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Loading... Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (original 2002; edition 2005)by John A. Nagl, Peter J. Schoomaker (Foreword)
Work InformationLearning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by John A. Nagl (2002)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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. no reviews | add a review
History.
Military.
Nonfiction.
"[A] highly regarded counterinsurgency manual.".
HTML: Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Naglâ??a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the conflict in Iraqâ??considers the now crucial question of how armies adapt to changing circumstances during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared. Through the use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both engagements, Nagl compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960 with what developed in the Vietnam War from 1950 to 1975. In examining these two events, Nagl argues that organizational culture is key to the ability to learn from unanticipated conditions, a variable which explains why the British army successfully conducted counterinsurgency in Malaya and why the American army failed to do so in Vietnam, treating the war instead as a conventional conflict. Nagl concludes that the British army, because of its role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics created by its history and national culture, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. With a new preface reflecting on the author's combat experience in Iraq, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife is a timely examination of the lessons of previous counterinsurgency campaigns that will be hailed by both military leaders and interested civilians No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)959.504History and Geography Asia Southeast Asia Malaysia; Singapore; BruneiLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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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