Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam [Paperback]

Exceptionally well written book. If this reviewer understands the forward correctly, Maj Nagl (now LCOL) wrote this book as his PhD thesis at Oxford University. However, it reads like a popular and best-selling history and not with a dry stilted academic tone.

Likewise, this book is exceedingly well researched. Despite feeling fairly well-read on military history in general and Vietnam in particular, I must have jotted down 20 - 30 books for future reference and study. One can certainly see that LCOL Nagl earned his PhD at Oxford.

The best part of the book is that it is not really about fighting a counter-insurgency, but rather about how institutions learn (or fail to learn) when confronted with radical change. In this sense, the British come off much better in the Malay experience than America does in Vietnam.

However, the book has several weaknesses.

First, the book has several errors of fact in the examples of the Chinese Civil War. These are not glaring errors, but since LCOL Nagl uses the Chinese Civil War as a basis to begin his discussion of the Malay conflict, they are relevant. Strangely, the revolutionary doctrine that Mao exports more closely resembles what LCOL Nagl reports vice what actually happened so, perhaps, for the purpose of this book, this failing is an academic one.

Second, Nagl implies that only had we followed all the great ideas the British had, we could have easily won in Vietnam. This is not knowable and may ultimately be false. The conflict in Vietnam was far more violent than the one in Malaya. Likewise the Viet Minh and North Vietnamese Army had several advantages that the Chinese Terrorists (CTs) in Malaya did not. Just a short listing of those are: (1) an effective standing Army, (2) large and powerful allies who provided technical and logistic support, (3) political and geographical points of refuge beyond the reach of the United States, and (4) an enemy (the regime in South Vietnam) that were a religious minority (Catholic) attempting to rule over a majority (Buddhists). Indeed, in Malaya, the CT's were the ethnic minority.

Third, while the best part of the book is the assessment of how a large bureaucracy learns, these ideas are not spelled out to this reader's satisfaction. The question of how an agency learns is not answered adequately.

Overall, this book is an excellent read and raises many important questions. However, it falls a bit short in providing adequate answers to these questions.

How does an army learn to fight an effective counterinsurgency? Sound relevant to today's headlines? John Nagl asked this question before it was "cool" - before the pundits of CNN or MSNBC knew how to spell "counterinsurgency". This book - Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife - is his answer. John is a scholar and a soldier who combines academic prowess and firsthand experience in counterinsurgency. LTC John Nagl is a West Point graduate (and in the interests of disclosure, a classmate of the reviewer), an armor officer, a Rhodes Scholar, a former instructor of International Affairs at West Point, and a veteran of the insurgency in Iraq.

The insurgency in Iraq had not begun when the hardcover edition of his book came out in 2002. Unfortunately, it's not at all certain that the people who opened the current war in Iraq read it. This 2nd edition includes a new author's preface discussing the relationship between his earlier scholarship and his recent combat experiences in Iraq. He candidly discusses what he now thinks of his own work based upon his first-hand experience with insurgency.

The depth of LTC Nagl's research is evident in every chapter and should satisfy the rigor of academia while, at the same time, his writing style is clear, concise, and leaves little doubt as to his reasoning. To be successful in an age of insurgencies, Nagl concludes that the Army "will have to make the ability to learn to deal with messy, uncomfortable situations an integral part" of its organizational culture. It must, per T.E. Lawrence, be comfortable eating soup with a knife. Victory in a fluid insurgency requires the ability to learn and to adapt and may even require differing victory conditions, organizations, and core competencies depending upon the context.

Nagl's own experiences have only hammered home the truth of this necessity. His unit was required to change its equipment, its organization, and develop new core competencies to transform from a tank battalion focused on a Soviet-style armored threat into a counterinsurgency (see "Professor Nagl's War" in the NY Times Sunday Magazine, Jan. 11, 2004). They integrated people and tools not normally found in a battalion task force in conventional battle (such as Civil Affairs and Counterintelligence teams - see "Soldier Uses Wits to Hunt Insurgents" by Greg Jaffe in the Wall Street Journal, Sep. 10, 2004). They hunted the enemy while at the same time acting as impromptu diplomats, aid workers, military and police trainers, and tribal mediators. This experience in Iraq was what Nagl describes as the most intense learning experience of his life.

This book was worth it - without the new information - as a hardcover at $89.95. At $17 in paperback, "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife" should be on the shelf of every American interested in the current situation in Iraq and in how the US can prevail.

While I enjoyed the erudite writing and the definite research in this book, I was disappointed because the case study was weak in finding similarities between Vietnam and Malaya, the outcome seemed predestined, and, more importantly, ignored the geopolitical and strategic outcomes of Malaya and Vietnam.

While as with all insurgencies, there are similarities between Vietnam and Malaya, the differences seperate these two historical conflicts.

1) The British in Malaya never faced the form of cohesive, coherent and constant conventional threat that the RVN, the US and their allies faced in Vietnam. Vietnam was a rather unique combination of conventional war, between the RVN, US and their allies and DRV and the VC Main Force, and guerilla war, within South Vietnam, between the RVN and the VC. If, following COL Nagl's examples, we had initiated a purely counter-insurgent strategy and operational plan, the war would have ended in 1968 with the highly successful NVA/VC offensive during Tet demolishing the last of the dispersed RVN and US forces. From 1963 to 1972, the NVA and VC were able, when they were willing to sustain the massive casualties, to concentrate conventional forces against isolated RVN, US and allied posts and detachments. Has we adopted the preferred anti-insurgency strategy of the "ink spot", we would have dispersed our forces and have been defeated in detail by the NVA and VC conventional forces. The facts are that in order to address the insurgency, the conventional war had to be won. We had to neutralize the NVA and VC Main Force units, such that we could then disperse into the country side and began constricting the VC and securing the villages.

2) The British never faced a situation where the insurgents enjoyed "sanctuaries" in which to recover and gather their strength and sally forth. The Malayan Communists were pinned into a constrained geographic area which became untenable when the British were able to commit sufficient forces. The NVA and VC operating in South Vietnam, however, could withdraw into Cambodia or Laos and reconstitute and regenerate their forces despite intensive bombing.

3) The Communist insurgency in Malaya never enjoyed the level of logistical support afforded the NVA and VC forces in South Vietnam. While early in the conflict, the VC were living off French and Japanese leftovers, the USSR and PRC stepped in and began supplying sufficnet quantities of arms and supplies through a distribution system that was never completely interdicted. The result was that in 1964-65, ARVN forces armed with M1 Garands and M1 carbines found themselves facing NVA, and even VC Main Force, troops armed with AK-47s. The Malayan insurgency was supplied from Indonesia and never reached the level of support the NVA and VC received, even before 1968. Their lines of communication were easily interdicted by the RN and very little came over the borders of neighboring Thailand and Burma, both antipathic to the Communist insurgency.

4) The centers of gravity for Malaya, the Malayan people, the British government and people and the insurgent leadership were within reach and control of the British. As the insurgents were isolated from the people, their leadership was neutralized. In Vietnam, the centers of gravity were the RVN and the people of South Vietnam, the government and people of the US and the leadership and people of North Vietnam. While the RVN, the US and their allies could control or effectively impact the first two, the third center of gravity was beyond their control. The North Vietnamese leadership was committed to unitying Vietnam under a Communist regime. They had the full free or coerced support of their people. Every move away from this overarching objective was a temporary tactic, paving the way towards victory. The RVN, US and their allies could gain and maintain the support of their people and governments, willingly or otherwise, but real victory, establishment of a peaceful coexistence of South and North Vietnam was impossible without the complete removal of the North Vietnamese leadership and the society that fostered it.

The British did succeeded in Malaya and the US did not in Vietnam but not because the British learned faster. The British learned anything in Malaya they didn't already know from 100 years of "policing" an Empire. Not only was there a "corporate" knowledge of counter-insurgency warfare, there was a personal and institutional knowledge going back a generation. The older officers and NCOs would have had direct experience in such warfare based on service in Palestine, Iraq, the Sudan, Somalia, Oman, the North-West Frontier, India, Burma, Cyprus and Greece from the mid'30s and on. The British merely required the application of this knowledge to the particular situation that faced them in Malaya. The US, especially the Army, had not faced a full blown insurgency since the Philippine Insurrection, 1898-1907. While some officers were exposed to insurgency warfare in Greece in 1946-48 and Korea in 1950-53 or as advisors in SEA, there was no 'corporate" or institutional body of knowledge to fall back on. The US Army had to learn on the job, while also conducting conventional warfare against the NVA and VC Main Force. It is neither elucidating nor fair to draw conclusions from a comparison of the two situations.

Finally, there is the geopolitical and strategic aspects. As Clausewitz (and Summers) has pointed out "War is the continuation of policy by other means". In other words a means to an end. Success on this level is judged by how well the tactical and operational outcome supports the strategic. And what was the strategic result of Malaya? The British fought in Malaya to protect and maintain British civil control through the system of Empire. Within a generation of their tactical and operational victory, they pulled their troops out of Malaya and granted independence, in other words the negative outcome they fought to avoid. The costs of victory had become to much to sustain. Malaya became another step, like Palestine, India and Burma before, and Kenya, Cyprus and Yemen after, in the long, painful withdrawal from the dream of Empire. For the US, tactical and operational success on the level of what the British achieved in Malaya would not have brought strategic victory. The North Vietnamese leadership would retain the ability to continue the fight sometime in the future and success in Vietnam would not have ensured success in Laos and Cambodia. The costs of strategic failure were bad enough, the costs of the means to achieve strategic success, ie. the complete neutralization of North Vietnam and a status quo in SEA, might have been even greater and led to the American people and government rejecting such commitments in the future.

As far as Iraq, the model of Malaya may have application, but we have already fallen behind. The four simple, if generalized, steps to success in counter-insurgency warfare are 1) isolate the insurgents from external support, 2) isolate the insurgents from internal support, 3) immobilize and seperate them from the populace and 4) neutralize their leadership. Thanks to our lack of resources at the end of the initial conventional campaign that achieved regime change, we haven't even completed step 1.

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