Units
The Highlander Brigade in Iraq, 2009: 4th BCT, 1st Armored Division
In April 2009 the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division, known within the Army as the Highlander Brigade, was preparing to deploy from Fort Bliss, Texas, to southern Iraq. Roughly 4,000 soldiers were involved. The commanding officer was Colonel Peter A. Newell, and the brigade was going with a designation no formation had carried before: it was to be the first Advise and Assist Brigade sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The announcement was reported at the time by Richard S. Lowry, a military historian and author of Marines in the Garden of Eden and The Gulf War Chronicles, and the report was later cited in reference accounts of the brigade’s history. This page sets out what that deployment was, who led it, and why it marked a change in how the Army was using its brigades in Iraq.
The unit and its commander
The 1st Armored Division’s 4th Brigade Combat Team was one of the formations created in the Army’s modular reorganisation of the 2000s, when the division stopped being the unit of account for deployments and the brigade, with its own reconnaissance, artillery, engineers, signals and logistics attached permanently, became the standard deployable package. The brigade was stationed at Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, and its soldiers’ families lived in the El Paso community; Newell said publicly that the brigade expected to spend about a year in Iraq and then return there.
Newell was not new to Iraq. In 2004 he had commanded the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry, a mechanised infantry battalion of the 1st Infantry Division that led the assault into Fallujah in November 2004 during Operation Phantom Fury, and whose soldiers also patrolled one of the most violent cities in northern Iraq during the same tour. Five years later he was taking a brigade to the same country with an almost opposite task.
The mission: security force assistance
The Highlander Brigade’s stated purpose in southern Iraq was to assist the Iraqi government and the people of the southern provinces in building a stable environment, and to do so by working alongside Iraqi institutions instead of in front of them. The brigade would collaborate with Provincial Reconstruction Teams, Military Transition Teams and Police Training Teams, so that diplomatic, informational, economic and military effort could be brought together in support of the Iraqi provincial governments.
The Army’s term for this is security force assistance. The Defense Department’s Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance defined it, in the language quoted at the time, as the unified action of the joint, inter-agency, intergovernmental and multinational community to generate, employ, sustain and assist host-nation or regional security forces in support of a legitimate authority. Stripped of the vocabulary, it meant that the brigade’s success would be measured by what Iraqi army, police and provincial officials could do at the end of the year, not by what the brigade had done itself.
Newell put the emphasis on the individual soldier. The key, he said, was harnessing the capacity of the American soldier to adapt to different environments, and more than ever the opinion of the young sergeant counted: what a sergeant experienced while dealing with the local population would shape the decisions of a brigade commander. The brigade would still be trained and equipped to protect itself and to conduct combat operations if it had to. The intent, though, was assistance.
How the brigade trained for it
A brigade going to hold ground trains against an opposing force at a combat training centre. A brigade going to advise a provincial government has to train against a different problem, and the Highlander Brigade’s preparation was unusual for an Army formation. It included exercises with the US Department of State, the US Department of Agriculture and the US Agency for International Development; with the city management offices of Austin and El Paso, Texas, on the practical workings of municipal government; with the US Border Patrol; and participation in the Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peace programme run by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
The reasoning, as Newell explained it, was that training with civilian government agencies in the United States would let the brigade work efficiently with the Provincial Reconstruction Teams it would meet in Iraq, whose staff came from exactly those kinds of agencies. A brigade staff that had sat with a city manager in El Paso would understand more quickly what a provincial council in southern Iraq was trying to do.
Why 2009 was the turning point
The context was the security agreement between the United States and Iraq, which came into force on 1 January 2009. It required American combat forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities, villages and localities by 30 June 2009 and set 31 December 2011 as the date by which all US forces were to leave the country. Newell described the advise-and-assist mission as the way forward to meet the conditions of that agreement.
That is what made the Highlander Brigade’s deployment a marker. Brigades sent to Iraq in the surge of 2007 and 2008 had been sent to take and hold ground. Brigades sent in 2009 were being sent into a drawdown, to make Iraqi forces and provincial governments capable of holding it themselves, and the Advise and Assist Brigade designation was the Army’s way of saying so in the unit’s orders. Later rotations used the same model until the withdrawal was completed at the end of 2011.
Brigade names and how to trace them
Army brigades carry informal names alongside their numbered designations. Highlander attached to the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, and it was used by the unit, by the local press in El Paso and by the brigade’s own public channels during the deployment, which its families could follow through the social media accounts the unit ran for the purpose. For anyone tracing the formation’s history, the numbered designation and the parent division are the reliable identifiers; the nickname is useful for finding contemporary coverage and unreliable as a key across the reorganisations of the 2000s, in which brigades were converted, activated and inactivated in large numbers.
A deployment announcement records that a named formation was ordered to a theatre in a window, under a named commander, with a stated mission. What it cannot record is how the year went. For the Highlander Brigade the announcement is the point at which the Army’s shift from fighting in Iraq to assisting Iraq acquired a unit, a commander and a date.
Questions and answers
What was the Highlander Brigade?
The 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division, based at Fort Bliss, Texas. Highlander is the brigade's informal name. In 2009 it deployed to southern Iraq under Colonel Peter A. Newell as the first brigade designated an Advise and Assist Brigade.
What is an Advise and Assist Brigade?
A brigade combat team that deploys with its full combat structure but with security force assistance as its primary mission: partnering with host-nation army and police units, provincial reconstruction teams and transition teams, and helping a provincial government establish security, rather than conducting independent combat operations. The 2009 Iraq rotations were the first to use the designation.
Why did the mission change in 2009?
The US-Iraq security agreement came into force on 1 January 2009. It required American combat forces to leave Iraqi cities by the end of June 2009 and set the end of 2011 as the date for full withdrawal. Brigades deploying in 2009 were therefore sent to support Iraqi forces and provincial governments during a drawdown, not to take over security themselves.