MAJ Dale DeStefano served as the brigade supply officer (S4) for the newly designated 504th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade (BfSB), formerly the 504th Military Intelligence (MI) brigade, during 2008 and 2009 at Contingency Operating Site (COS) Sykes, Tal Afar, Iraq in support of Operating Iraqi Freedom (OIF). In part 2 of his October 2009 interview, MAJ DeStefano discusses the challenges of transitioning the brigade to a BfSB in the midst of a less than 12 month turnaround time to redeploy to Iraq, the dividends that his unit's smooth handoff on the prior deployment paid, and the headaches caused by COS Sykes' isolation. MAJ DeStefano concludes his interview with the observation, " I feel that we have to stay the course, whatever that course may be. I don't think we can leave Iraq until its stable. We've gotten them to the point where they can field their own security force, not necessarily a military where they can go invade somebody but they can secure themselves. They can police themselves and do their own infrastructure -- trash, water and food -- all on their own. If it's not necessarily what we would do, I don't care. It's important that they're stable and that we can work with them later on. The same is true for Afghanistan."

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