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highly recommended |
Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam 
Good read. Great knowledge. I wish the authore had stayed in the army becasue he knows what he is talking about.
Amazing
Very cool book for operators (armed forces and civilian) and regular people. It shows us what we should be trying to do in the whole world. Make people safer, and they'll help you find the really bad guys (not the everyday ones). Really worth reading.
Shows the pain of organizational culture
As the war in Iraq slides into it's fifth year I am sure most Americans are perplexed on why things remain so screwed up over there. Why can't American's just handle it and come home. This book sort of explains the why. This book is excellent. It really defines what an insurgency is. It isn't like the traditional war like WWII which we see on the history channel. Anyone who wants to get perspective on events needs to read this book.
The book has a second point too which anyone can apply. This book shows how the organizational culture can effect the ability to solve problems. The author does that in studying the British experience in Malay vs. the American experience in Vietnam. He shows how the British were adapt and could learn then apply as they go along. The LTC then shows how the American's were not flexible and paid the consequences. LTC Nagel shows how the American's were so preprogrammed in fighting a WWII type battle they couldn't grasp any other solution. The Generals were preprogrammed in Vietnam to such a degree they threw out any fact that upset the model in their mind. They may have changed the buzz words but the core way of doing business was the same throughout Vietnam for the Americans, search and destroy. While the British had a way to listen and apply the lessons learned from the bottom up. The result of such innovation was that they won their war and we didn't. Insurgencies tend to be as much of a political fight as anything else. LTC Nagel shows that in the book.
Any manager of any large organization needs to read this book because it shows how organizational culture can choke a team to death.
LTC Nagel does identify what an insurgency is but doesn't offer much remedy to fighting that war directly. He does talk about how the British did it and how some American's had theories in handling that type of war. It would be interesting to hear of his insight in the context of Iraq. However I feel that the planners in this surge probably read this book. It has a lot of similarities with the British Malay model.
Overall it is an easy read. He does get lost in the military terms a little. The material he talks about is the same concepts you read about in the newspapers. It will help the reader understand what is going on.
Theory From One Who Gets It
To use a term that many in the military are fond of, Nagl "gets it." His understanding of counterinsurgency operations is both broad and deep, and his writing is smooth enough for the lay reader to comprehend without any difficulty.
Nagl's departure from the US Army will be a loss for this country's armed forces. However, since he will be taking a position at the Center for a New American Security, hopefully we can look forward to fresh work from this great military mind.
reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Armies are invariably accused of preparing to fight the last war. Nagl examines how armies learn during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared in organization, training, and mindset. He compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948-1960 with that developed in the Vietnam Conflict from 1950-1975, through use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both conflicts. In examining these two events, he argues that organizational culture is the key variable in determining the success or failure of attempts to adapt to changing circumstances. Differences in organizational culture is the primary reason why the British Army learned to conduct counterinsurgency in Malaya while the American Army failed to learn in Vietnam. The American Army resisted any true attempt to learn how to fight an insurgency during the course of the Vietnam Conflict, preferring to treat the war as a conventional conflict in the tradition of the Korean War or World War II. The British Army, because of its traditional role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics that its history and the national culture created, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. This is the first study to apply organizational learning theory to cases in which armies were engaged in actual combat.
counterinsurgency, knife, learning, lessons, malaya, soup, vietnam
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based on 49 reviews
