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

John A. Nagl (Author), Peter J. Schoomaker (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226567702 | ISBN-13: 978-0226567709 | Publication Date: September 15, 2005 | Edition: 1

Invariably, armies are accused of preparing to fight the previous war. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl—a veteran of both Operation Desert Storm and the current conflict in Iraq—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—the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine cover story by Peter Maass—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 but 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.

(20060115)

Editorial Reviews

Review

 "[A] highly regarded counterinsurgency manual."—Michael Schrage, Washington Post

(Michael Schrage Washington Post 20060401)

"The success of DPhil papers by Oxford students is usually gauged by the amount of dust they gather on library shelves. But there is one that is so influential that General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq, is said to carry it with him everywhere. Most of his staff have been ordered to read it and he pressed a copy into the hands of Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Baghdad in December. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (a title taken from T.E. Lawrence — himself no slouch in guerrilla warfare) is a study of how the British Army succeeded in snuffing out the Malayan insurgency between 1948 and 1960 — and why the Americans failed in Vietnam. . . . It is helping to transform the American military in the face of its greatest test since Vietnam. "—Tom Baldwin, Times (UK)

(Tom Baldwin Times (UK) 20060320)

"An extremely relevant text. Those interested in understanding the difficulties faced by Coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, or who want to grasp the intricacies of the most likely form of conflict for the near future, will gain applicable lessons. [Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife] offers insights about how to mold America''s armed forces into modern learning organizations. As the Pentagon ponders its future in the Quadrennial Defense Review, one can only hope that Nagl''s invaluable lesson in learning and adapting is being exploited."—Frank G. Hoffman, Proceedings of the United State Naval Institute

(Frank G. Hoffman eedings of the United State Naval Institue 20060101)

"Brutal in its criticism of the Vietnam-era Army as an organization that failed to learn from its mistakes and tried vainly to fight guerrilla insurgents the same way it fought World War II. In [Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife], Col. Nagl, who served a year in Iraq, contrasts the U.S. Army''s failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s. The difference: The British, who eventually prevailed, quickly saw the folly of using massive force to annihilate a shadowy communist enemy. . . . Col. Nagl''s book is one of a half dozen Vietnam histories -- most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam -- that are changing the military''s views on how to fight guerrilla wars. . . .The tome has already had an influence on the ground in Iraq. Last winter, Gen. Casey opened a school for U.S. commanders in Iraq to help officers adjust to the demands of a guerrilla-style conflict in which the enemy hides among the people and tries to provoke an overreaction. The idea for the training center, says Gen. Casey, came in part from Col. Nagl''s book, which chronicles how the British in Malaya used a similar school to educate British officers coming into the country. ''Pretty much everyone on Gen. Casey''s staff had read Nagl''s book,'' says Lt. Col. Nathan Freier, who spent a year in Iraq as a strategist. A British brigadier general says that ''Gen. Casey carried the book with him everywhere.''"—Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal

(Greg Jaffe Wall Street Journal 20051201)

"As the United States enters its fifth year of the war on terror, military leaders are conducting low-intensity and counter-insurgency operations in several different areas around the world. Of the different books produced on this subject, LTC John Nagl''s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife is an absolute must for those who want to gain valuable insight on some of the hard lessons of fighting an insurgency before actually getting on the ground. The book expertly combines theoretical foundations of insurgencies with detailed historical lessons of Malaya and Vietnam to produce some very profound and topical implications for current military operations. The true success of the book is that Nagl discusses all of these complex issues in an easy-to-follow and straight-forward manner. . . . I read this book upon returning from my tour in Iraq after commanding a company on the ground for a year. I was amazed at how insightful and ''true'' the conclusions were and wished that I had read it before I deployed."—Nick

Ayers, Armor

 

(Nick Ayers Armor 20051101)

"Nagl, currently a Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, focuses on organizational culture as the key to defeating insurgencies: successful militaries learn and adapt."—"Recommended Reading on Counterinsurgency," Nathaniel Fick, Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute

(Nathaniel Fick Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute 20060816)

"The capacity to adapt is always a key contributor to military success. Nagl combines historical analysis with a comprehensive examination of organisational theory to rationalise why, as many of his readers will already intuitively sense, ''military organisations often demonstrate remarkable resistance to doctrinal change'' and fail to be as adaptive as required. His analysis is helpful in determining why the U.S. Army can appear so innovative in certain respects, and yet paradoxically slow to adapt in others."—Nigel R F Aylwin-Foster, Military Review

(Nigel R F Aylwin-Foster Military Review 20061119)

"One key army text is Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife by Lt. Col. John Nagl, which focuses on counterinsurgency lessons from the 1950s war in Malaya and from the Vietnam War. The title phrase was used by Lawrence of Arabia in describing the messy and time-consuming nature of defeating insurgents. Nagl focuses on the ability of armies to learn from mistakes and adapt their strategy and tactics—skills in which he finds U.S. forces lacking. He shows how the British in Malaya were nimble enough to defeat a communist insurgency, while the U.S. military in Vietnam clung to a failing doctrine of force. Sadly, the Pentagon had not absorbed such insights before invading Iraq. Nagl himself says he learned a lot more during a one-year tour in Iraq. His ideas, if applied back in mid-2003, might have checked the growth of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq and prevented Sunni Islamists from provoking a civil war with Iraqi Shiites. It may be too late for the Army''s new doctrine to stop Iraq from falling apart....It''s past time to make Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife required reading at the White House."—Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer

(Trudy Rubin Philadelphia Inquirier )

"As the Baker/Hamilton club considers America''s options in the Middle East, its members would do well to browse currently hot books on counterinsurgency [including] Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam...Stimulating, thoughtful and serious."—Michael Ledeen, The Jerusalem Post

(The Jerusalem Post Michael Leeden )

Book Description

Compares performances of the British and U.S. Armies in Southeast Asia to isolate key variables that allowed or prevented successful adaptation to events on the ground.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226567702
• ISBN-13: 978-0226567709
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (62 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #33,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > History > Asia > Southeast Asia
  • #46 in Books > History > Asia > Vietnam > Vietnam War

More About the Author

Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. He led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm and served as the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom. A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Nagl earned his doctorate from Oxford University, taught national security studies at West Point, and served as Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and was on the writing team that produced the Army's new Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

128 of 134 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very enjoyable PhD Thesis, December 8, 2005

By 

C. Davis (Hanover, MD) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Paperback)

Exceptionally well written book. If this reviewer understands the forward correctly, Maj Nagl (now LCOL) wrote this book as his PhD thesis at Oxford University. However, it reads like a popular and best-selling history and not with a dry stilted academic tone.

Likewise, this book is exceedingly well researched. Despite feeling fairly well-read on military history in general and Vietnam in particular, I must have jotted down 20 - 30 books for future reference and study. One can certainly see that LCOL Nagl earned his PhD at Oxford.

The best part of the book is that it is not really about fighting a counter-insurgency, but rather about how institutions learn (or fail to learn) when confronted with radical change. In this sense, the British come off much better in the Malay experience than America does in Vietnam.

However, the book has several weaknesses.

First, the book has several errors of fact in the examples of the Chinese Civil War. These are not glaring errors, but since LCOL Nagl uses the Chinese Civil War as a basis to begin his discussion of the Malay conflict, they are relevant. Strangely, the revolutionary doctrine that Mao exports more closely resembles what LCOL Nagl reports vice what actually happened so, perhaps, for the purpose of this book, this failing is an academic one.

Second, Nagl implies that only had we followed all the great ideas the British had, we could have easily won in Vietnam. This is not knowable and may ultimately be false. The conflict in Vietnam was far more violent than the one in Malaya. Likewise the Viet Minh and North Vietnamese Army had several advantages that the Chinese Terrorists (CTs) in Malaya did not. Just a short listing of those are: (1) an effective standing Army, (2) large and powerful allies who provided technical and logistic support, (3) political and geographical points of refuge beyond the reach of the United States, and (4) an enemy (the regime in South Vietnam) that were a religious minority (Catholic) attempting to rule over a majority (Buddhists). Indeed, in Malaya, the CT's were the ethnic minority.

Third, while the best part of the book is the assessment of how a large bureaucracy learns, these ideas are not spelled out to this reader's satisfaction. The question of how an agency learns is not answered adequately.

Overall, this book is an excellent read and raises many important questions. However, it falls a bit short in providing adequate answers to these questions.

80 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nagl wrote the book on counterinsurgency - before the current war in Iraq, August 22, 2005

By 

Mark Steele (PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Paperback)

How does an army learn to fight an effective counterinsurgency? Sound relevant to today's headlines? John Nagl asked this question before it was "cool" - before the pundits of CNN or MSNBC knew how to spell "counterinsurgency". This book - Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife - is his answer. John is a scholar and a soldier who combines academic prowess and firsthand experience in counterinsurgency. LTC John Nagl is a West Point graduate (and in the interests of disclosure, a classmate of the reviewer), an armor officer, a Rhodes Scholar, a former instructor of International Affairs at West Point, and a veteran of the insurgency in Iraq.

The insurgency in Iraq had not begun when the hardcover edition of his book came out in 2002. Unfortunately, it's not at all certain that the people who opened the current war in Iraq read it. This 2nd edition includes a new author's preface discussing the relationship between his earlier scholarship and his recent combat experiences in Iraq. He candidly discusses what he now thinks of his own work based upon his first-hand experience with insurgency.

The depth of LTC Nagl's research is evident in every chapter and should satisfy the rigor of academia while, at the same time, his writing style is clear, concise, and leaves little doubt as to his reasoning. To be successful in an age of insurgencies, Nagl concludes that the Army "will have to make the ability to learn to deal with messy, uncomfortable situations an integral part" of its organizational culture. It must, per T.E. Lawrence, be comfortable eating soup with a knife. Victory in a fluid insurgency requires the ability to learn and to adapt and may even require differing victory conditions, organizations, and core competencies depending upon the context.

Nagl's own experiences have only hammered home the truth of this necessity. His unit was required to change its equipment, its organization, and develop new core competencies to transform from a tank battalion focused on a Soviet-style armored threat into a counterinsurgency (see "Professor Nagl's War" in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, Jan. 11, 2004). They integrated people and tools not normally found in a battalion task force in conventional battle (such as Civil Affairs and Counterintelligence teams - see "Soldier Uses Wits to Hunt Insurgents" by Greg Jaffe in the Wall Street Journal, Sep. 10, 2004). They hunted the enemy while at the same time acting as impromptu diplomats, aid workers, military and police trainers, and tribal mediators. This experience in Iraq was what Nagl describes as the most intense learning experience of his life.

This book was worth it - without the new information - as a hardcover at $89.95. At $17 in paperback, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" should be on the shelf of every American interested in the current situation in Iraq and in how the US can prevail.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Timely and Relevant, June 11, 2003

By 

"mkc3tech" (Chester Springs, PA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Hardcover)

My own multiple interests in organizational redesign, learning and adaptation, and national security issues led me to read this book. MAJ Nagl is an armor officer, a Rhodes Scholar, and a former instructor of International Affairs at West Point. His book, Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaysia and Vietnam: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, discusses the way armies learn within the frameworks of the British experience with counterinsurgency in Malaya and the American experience in Vietnam. It is particularly timely as the army finds itself in a global war against shadowy networks more reminiscent of insurgencies than conventional armies. These networks have turned the "rules" upside down. Networks that can change direction at will or that can go in different directions simultaneously are not easily defeated by bureaucratic juggernauts that require fifteen years to field a new weapon system or that still apply failed tactics from thirty years ago. Victory in multiple, rapidly changing environments requires the ability to learn and to adapt and may even require differing victory conditions, organizations, and core competencies depending upon the context.

MAJ Nagl presents a twofold thesis. First, the British Army developed a successful counterinsurgency doctrine in Malaya due to its performance as a learning institution. Second, the American Army failed to do the same in Vietnam and in fact actively resisted the necessity of learning to fight a new sort of war. But what is organizational learning? Learning theorists tend to recognize the inherently iterative nature of the learning process whether they characterize it using a simple model such as Boyd's OODA loop or Ackoff's more complex organizational learning and adaptation model. To develop his thesis, the author first looks at Richard Downie's model of the learning cycle as applied to the development of doctrine [1]. This model is more complex than the OODA cycle and less complex than some other models. Overall, Downie's model provides a reasonable framework for this study. MAJ Nagl then evaluates each army's experience using a set of questions to measure the effectiveness of each as a learning institution.

To answer these questions, the author provides a summary history of insurgency itself, a description of the historical context in which each army's organizational culture developed, and the details of the respective British and American experiences in Vietnam. He finally sums up his conclusions in a "lessons learned" chapter that provides recommendations to foster learning within the army.

Largely due to its historical context, the British army developed an organizational culture characterized by a focus on limited war, diverse, global experience, a decentralized organization, and doctrinal flexibility. In contrast, American military history led to an organizational culture focused on absolute victory, large wars characterized by technology and overwhelming firepower, and political and cultural naivete.

After establishing the historical context for these very different organizational cultures, MAJ Nagl described in detail their specific experiences in Malaya and Vietnam. The British army in Malaya went through two distinct phases in evolution as a learning institution. During the first phase, the army was still focused on its most recent experience in conventional war in World War II and Korea despite the presence of a significant number of officers with experience in "small wars". This hindered effective learning in the face of the insurgency. During the second phase, the British army developed fully as a learning organization. The key difference between these two phases was the leadership imposed by General Miles Templer and his recognition that victory meant political victory as well as operational and tactical victory. He fostered a climate of innovation that ran the gamut from free primary schooling for children of all ethnicities (Malay, Indian, and Chinese) to extensive use of intelligence, clandestine operations, and psychological warfare to the steady development of a government capable of taking over after independence. The combination of these innovations enabled the forces fighting the insurgents to truly win the "hearts and minds" of the people of Malaya and to remove the fish (the insurgents) from the water (the people). Coupled with these innovations, and probably one of the keys to their effectiveness, was a limitation on the use of overwhelming firepower and the subordination of the military to the political.

In contrast, the author effectively makes the case that the US Army in Vietnam failed to develop as a learning organization and, in fact, actively resisted the adaptations necessary to develop an effective counterinsurgency doctrine. MAJ Nagl cites ample evidence that the military refused to listen to its own civilian leadership when it called for a more politically-sensitive approach to counterinsurgency, that it rejected internal studies pointing out its own flaws and refused to learn from them, and that it did not foster tactical and operational innovation but, instead, relied upon superior technology and overwhelming firepower even when these could prove counterproductive. The US approach largely lost the "hearts and minds" of the people and lost the war politically and, ultimately, militarily.

The depth of the author's research is evident in every chapter and should satisfy the rigor of academia while, at the same time, the writing style is clear, concise, and leaves little doubt as to the author's reasoning. Overall, MAJ Nagl has made an impressive contribution to the study of organizational learning that will prove valuable to anyone interested in these concepts as well as those for whom there is no substitute for victory. This study is especially relevant today. One must wonder, for example, if the Army, 10 years after Mogadishu, has developed effective doctrine for fighting on urban terrain in the developing world or has merely chosen to avoid that fight and to remain unprepared for an enemy who wisely uses terrain to avoid superior technology and firepower. To be successful in an age of "small" wars, Nagl concludes that the Army "will have to make the ability to learn to deal with messy, uncomfortable situations an integral part" of its organizational culture. It must, per T.E. Lawrence, be comfortable eating soup with a knife.