Knife Fights: An Education in Modern War

Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife), a West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, was one of the U.S. military’s sharpest thinkers during his 20-year (1988–2008) Army career. Nagl commanded a tank platoon in the first Gulf War; earned a Ph.D. at Oxford; lead a tank battalion in the second war in Iraq; and served at the Pentagon as a counterinsurgency specialist (He also taught at West Point and Annapolis). This work is both a memoir and a treatise on American war strategy in the post-9/11 world; Nagl writes evocatively about his wartime experiences, clearly explaining his theories of waging asymmetric warfare. A critic of the Iraq war (“a war that did not need to be fought”), Nagl offers perceptive critiques of the serious mistakes made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the military’s general officer corps. The latter, he says, “failed to prepare the army for the war it was actually going to have to fight,” and also failed “to rapidly adapt when the conventional army they had built was required to conduct counterinsurgency.” Nagl makes a strong case that the next war the U.S. engages in will require stronger counterinsurgency planning than Pentagon policy makers currently anticipate. (Nov.)