From October 2006 through October 2007 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Joseph Chestnut served as the intelligence advisor and executive officer of a military transition team (MiTT), assigned initially to 2nd Battalion, 2nd Brigade, 8th Iraqi Army Division, an infantry battalion based in Mahawil, and later to the 8th Division headquarters based in Diwaniyah. In this interview, he discusses the full range of his team's advisory efforts; the conduct of combined operations with US maneuver units; the difficulties the Iraqis had in working with the Polish, which ran Multinational Division-Center South; the constant challenges posed by logistics; what he considers the principal successes and failures of the Iraqi units he worked with and their intelligence apparatuses in particular; his force protection concerns on Camp Echo; as well as his judgment that a MiTT tour is "one of the toughest jobs in the Army." Chestnut closes his interview by saying that the Army needs to be true to its original intent in seriously filling advisory teams with the "best and the brightest," not "scraping the bottom of the barrel" as he feels they have done.

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