1.1: Getting Rid of the Hay
My morning was supposed to start with bacon and two hard boiled eggs. Instead, it started with a rocket attack that shut down the chow hall on FOB Warhorse in Diyala, Iraq.1 I was a new XO in Special Forces, having just joined the company three weeks before we deployed in 2008.
Dejected about my missed breakfast, I walked back to the company headquarters to discover one of the rockets had impacted right outside our compound walls. The operations center was abuzz. Most of the soldiers in the company were on their first tour, and the excitement which comes with the first time someone tries to kill you was still coursing through their veins.
I quickly learned one of our ODAs had also taken rockets inside their compound at FOB Gabe, a camp on the other side of the city.2 The team had recovered pieces of the fuselage, allowing us to determine the type of rockets used in the attack. Most of the rest of that day was uneventful.
Until I went to dinner. As the sun was setting, another barrage of rockets hit Warhorse. Just as I was about to get a plate of food, the KBR workers all went scrambling for the bunkers. Now thoroughly annoyed, I walked back to the SF compound and immediately asked our intel section what the hell was going on. They didn’t have any ideas, but they let me know FOB Gabe had been hit again as well.
I asked the team what we knew, and it wasn’t much. Apparently, the Iraqi Police had found eight more of the same 107mm rockets on metal rail launchers about 15 kilometers south of the city, just inside a Sunni enclave. A hasty google of the WEG (World Equipment Guide) came up with a range of only about 9 kilometers though. I asked what we’d gotten from the radar hits, but the answer was nothing conclusive.
I jumped on mIRC to see what I could find.3 The chat program was the best way to get information across the coalition, and ironically, software I’d used to pirate MP3s before Napster. I joined the fires channel and asked for the radar hits, getting the same answer: nothing conclusive. I was still hangry, so I asked the fires cell to just send me all the grids and then I booted up FalconView, a mapping app. After dropping all the grids onto the map, I drew two nine kilometer circles around the camps. Only six or so of the 40 radar points plotted in either of the circles, and only three were inside both. I discounted two subconsciously. They were both in full view of a lot of traffic and one of them was in plain view of the camp’s guards. If we were getting attacked from these spots, we were in real trouble.
Which left one grid. It was almost due east of Warhorse, and almost due north of Gabe. This setup brought me back to my days in Ar Ramadi. The insurgents there would often hit us at dawn and dusk and from a spot across the river that was almost due east. With the sun to help them set their azimuth, and a large enough camp to hit, the only thing they had to do was hastily work out the elevation for the rocket.
We passed the grid and the screen grabs from FalconView to the regimental headquarters who sent out a cavalry platoon. Once at the spot, they recovered the metal rails the insurgents had used. We didn’t catch the attackers, but we were able to pull the regimental hounds off the Sunnis. The rockets 15 kilometers to the south had been planted to drive us to think it was the Sunnis, but the actual attacks had come from solidly Shia terrain.
The regiment’s principal tool for information was PowerPoint, which is why they hadn’t found the rails. Because PowerPoint doesn’t do grids. It doesn’t integrate fires data. And PowerPoint is slow. Slow to make, slow to share, and slow to transcribe back into data. It also doesn’t share well across mIRC. KMZs do though.4 KMZs are data, and can integrate with other sources, painting a picture and helping you find answers you didn’t know you had.
As I told the intel NCOs in our headquarters, you don’t find needles in haystacks by looking for the needle. You do it by getting rid of the hay. When all you’re working with is PowerPoint, there’s no way to know what’s hay and what’s a needle.
FOB, pronounced like a key-fob, is generally a base large enough to have a chow hall. Smaller than that were typically called COPs, or combat outposts.
ODA - Operational Detachment Alpha, or Special Forces (SF) teams. The core is eight soldiers: two weapons sergeants (MOS 18B), two engineers (18C), two medics (18D), and two commo sergeants (18E). The 4-soldier leadership cell consists of an intel sergeant (18F), team warrant (180A), team sergeant (18Z), and team leader (18A), rounding out the remaining 12-members of detachment. The term ODA has a long convoluted history going back to World War 2. There are also ODBs, ODCs, an ODD, and ODGs.
mIRC - An Internet Relay Chat program created by British Programmer Khaled Mardam-Bey. I first encountered mIRC in 1998 when I began pirating mp3s. The program’s three biggest strengths are: 1) It’s incredibly small file size, which means you can run it straight off the desktop without even installing it, 2) it’s super easy to learn and configure, 3) You can configure scripts to automate all kinds of actions based off user input.
Keyhole markup language, or zipped XML files formatted to display on a map. The principal file format for sharing Google Earth data, and the principal export from almost all other mapping or COP programs.
I really enjoyed this vignette, empathized deeply with the hangriness, and what a strong rhetorical flair at the finish. Did you do anything to capture / codify and disseminate this process of cross application data analysis to your peers / higher (either at the time for this specific example, or at anytime in the future REF an analogous experience)? It seems like the logic of taking source data points (like radar hits from the fires cell) and bringing them down stream into a program where you can make sense of them would be an invaluable and repeatable process until a better suited program came to be. Were you a data advocate from the beginning? Did the value / career long relevancy / gravity of what you had done (making sense of data across programs (being the human outside of the computer (or box))) stand out to you at the time?