Intelligences Role in Operation Iraqi Freedom - Essay Example

A Critical Analysis of Intelligence’s Role in Operation Iraqi Freedom At the beginning of 2002, the US Intelligence started providing massive collaborative analytics, information service, and other expert intelligence support to the military planners and policymakers in preparing the groundwork for the Operation Iraqi Freedom, even during the battle, and in post-war infrastructural reconstruction and peacekeeping efforts. The Intelligence experts worked intimately with the “United States Central Command” (USCENTCOM) to provide its intelligence data and expert service on target-based issues and to face critical situations and circumstances as they arose. In early 2002, General Franks’ “Generated Start” plan “called for very early infiltration by CIA teams, to build relationships and gain intelligence, and then the introduction of Special Operations Forces, particularly in northern Iraq and in Al Anbar province in the west”1. Supporting the development of a strategy for troop safety, a special interagency branch was assigned to identify and locate any oilfield risks that the US-led coalition army might face upon entering the country crossing its northern and southern borders.  This special branch identified probable areas of the oilfields that were supposed to be booby-trapped by the Iraqi soldiers. Also it attempted to trace out other natural oilfield dangers such as toxic gases, fire-risk and pressurized equipment.  USCENTCOM's strategy for deploying troops in Iraq included these safety measures based on the intelligence reports provided by this special branch. Dividing the whole invasion strategy into a number of phases depending on their priority, USCENTCOM J2 and the “Defense Intelligence Agency” (DIA) jointly launched thirteen crisis secret service communicative partnerships in order to provide critical intelligence support to field operations in the Iraqi battlefields during the allied invasion, the “Operation Iraqi Freedom”.  During the peak hours of the battle in Operation Iraqi Freedom, more than 900 secret agents and other subsidiaries in and outside Iraq were committed to assisting USCENTCOM. Before the commencement of the Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC), an military technical adventure operated by the “Defense Intelligence Agency” (DIA) launched a “Ballistic Missile Portal” (BMP) that would collect “pictures, descriptions, order of battle, infrastructure, technical parameters, and signatures unique to ballistic missiles”2. The whole service Community, including both the expert agents and the fighters in the battlefield, provided data to the BMP, which enabled the operators at the Central Command to locate and hit the threatening targets effectively. In response to the Intelligence personnel’s requirements for quick and the best possible flawless assessments of the possible Iraqi counter actions and strike, DIA authority built a “RED CELL” in order to replicate the decision-making process of the Iraqi military high command. The cell prepared about twenty policy papers that reflected different aspects and functioning processes of the Iraqi high command3. The series of Intelligence effort exerted a direct and effective impact on the US-led Coalition’s forces’ strategic invasion planning and policy making. In an all-inclusive effort to provide support to the Intelligence community prepared a list of 3000 Iraqi personalities including the 55 most wanted who were classified according to their level of posing threat to the US-led coalition. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) formed a team of 12 analysts and on-battle foreign resource utilization specialists from DIA's MSIC, called the “Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Cell (JCMEC)”. The JCMEC team played a crucial role in locating, collecting, assessing, utilizing, and evacuating the “captured enemy materiel and weapons of strategic or intelligence value throughout the Iraqi theater of operations”4. ONI’s effort not only fed a swiftly moving army with easily acquired military supply, but also it was cost-effective for the military planners. The ONI experts investigated, located, and packed more than 150 tons of “armored vehicles, torpedoes, naval mines, and anti-ship cruise missiles” for transshipment to the United States5. Various Intelligence agencies were engaged in tackling subsidiary reactions to the Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) provided important investigative support to the Special Forces for capturing suspect WMD hide-sites obnoxious documents. The FBI built up an intelligence team to tackle possible Iraqi terrorist and “counterintelligence threats to the United States in reaction to the war”6. Some critics and war-specialists believe that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played the most crucial role in the occurrence as well as the master-plan of the Operation Iraqi Freedom. CIA’s assessment on Iraqi Army, tribal pattern of the Iraqi Society, and important role-playing Iraqi personalities mainly shaped the Coalition army’s war strategy for the Operation Iraqi Freedom. The CIA professionals played the following role in OIF: a. to develop and implement a strategy for trammeling Iraqi-sponsored violent activities, b. to develop new “intelligence methodologies and designed new tools to support Iraq war planning and force protection”7, c. to collect data on Iraqi WMD, to research and to provide analytics to USCENTCOM, d. to provide a comprehensive assessments of international tangible and intangible support for US military enterprise, e. to assess Iraqi resistance, f. to provide analytics and assessment on media’s role in post-Saddam Iraq, and g. to define the US-led coalitions’ role in post Saddam Iraq. A number of other Intelligence Agencies such the “National Security Agency” (NSA), the “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency” (NGA), Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) etc. provided high-tech intelligence support and analytics to military planners and combatants in the Iraqi Battle field. Intelligence played a crucial part in the Operation Iraqi Freedom. Special Operations Forces (SOF) performed quick Search and rescue, while combating and destroying Iraqi missile systems that were capable of deploying WMD. The US-led air forces provided support to the ground forces in operations while ensuring air superiority over whole Iraq. Each of the US-led coalition operations were supported two strategies: “Command, Control, and Communications, Computers (C4), Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets, and the professionals who manage them within the Combined Forces Commander (CFC)”8. Indeed though C4I systems played an arguably finest role in the United States’ success, the ISR assets as well as the CFC professionals, at the operational level of war, experienced considerable fissures with regard to their aptitude to offer timely, correct, distilled, and actionable intelligence service to strategic military planners. This gap in the Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance strategy arose from the chasm between the “huge amounts of raw information being collected by sensors and the OIF intelligence effort’s ability to direct, collect, exploit, analyze, and disseminate fused intelligence products”9. The key issue that affected the ability of the advancing army was the Intelligence’s incapability to feed a fast-paced army with required support and planning for rapid maneuvers of the troops during OIF. The shortage of quick intelligence analysis capability is another. Also a lack of interoperability among different dependently and independently functioning bodies of a C4ISR system hindered a continuous stream of information through the intelligence cycle to war-fighters. Referring to the intelligence gap xxx notes, “The inability of supporting intelligence elements to quickly respond to demanding operational requirements and rapid maneuvers was exacerbated by a lack of intelligence analysis tools to swiftly track and correlate large amounts of data”10. References Bradley, Carl M., “Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance in Support of Operation Iraqi Freedom”, p. 2, October 28, 2011, available at http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA422709 CIA Report, “Support to Operation Iraqi Freedom”, October 28, 2011, available at https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/archived-reports-1/Ann_Rpt_2003/iraq.html Dale, Catherine. Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategies, Approaches, Results, and Issues for Congress. October 28, 2011, available at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL34387.pdf Knights, Michael. “Iraqi Freedom’ Displays the Transformation of US Air Power,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, v. 15, no. 5 (2003): 16-19. 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