Fog of War, and Refueling at 25,000 Feet

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 22, 2006 — -- We awake to the Fog of War.

No, not a car bomb, IED attack, or U.S. troops engaging insurgents, but literally the FOG OF WAR.

It is pea soup outside, we can't see a hundred feet in front of us and our C-17 aircraft that was supposed to be on ground, loaded and ready for us to board by 9 a.m. is circling the Iraqi skies above, waiting for the fog to lift so it can land.

What would Rumsfeld do?

We have this sinking feeling that we will be here for a while, and our evening arrival at Andrews Air Force Base looks more like it will be early Saturday morning. Good thing we had to wake up early and drop off our luggage by 5:30a.m. only to have it sit on a truck for hours and hours.

We are supposed to fly to Mosul, where new Defense Secretary Gates is to receive an intelligence and operations brief and meet some troops before returning to the States, but the weather gods have other plans for us.

Gates meets with a few soldiers from Task Force 2-15 of the 10th Mountain Division who are leading a model "embedded training program" where U.S. Army soldiers "embed" with Iraqi army units.

This task force has 400 men spread through an Iraqi brigade, advising them, teaching them, training them, even living with them. They hope the Iraqi soldiers will be ready to succeed on their own in a year's time.

Lt Col Bob Morschauser, a member of the task force, believes the partnering is successful and he told the defense secretary he thought more of it needed to be done.

"The big thing is confidence," he says. "They are gaining confidence rapidly," learning tactics, techniques and procedures of the U.S. Army.

There were supposed to be a half-dozen Marines at the meeting, too, but they couldn't get here due to the weather.

Gates receives a briefing from Combined Joint Task Force Troy, which is the "counter-IED" unit -- they develop ideas and technologies to defeat the IEDs that have become such a devastating force in this war.

After the briefing, some of the unit's soldiers give the defense secretary a demonstration of counter-IED equipment and he gets to see first-hand the latest tools the military has to try to suppress these deadly weapons.