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

This book was recommended to me by a friend who also happens to be ex-SF and who has extensive combat and training experience. I thank him for the suggestion. I think this is the sort of book whose value depends in part on where you’re at going into it. While women like me were barred from the honor of serving, especially in combat arms, when I was young enough for my service to matter, I have had the privilege of studying the lessons of unconventional and guerrilla warfare extensively since the mid 1990s. Back then, while pursuing a doctorate in an unrelated subject, I had academic access to a great deal of excellent but neglected scholarship coming from the Army historical service and other places, much of which taught many of the show more general lessons of this book. And I’ve continued that study over the decades since. The author is certainly not wrong to point up the ongoing arrogance and amnesia one finds so often in Big Green and the highest levels of the United States government. I do think he is a bit off base in praising the “learning culture” of British armed forces as highly as he seems to, under emphasizing important differences between the Malayan Emergency and what became the Vietnam War. More importantly I think the 19 years of American combat involvement since this book was first published demonstrates a more fundamental truth about fighting insurgencies - no matter the level of tactical excellence achieved, you have to offer something the indigenous personnel want and believe will succeed and that they invest in, and do it early before your chances are lost forever (if you even have a chance). Tactical excellence is not a substitute for a viable strategic vision. Furthermore I have come to believe that some insurgencies are fundamentally literally incapable of being defeated by Western powers. We can change regimes, certainly. But the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq certainly drive the limits of regime change, and the unpleasant sequelae, home with an exclamation point.

One finds in this book an earnest ongoing optimism that maybe next time the United States can study harder and learn more and then it’ll win these kinds of wars. While learning is imperative and this book underscores several methods of doing so, I think the fundamental optimism about winning-with-homework is misplaced in certain conflicts.

So I think this is a good book, very much worth reading as part of inquiries into COIN and military learning theory at the operational level. It might seem like a revolutionary book depending on where you are coming from in your studies. For me it simply is a good book, not a great or revolutionary one. show less

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

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

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 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