John A. NaglCritiques

Good book

I think it was more about organizational culture than counter insurgency, it seemed like it just happened to use a COIN comparison situation to get this point across.

i guess the army has gotten better at being adaptive and allowing innovation, but it's still frustratingly slow

oh well..."be the change you want to see" -Ghandi

With apologies to the author, I had to stop reading about half way through this book. Unfortunately, some of impact of Nagl's book was undercut by already having read about the General Petraeus approach to counterinsurgency in Iraq. Much of the Petraeus approach apparently uses the lessons and understanding outlined by Nagl in "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, so the book, and its lessons from history, weren't really new enough nor groundbreaking enough to hold my interest. Because of that, it seemed dry and repetitive to me, and my interest faded. I think we all saw how poorly prepared we were to handle political and civil unrest in Iraq, and we subsequently came to understand the benefits of the counterinsurgency as generally credited to General Petraeus. So the value in Nagl's writing seems validated. However, my interest in the subject just wasn't strong enough to sustain me, and I put the book down, never to pick it up again.

Really good, just like the new COIN field manual, and probably ultimately just as dangerously misleading.

The author could have make his point succinctly with far less words. Once he made his case, he seemed to rattle on and on. I'm sure to military aficionados, the detail would have been more boring but tome, it was just boring.

An insider tale of the adaptation process the US Army had to undergo to attain a victory in Iraq. I found extremely interesting the significant role played by Rhodes scholars and other brilliant minds, military or civilian.

My only complain is with the last quarter of the book being a constant repetition of points the author have already made before without adding any extra data, the aforementioned part of the book also includes a two paragraph simplistic explanation of China behavior in the UN security council is strangely out of place in a book full of well based arguments.

Really good, just like the new COIN field manual, and probably ultimately just as dangerously misleading.

Erudite and academic although with a dry writing style Nagl wrote what is considered to be a classic in counterinsurgency. He tends to repeat the contrast between the British experience and the Americans in Vietnam although he does rightly point out the insights that effective counterinsurgency tactics require.

Good perspective on COIN ops.

Not quite a modern Kitson, Nagl concentrates more on a psychological and sociological analysis of the ability (or, to be frank, the inability) of the British and American armies to learn lessons from the conflicts in Malaya and Vietnam, respectively. He conducts a detailed analysis of the historical phases of each conflict and the particular military and political drivers that contributed to the observed behaviour patterns.

Much of the tactical analysis you see in similar books is missing or weak, as he concentrates on very high level 'business' processes (this may be due to both wars being primarily infantry affairs and Col Nagl being a cavalryman.) His view of Nirvana is the "learning institution", similar the sort of cyclical self-review popularised within industrial continuous improvement methodologies and how this can apply within the strongly hierarchical environment of the conventional or mainstream military.

The paperback edition has a short preface reflecting his experiences from a year (2003/04) serving in Iraq.