as we all know, the difficult part in iraq and afghanistan was not taking the regime down to figuring out what happened afterwards and in the immediate aftermath of iraq, we saw chaos and a rise to the insurgency that is fueled by the saddam hussein baathist party. , so the special operations are called in to do ban hunting and specifically defined his sons. they did eventually track down both of them and curious saddam after he's captured by the special operators and it is hoped initially that's the sort of decapitation strike is going to put a lid on the uncertainty

that it's going to sort of fall apart now that he's gone. unfortunately, there are others that are ready and willing to take up the charge, so we find ourselves in thensurgent he campaigned. around this time we have general stanley mcchrystal coming in as a commander and the task force 714 that he sets up in iraq and at the time it was not particularly active and there were still a lot of people that fought the forces should not be giving the daily operations. they should focus on only the big targets. they decided that we cannot do that and it's not going to work so he looks for ways to ramp up operation and does so very effectively and we can see from here it was up to 300 in 2006

and this is made possible by the advances in communications technology. they are using cell phones and computers without a lot of thought as to the fact that they are getting intercepted. so quite impressive and a lot of people think that it is at this scale we cannot affect the insurgency. we also have another term people sometimes get confused about, but it's basically the operators that are not a part so it is mainly the special forces and navy seals at this time. they also decide that they want to do this and go out and hold down bad guys in the middle of the night and this is a move away from their more traditional goal of working with local forces, local populations and will come under fire from a number of the community for taking them away from that.

so wt we think of this counterinsurgency typically workinascorinsurgey typically working with local forces to secure the population is actually done mainly by conventional forces and we will see over time there is better collaboration between the special operations and general purpose forces as we call them because initially a lot of them are running around doing things by themselves thinking that this is going to win the war and they ticked off a lot of the commanders that had to go and explain to the population would have happened and clean up the mess. over time they learned to work together and what they did could be mutually reinforcing and there was a mess in the myth ine counterinsurgency that you don't need to actually capture and that's falsthat's false that yot of division of labor were the special operators would go in and do the capture and killing of the leadership targets and

they would do more population security industry and retail targets. ..