As the violence spiraled ever higher, the task force strove to keep pace. By 2006, the “Unblinking Eye” concept that began with Delta’s A Squadron and a single Predator in early 2004 had reached full fruition. At Flynn’s direction, the task force aimed to have up to three ISR aircraft watching a target simultaneously. Indeed, it often had enough of such aircraft over Baghdad and the major cities in Anbar that when a car bomb went off, analysts could pull the video feeds from aircraft overhead and watch them in reverse, to trace the car’s route back to its start point. The dynamo that McChrystal and Flynn had built was now operating almost on automatic. In August 2004, the task force had conducted eighteen missions. In August 2006 it conducted more than 300. Strike forces now aimed to conduct the “analyze” and “disseminate” parts of the F3EAD process within an hour of coming off target. “McChrystal would say, ‘We have to operate at the speed of war,’” said a Ranger officer. “‘Faster, faster, faster.’”
The task force was growing. It routinely included a “white” Special Forces company that specialized in direct action missions. Each Special Forces group had such a company, called a combatant commander’s in-extremis force, or CIF (pronounced “siff”), because it was designed to give a regional combatant commander an on-call counterterrorist force in case the JSOC task force was unavailable. The CIFs, which had a training relationship with Delta, all rotated through Iraq in support of McChrystal’s task force. In 2006, McChrystal also gained an 82nd Airborne Division paratroop battalion, known as Task Force Falcon. With its reinforcements thrown into the fray, his task force continued its furious pace through the fall. But one of its most notable fights was a defensive one. On November 27, a daytime air-vehicle interdiction mission targeting an Al Qaeda in Iraq foreign fighter facilitator went awry when an RPG downed an AH-6 between Taji and Lake Tharthar about fifty kilometers northwest of Baghdad. (The assault force was en route to a larger site in the desert to wait for the target’s vehicle when this happened.)
Outnumbered and outgunned by insurgents who arrived in truck after truck, the assault force found itself with no shelter in the flat desert. The force’s remaining AH-6, piloted by CW5 Dave Cooper, did much to hold them off, repeatedly strafing the insurgents. Cooper was credited with turning the tide of the battle, and later received a Distinguished Service Cross for his efforts. The ground force remained at the site until darkness, but tragedy struck when an F-16 supporting the embattled force flew too low and crashed, killing its pilot.
Other raids that month focused on Ansar al-Sunnah, a Kurdish-led Islamist group that was allied with, but not formally part of, Al Qaeda in Iraq. The Coalition’s efforts to reconcile some Sunni insurgent groups, thus isolating Al Qaeda in Iraq, included an effort to divide Ansar al-Sunnah from AQI. But although JSOC (and much of the rest of the U.S. national security community) had focused almost exclusively on Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, in particular on Al Qaeda in Iraq, since 2004, a different threat was emerging. Arguably a greater threat to U.S. forces and interests in the region than Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, it was an enemy that would hark back to JSOC’s birth, but for which its Iraq task force was singularly unprepared: Iran."