Nagl, John A. 1966-

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NAGL, John A. 1966-

PERSONAL:

Born 1966. Education: West Point, graduated 1988; Oxford University, M. Phil., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Praeger, 88 Post Road West, P.O. Box 5007, Westport, CT 06881.

CAREER:

Writer and counterinsurgency consultant. Military service: U.S. Army, c. 1990—, became major; winner of Bronze Star.

WRITINGS:

Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Praeger (Westport, CT), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

U.S. Army Major John A. Nagl is a West Point graduate, a Rhodes scholar with a doctorate from Oxford University, a veteran of the Gulf War, and the author of the book Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife. As Peter Maass noted on ParaPundit.com, "while many military scholars were focusing on peacekeeping or the impact of high-tech weaponry, Nagl was drawn to a topic much less discussed in the 1990's: counterinsurgency." In September 2003, with the U.S. Army fighting insurgents after overthrowing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Nagl was sent to the country's Sunni Triangle with the Eighty-second Airborne Division to test, on the ground, the theories outlined in his book.

Nagl took the subtitle of Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam from a statement by T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who, as Lawrence of Arabia, led an Arab insurgency against Turkish forces during World War I. Lawrence once noted that the battle between conventional and guerrilla forces can be "'messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife,'" as Nicholas Blanford relayed in the Christian Science Monitor. Speaking with Blanford, Nagl remarked that winning over the insurgents was not his main objective in the so-called "hearts and minds" campaign. "'We don't want to win their minds,'" Nagl told Blanford. "'We want to win over the locals so that they can tell us who they are. That's the key, I think. And every sweet and soccer ball we hand out is a bullet in that fight.'"

In Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, which is based on Nagl's Ph.D. dissertation, he compares British and American approaches to recent guerrilla wars. Nagl points out the difference in the two campaigns: the Malaysian insurgency was led by ethnic Chinese who actually sustained themselves by stealing from and preying upon the fifteen percent of the population that was Chinese. The British managed to diffuse the situation by securing this minority population from the rebels and by promising independence. The events in Vietnam were different, however, as there existed a broad-based and ethnically cohesive insurgency that had a valid case against a corrupt government. The British were able to withdraw from Malaya after twelve years of war and leave a democratic society behind them; the Americans finally gave up on Vietnam after thirteen years of fighting and left it to fall to the communists. Reviewing Nagl's book in the Journal of Military History, John P. Cann noted that the author "takes a fresh look at the differences in the organizational culture of the British and U.S. armies, how this difference affected their respective approaches to Malaya and Vietnam, and how it contributed to victory for one and defeat for the other." According to Cann, Nagl concluded in his book that "small wars are not going away, and the U.S. Army had better learn how to fight them."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Christian Science Monitor, February 24, 2004, Nicholas Blanford, "Insurgent and Soldier: Two Views on Iraq Fight," p. 1.

Journal of Military History, July, 2003, John P. Cann, review of Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, p. 988.

New York Times Magazine, January 11, 2004, "Professor Nagl's War."