Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam | John A. Nagl | counterinsurgency reading for military engineers

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Learning to Eat So...

	Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam John A. Nagl University Of Chicago Press, 2005 - 280 pages average customer review:based on 51 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Not just about COIN operations

I'm not going to address the specific counter-insurgency tactics discussed in this book. There are plenty of other books that address such things. (David Galula's book "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice" is a good one)

This book shines because it addresses how armies adapt to new combat situations. Armies that can adapt and encourage creativity tend to do well in unfamiliar combat zones. Armies that are hidebound and dogmatic tend to do poorly.

counterinsurgency reading for military engineers

"What does Nagl propose that is any different than Galula, Trinquier, or any of the other classic authors of counterinsurgency warfare?" was the question a recent graduate of the Command and General Staff College posed to me after I had spent an evening reading this book whose title, quoted from T.E. Lawrence, describes the slow and messy nature of counterinsurgency operations.

That was a fair question because as many students of counterinsurgency are aware, these works often present overarching concepts (legitimacy, commitment, intelligence, etc) and then leave the reader struggling to draw his own conclusions on how they may be applied to a given contemporary military operation.

However, I found an answer to the question in Nagl's premise that it is in the processes, not the concepts where one finds the key to defeating insurgencies. Nagl supports this premise by offering the reader a process used throughout the book to examine the decisions and actions taken or not taken by militaries in their effort to become counterinsurgency learning organizations.

If the use of a systemic, iterative, organizational learning process like the one Nagl employs sounds familiar, it should. Two recent Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth Commanding Generals have forwarded a similar construct called "The Engine of Change," that is being put to use throughout our Army to support coalition counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Specifically, military engineers may find Nagl's work particularly familiar because it allows for structured thought while examining emerging counterinsurgency doctrine. After introducing the reader with his methodology in the early chapters, Nagl demonstrates how it can be applied to analyze the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice during the British Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960, and again with the doctrine the United States developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975.

At the conclusion of the Malayan Emergency and Vietnam War analyses, Nagl leaves the reader well positioned to personalize and apply this approach for immediate use in military transition teams, provincial reconstruction teams, and full spectrum operations.

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Excellent Book

Nagl wrote an excellent book on contrasting the success in Malaysia with the failure in Vietnam.

The jacket mentions that he's currently serving in Iraq, so it will be interesting to see what his take on that conflict will be in a couple of years.

Good but is it applicable

This is a good study of the military institutions in Britian and the U.S. The weakness of the study lies in the cases, Malaya and Vietnam. Malaya was an insurgency that had its base in a foriegn population, were the insurgents in vietnam were of local nationals. this difference could play a large part in why the british were successful. besides this the book has great insight into how militaries learn and adapt to their situations.

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