John Nagl
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Lieutenant Colonel John A Nagl (1966- ) is an officer in the United States Army who is regarded as an influential expert in counterinsurgency.
After growing up in Omaha, Nebraska, he attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated near the top of his class in 1988. He was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar and studied international relations at Oxford. He served as a tank platoon leader during the Gulf War, then returned to school to eventually earn his M. Phil and D. Phil at Oxford's St. Anthony's College.[1] His research focus was on counterinsurgency: his dissertation was a comparison of the British and American militaries as they dealt with insurgencies in Malaya and Vietnam, respectively. This work would later be made a book-length treatment published under the title Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, after an observation by T.E. Lawrence about the difficulty of fighting guerrillas.
After his studies, he was appointed to a professorship at West Point, which he held until deploying in 2003 as an operations officer with an armored battalion stationed near Khaldiya, Iraq. Recently, he has helped author the US Army's counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24), and currently[2] helps train MiT Teams -- small groups of soldiers tasked to develop the Iraqi Army. Already notable in military circles, his public profile was further raised with an interview on Comedy Central's The Daily Show on August 23, 2007.
Nagl is renowned for his extensive mentorship and tutelage of junior officers. LTC Nagl is affiliated with a rising group of mid-level military intellectuals, many of whom who have been tapped, at one time or another, to provide insight and recommendations to General David Petraeus. These officers include, but are not limited to Colonel Michael Meese, Lieutenant Colonels Douglas Ollivant, Mike George, Jen Easterly, Paul Yingling, Bill Ostlund and Charles Miller, as well as Dr. David Kilcullen. This crop of the new "best and brightest" were heavily influenced by their time together as associate professors at the United States Military Academy's Department of Social Sciences, which COL Meese now leads.
Nagl has recently filed for retirement from the U.S. Army and plans to become a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington D.C. [3] He has also recently published a series of articles and op-ed pieces regarding the need for a permanent Army Advisory Corps. [4]
Lieutenant Colonel Nagl is married to Susi Varga, whom he met while a student at Oxford; they have one son named Jack.
Contents |
[edit] Books
[edit] Authored
- Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2002) ISBN 0-2759-7695-5 / paperback (2005) ISBN 0-226-56770-2. With a new preface by the author for the paperback edition.
[edit] Foreword by
- The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007) ISBN 0-226-84151-0 / FM 3-24. Foreword by Nagl to the University of Chicago Press edition.
- Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II (2007) ISBN 0-226-84170-7
[edit] References
- ^ Maass, Peter. "Professor Nagl's War", The New York Times, January 11, 2004. [1]
- ^ Olmsted, Andrew. "From the Front Lines" RockyMountainNews.com Accessed September 4, 2007. [2]
- ^ High-Profile Officer Nagl to Leave Army, Join Think Tank - washingtonpost.com
- ^ [Institutionalizing Adaptation - Center for a New American Security http://www.cnas.org/en/cms/?145 - A Battalion's Worth of New Ideas - newyorktimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02nagl.html?ref=opinion ]
[edit] External links
- Biography at Small Wars Journal
- An interview with Nagl for the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
- Link to Daily Show interview
- Interview on Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife at the Pritzker Military Library
