiving battalion elements as they deployed to Kuwait, the convoy north into Iraq, the lack of maps for each vehicle, and the difficulty the unit had in establishing a baseline for signals intelligence. She also discusses their accommodations in Baghdad, the ease of her change of command, the importance of her human intelligence teams, and the impossibility of separating civil-military operations from human intelligence collection efforts. Stanford closes by noting her surprise that a battalion was replacing her brigade and the constantly high demand for good human intelligence amongst the battalions.

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