Col. Sean B. MacFarland, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, leads the Ready First Brigade in rendering the hand salute upon completion of the uncasing of the unit colors Mar. 6 at Ray Barracks in Friedberg, Germany. The colors were uncased during a Welcome Home Ceremony honoring Soldiers of the Ready First team, who recently returned from Iraq. (U.S. Army Photo by Sgt. Mark Patton, 1st Armored Division Public Affairs)
Colonel Sean MacFarland and the 1st Brigade Combat Team (1st AD) are back in Germany after a fourteen month deployment to Tal Afar and Ramadi. It was Col. MacFarland who Shaykh Sattar Abu Rishah turned to for help when the tribal shaykhs of Ramadi came under attack by Al-Qaeda. MNF-Iraq Commander General Petraeus has called MacFarland's counter-insurgency methods in Ramadi a blueprint for success to be disseminated throughout the forces in Iraq.
How did Col. MacFarland turn Ramadi around? Here's what he told Stars and Stripes' Matt Millham yesterday:
The innovations that we employed were really not Earth-shatteringly original or brilliant or anything like that. What we really did was execute our doctrine. We found where the enemy was strongest and we attacked the enemy with intelligence-led operations, establishing combat outposts to deny the enemy any kind of safe haven. At the same time we were working tribal engagement. We were looking for opportunities to begin reconstruction in areas that were secured.
At the same time we were doing that, we were working with the Iraqi army as aggressively as possible to fight alongside us and accelerate their progress toward independence. We began an aggressive program to increase the size of the Iraqi police force, and that effort was intertwined with our tribal engagement, which was also intertwined with our governance and economics operation.
Millham has more on Col. Macfarland and the Ready First Brigade homecoming and Ramadi success here, here, here and here. A tribute to the Ready First fallen is here (.pdf). The 1st Armored Division's website has more, too.
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Previous blogging at alphabet city on the Anbar Salvation Council:
