John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005)
In this timely and influential book, career Army officer John A. Nagl reviews American and British counterinsurgency efforts in Southeast Asia through the lens of organizational theory to determine whether each had the wherewithal to adapt during wartime. He accomplishes this by analyzing how the two armies learned when confronted with situations for which they were unprepared—the British Army in Malaysia, and the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He analyzes both armies’ organizational cultures to assess how they adapted to asymmetrical opponents. Nagl, who wrote this as a dissertation for his Ph.D. in International Relations from Oxford University, was a principal architect of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in the Iraq war and taught international relations at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
The author draws heavily on concepts in bureaucracy and organizational theory. Organizational theory, as Nagl says, suggests that “organizations are created in order to accomplish certain missions” (4). Organizations thus favor policies that increase their importance and better fulfill their primary mission and role. Each organization, therefore, has its own culture based on its experience that creates a patterned way of thinking about what its primary roles are to be. These, in turn, drive the organization’s behavior. The American army, as Nagl demonstrates, saw ground combat by organized regular divisions as its primary role—not the sort of counterinsurgency it found itself embroiled in Vietnam. The British, in contrast, understood its history and experience as a colonial constabulary and embraced this role when adapting to events in Malaysia.
Through a careful analysis of organizational theory, Nagl’s simple conclusion is that the British army was a learning institution while the American army was not. The United States Army failed in Vietnam because its organizational culture precluded it from adapting during wartime to fight an unconventional enemy in the Vietnam War. The British, on the other hand, learned and adapted while fighting in Malaysia to achieve victory. He demonstrates that the British army, used to conducting counterinsurgency and small war constabulary action throughout its colonial history, was much more adaptable because it absorbed lessons better than their American counterparts. The British also understood the correlation between political and military spheres needed to accomplish their objectives.
Organizations should, in theory, learn from experience and continuously adapt to achieve success. The United States did not learn and thus did not change its counterinsurgency doctrine during Vietnam, nor in the fifteen years studied by Richard Downie in his 1998 book, Learning from Conflict: The U.S. Military in Vietnam, El Salvador, and that Drug War. Nagl represents a Jominian, scientific view of war, arguing that if only the United States had followed a specific formula, they should have found success. His formulaic approach is not surprising, given his background in the social sciences and his reluctance to take the human factor into account.
Nagl, nevertheless, makes a convincing argument. His writing is superb, and the work is easy to follow. His blending of theoretical and historical lenses help him argue successfully that the American army was flawed in its approach to Vietnam at the institutional level. His framework for this analysis represents a decidedly top-down view of the Army in Vietnam. The natural inclination is to view the debacle from an institutional standpoint, but one is left wondering if companies and battalions adapted their tactics, techniques, and procedures at the small unit level. Further study into the tactical culture of specific units is necessary to get a complete picture. Nevertheless, war, and especially counterinsurgency are more than merely a series of combats and thus warrant an institutional and national level critique.
This book offers an excellent analysis of the varying literature on organizational theory, organizational learning, and military innovation. It is particularly useful for students of military cultures and counterinsurgency. An issue might arise in his sources, as he only shows a small consideration of “operational readiness” and “lessons learned” reports. He cites only one American army unit below the division level. Anyone who reads Nagl will understand that counterinsurgency is not merely a military problem; the U.S. habit of sending the military to war with minimal strategic guidance is on full display in Vietnam. The soldier must adapt, but the entire nation must realize that war and politics go hand in hand, perhaps no more so than in unconventional warfare.