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Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife : Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and VietnamBlog this item
    • John Nagl shows his brilliance in this book, written years before our current counter-insurgency crises. He builds a model and sticks to it, examining what makes military cultures both successful and adaptive. Useful for anyone looking at operating in a conflict-heavy bureaucracy, military or othe ... Continue

      John Nagl shows his brilliance in this book, written years before our current counter-insurgency crises. He builds a model and sticks to it, examining what makes military cultures both successful and adaptive. Useful for anyone looking at operating in a conflict-heavy bureaucracy, military or otherwise.

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  • WingmanX said on Feb 29, 2008

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Book Description

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.

Book Details
English Books
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Paperback 280 Pages
ISBN-10: 0226567702
ISBN-13: 9780226567709
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Pub date: Sep 15, 2005
Dimensions: 23 cm x 16 cm x 2 cm Just how big is that?
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