John Nagl

soldier-scholar John Nagl

John A. Nagl is a counterinsurgency writer.

Biography

John Nagl is the eldest of six children. He grew up in a Roman Catholic household in Omaha, Neb., and said he decided to attend West Point out of a desire to serve his nation and spare his family the expense of putting him through college. (His father was an electrical engineer who served in the Navy.)

According to the New York Times, Nagl 'graduated close to the top of his West Point class in 1988 and was selected as a Rhodes scholar.' He studied a Masters in International Relations for two years at Oxford before the 1991 Gulf War - during which he led a tank platoon - and then returned to Oxford to study a PhD at St. Antony's College. At Oxford Nagl 'immersed himself in the classic texts of guerrilla warfare'. According to the New York Times, 'the book that most forcefully captured Nagl's imagination' was T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whilst his research focus was on the 'counterinsurgy' operations in Malaya and Vietnam. His thesis was published in 1997 and titled, 'British and American Army Counterinsurgency Learning during the Malayan Emergency and the Vietnam War' It was supervised by Professor Robert O'Neill, who was at that time director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University. Nagl writes that O'Neill 'suggested the topic and saw it through to the end.' In 2002 Nagl's thesis was published as a book titled Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam. The introduction to a recent edition of the book was written by Gen. Peter Schoomaker, at the time the Army's chief of staff.

According to the Washington Post, Nagl served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as the operations officer for an Army battalion in Iraq's Anbar province.' A contributor note in the December 2007 Rusi Journal states that Nagl commanded, 'the 1st (US) Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas' and 'served as the operations officer of Task Force Centurion in Al-Anbar in 2003 and 2004'.

After serving in Iraq Nagl became an assistant to Paul Wolfowitz. Next, under the stewardship of Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the top U.S. commander in Iraq, he helped produce the Army's counterinsurgency manual. He then became the commander of a battalion in Fort Riley, Kan., that teaches U.S. soldiers how to train and advise Iraqi forces.

In 2008 the Washington Post reported that Nagl, then 41, had 'decided to leave the service to study strategic issues full time' at the Center for a New American Security

Views

Nagl is an advocate of the use of military power to force and coerce social changes on other countries.

In his book Nagl writes approvingly of the brutal American annexation of the Philippines at the turn of the century:

Military measure were only one component of a broader political-military campaign that included effective propaganda, payment of cash bounties for weapons surrendered by the insurgents, and building of schools and hospitals in a comprehensive public works program. Those revels who maintained their antagonism were deported, imprisoned or defeated in the U.S. Army’s most successful instance of counterinsurgency theory and practice.

Affiliations

• Insurgency Research Group, has presented at a group seminar at King's College London.