Captain Luis Montalvan describes his service in Iraq starting in September, 2003, when he was a scout platoon leader with 30 to 40 soldiers assigned to handle 100 kilometers of the border with Syria including a major border crossing site, an “absolutely absurd” assignment that “drives to the heart of the lack of troops that we had there from the get-go.” In 2007, Monalvan was invited to join the Iraq Planning Group of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He briefed them on the enormous extent of corruption in Iraq. He also wrote a New York Times op-ed piece on the same subject. “Thirty to 50 percent of Iraqi security forces on the payrolls are ghosts—they don’t exist,” he says, and their salaries go to cronies at the top of the Iraqi government. Montalvan says that “when you follow the crumb trail with respect to Iraqi corruption, it leads to American corruption.”