In 2011, Brennan Deveraux was a lieutenant on his first deployment. He was in Iraq, but the war there was in what everybody believed was its final stages. He felt like he had missed it and that his unit was part of, as he describes it, “closing up shop” on the US military involvement in the country.
And yet just five years later he was back, deployed to a small base in Baghdad called Union III. An artillery officer, Brennan worked in a small group known as a strike cell. He was the theater-level rocket artillery liaison for Operation Inherent Resolve, as the US military worked to support Iraqi security forces in their bid to wrest back control of vast swathes of territory seized by ISIS two years earlier. In practice, that meant he played a central role in prosecuting enemy targets by coordinating the fires of HIMARS rocket artillery. Over the course of the deployment, he fired more than five hundred rockets. In this episode of The Spear, he shares the story of one of those rockets and its target—an ISIS sniper team that threatened to wreak havoc on Iraqi forces working their way toward Mosul.
Brennan also wrote about this story and others in his forthcoming book, Exterminating ISIS: Behind the Curtain of a Technological War (Casemate, 2025). The book is an example of the type of combat memoirs that add nuance to readers’ understanding of a particular war and a particular time and place. It is also an example of the professional military writing that is undergoing a rejuvenation in the Army with the backing of the Harding Project, an initiative that was launched one year ago this week. After sharing the story of one fire mission in Iraq during this episode, Brennan describes both the professional and the personal motivations that encouraged him to write his book and shares advice for other members of the profession of arms who would like to contribute to the Army’s professional military discourse. For further advice, a special edition of Military Review has just been published, dedicated to the Harding Project’s work, detailing the importance of professional writing, and offering encouragement and guidance on how to get started.
You can listen to the full episode to hear Brennan’s story below, and don’t forget to subscribe to The Spear on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there, we would love it if you would take just a second to give the podcast a rating or leave a review.
Image credit: Sgt. 1st Class Steven Queen, US Army
I don't know how much a HIMARS cost, but I suspect it's a lot. (Same for the monitors, computers databases, etc. that no doubt go with the HIMARS system.) In contrast, what does it cost to recruit and train an Isis fighter? Osama bin Laden thought he could bankrupt the U.S. by luring us into a lengthy, expensive war in the Middle East. He was wrong (at least so far.) Osama had no idea of Modern Monetary Theory and our ability to simply print money to pay our bills. Since our goal is to eventually get the army out of the Middle East, and since China is now viewed as our biggest threat, it's pretty clear that the navy and marines will get most of the Defense Department money in the future. So it seems to me the army needs to find a less expensive way to fight in the future.