Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

This book was written by Lt Col John A Nagl, a PhD, with an update from his own experiences in Iraq at the beginning of the current war.

It takes an interesting examination between the two largest, most recent counterinsurgency operations that have been undertaken. The first of these was the British in Malaya and the second was the Americans in Vietnam. Lt Col Nagl examines the insurrections that began each countries' involvement in these wars and the learning curve that each country applied while adapting to the enemy.

This book was interesting because the British were successful in Malaya. They were fighting a communist insurgency, as we did in Vietnam. What allowed them to be successful and for us to fail?

Lt Col Nagl points out that it took a couple of years of missteps for the British to learn how to fight the Malayan insurgents. However, a bright commander decided that they needed to fight the enemy the same way they fought insurgents in Burma in World War II. Additionally, they drew from their institutional knowledge of managing local populations during their colonial expansion from the 1700's on.

The Americans also drew from their World War II experience, which taught them that the key to victory was to apply so much pressure as to force acquiescence. However, this is not possible in an insurgency. Air strikes do not court the favor of the local population (neither does deforestation through spraying Agent Orange). Our error (that was never corrected) was that we wanted to fight a large-scale, high technology brand of warfare. However, as I have heard before, our enemy has a say in this, and our enemy was not equipped to fight this kind of war. Instead, he chose to attack and retreat into the population. When we fire back into the population, we lose credibility and end up unable to distinguish between our enemy and the general population (a common criticism of the war in Vietnam). Further, no matter how unsuccessful our efforts, commanders continued to want to fight a large-scale, high technology battle.

This book was originally written in 1997. It is very instructive as to what is required when we find ourselves fighting a local insurgency. While it has taken 4 years, I feel we have finally learned and changed our tactics to reflect this learning in Iraq.