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

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

Book Description

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

 "[A] highly regarded counterinsurgency manual."

(Michael Schrage Washington Post 20060115)

"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) 20060328)

"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 eedings of the United State Naval Institue 20060401)

"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 20060320)

"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 20060101)

"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 20051201)

"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 20051101)

"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 Inquirier 20060816)

"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."

(The Jerusalem Post Michael Leeden 20061119)

About the Author

Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl is a Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Nagl led a tank platoon in the First Cavalry Division in Operation Desert Storm, taught national security studies at West Point's Department of Social Sciences, and served as the Operations Officer of Task Force 1-34 Armor in the First Infantry Division in Khalidiyah, Iraq.

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: 6.2 x 0.8 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #2 in Books > History > Asia > Malaysia
  • #34 in Books > History > Asia > Southeast Asia
  • #71 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > International & World Politics > Asian

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

135 of 142 people found the following review helpful

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

By C. Davis VINE™ VOICE

Format: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.

82 of 89 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

Format: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.

39 of 45 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Vietnam, Malaya and Iraq March 22, 2006

By Michael Snyder

Format:Paperback

While I enjoyed the erudite writing and the definite research in this book, I was disappointed because the case study was weak in finding similarities between Vietnam and Malaya, the outcome seemed predestined, and, more importantly, ignored the geopolitical and strategic outcomes of Malaya and Vietnam.

While as with all insurgencies, there are similarities between Vietnam and Malaya, the differences seperate these two historical conflicts.

1) The British in Malaya never faced the form of cohesive, coherent and constant conventional threat that the RVN, the US and their allies faced in Vietnam. Vietnam was a rather unique combination of conventional war, between the RVN, US and their allies and DRV and the VC Main Force, and guerilla war, within South Vietnam, between the RVN and the VC. If, following COL Nagl's examples, we had initiated a purely counter-insurgent strategy and operational plan, the war would have ended in 1968 with the highly successful NVA/VC offensive during Tet demolishing the last of the dispersed RVN and US forces. From 1963 to 1972, the NVA and VC were able, when they were willing to sustain the massive casualties, to concentrate conventional forces against isolated RVN, US and allied posts and detachments. Has we adopted the preferred anti-insurgency strategy of the "ink spot", we would have dispersed our forces and have been defeated in detail by the NVA and VC conventional forces. The facts are that in order to address the insurgency, the conventional war had to be won. We had to neutralize the NVA and VC Main Force units, such that we could then disperse into the country side and began constricting the VC and securing the villages.

2) The British never faced a situation where the insurgents enjoyed "sanctuaries" in which to recover and gather their strength and sally forth. The Malayan Communists were pinned into a constrained geographic area which became untenable when the British were able to commit sufficient forces. The NVA and VC operating in South Vietnam, however, could withdraw into Cambodia or Laos and reconstitute and regenerate their forces despite intensive bombing.

3) The Communist insurgency in Malaya never enjoyed the level of logistical support afforded the NVA and VC forces in South Vietnam. While early in the conflict, the VC were living off French and Japanese leftovers, the USSR and PRC stepped in and began supplying sufficnet quantities of arms and supplies through a distribution system that was never completely interdicted. The result was that in 1964-65, ARVN forces armed with M1 Garands and M1 carbines found themselves facing NVA, and even VC Main Force, troops armed with AK-47s. The Malayan insurgency was supplied from Indonesia and never reached the level of support the NVA and VC received, even before 1968. Their lines of communication were easily interdicted by the RN and very little came over the borders of neighboring Thailand and Burma, both antipathic to the Communist insurgency.

4) The centers of gravity for Malaya, the Malayan people, the British government and people and the insurgent leadership were within reach and control of the British. As the insurgents were isolated from the people, their leadership was neutralized. In Vietnam, the centers of gravity were the RVN and the people of South Vietnam, the government and people of the US and the leadership and people of North Vietnam. While the RVN, the US and their allies could control or effectively impact the first two, the third center of gravity was beyond their control. The North Vietnamese leadership was committed to unitying Vietnam under a Communist regime. They had the full free or coerced support of their people. Every move away from this overarching objective was a temporary tactic, paving the way towards victory. The RVN, US and their allies could gain and maintain the support of their people and governments, willingly or otherwise, but real victory, establishment of a peaceful coexistence of South and North Vietnam was impossible without the complete removal of the North Vietnamese leadership and the society that fostered it.

The British did succeeded in Malaya and the US did not in Vietnam but not because the British learned faster. The British learned anything in Malaya they didn't already know from 100 years of "policing" an Empire. Not only was there a "corporate" knowledge of counter-insurgency warfare, there was a personal and institutional knowledge going back a generation. The older officers and NCOs would have had direct experience in such warfare based on service in Palestine, Iraq, the Sudan, Somalia, Oman, the North-West Frontier, India, Burma, Cyprus and Greece from the mid'30s and on. The British merely required the application of this knowledge to the particular situation that faced them in Malaya. The US, especially the Army, had not faced a full blown insurgency since the Philippine Insurrection, 1898-1907. While some officers were exposed to insurgency warfare in Greece in 1946-48 and Korea in 1950-53 or as advisors in SEA, there was no 'corporate" or institutional body of knowledge to fall back on. The US Army had to learn on the job, while also conducting conventional warfare against the NVA and VC Main Force. It is neither elucidating nor fair to draw conclusions from a comparison of the two situations.

Finally, there is the geopolitical and strategic aspects. As Clausewitz (and Summers) has pointed out "War is the continuation of policy by other means". In other words a means to an end. Success on this level is judged by how well the tactical and operational outcome supports the strategic. And what was the strategic result of Malaya? The British fought in Malaya to protect and maintain British civil control through the system of Empire. Within a generation of their tactical and operational victory, they pulled their troops out of Malaya and granted independence, in other words the negative outcome they fought to avoid. The costs of victory had become to much to sustain. Malaya became another step, like Palestine, India and Burma before, and Kenya, Cyprus and Yemen after, in the long, painful withdrawal from the dream of Empire. For the US, tactical and operational success on the level of what the British achieved in Malaya would not have brought strategic victory. The North Vietnamese leadership would retain the ability to continue the fight sometime in the future and success in Vietnam would not have ensured success in Laos and Cambodia. The costs of strategic failure were bad enough, the costs of the means to achieve strategic success, ie. the complete neutralization of North Vietnam and a status quo in SEA, might have been even greater and led to the American people and government rejecting such commitments in the future.

As far as Iraq, the model of Malaya may have application, but we have already fallen behind. The four simple, if generalized, steps to success in counter-insurgency warfare are 1) isolate the insurgents from external support, 2) isolate the insurgents from internal support, 3) immobilize and seperate them from the populace and 4) neutralize their leadership. Thanks to our lack of resources at the end of the initial conventional campaign that achieved regime change, we haven't even completed step 1.