In 2005, when the brigade I was part of got over to to Ramadi in 2005, coin doctrine wasn't written yet. And so we kind of had to figure it out on our own. You know, you read history, you see how it was done in the past and just use some common sense," he says. "Just an amazing thing about our American servicemen and women, they figure it out" He then googled a new counterinsurgency manual that didn't even get released at the time. That's what drove him toward helping broader conventional forces as they move into Iraq.