BOOK REVIEW: ‘Knife Fights’

OPINION:

KNIFE FIGHTS: A MEMOIR OF MODERN WAR IN THEORY AND PRACTICE
By John A. Nagl
Penguin Press, $27.95, 288 pages

Writing a book about formulating military doctrine for a general audience is no easy task, but Army Lt. Col. John Nagl (retired) has mastered the challenge. His memoir, “Knife Fights,” revolves around the writing of the American doctrine for counter-insurgency, and his wry wit and writing skill make it a good read, even for casual readers.

Mr. Nagl is a West Point graduate of their Social Sciences curriculum, and he served as a tank officer fighting in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. He became interested in unconventional warfare when his tank unit was bested by a mostly Eskimo National Guard light infantry unit from Alaska in a peacetime exercise in California. Mr. Nagl was one of the fortunate Army officers to be sent to Oxford in Great Britain to get both his master’s and doctorate degrees. His doctoral dissertation on counter-insurgency operations was later published as a nonfiction book.

Mr. Nagl got the opportunity to test his theories during the Second Iraq War when, following the conventional fighting, the battalion in which he was the operations officer was assigned to govern and conduct counter-insurgency operations in the Iraqi city of Khalidiyah; it proved to be a searing experience because the Army lacked the doctrine, skills and flexibility to deal easily with a threat that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed as a bunch of Saddam-era “dead enders.” When assigned to the Pentagon on the military staff of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Mr. Nagl set out on a one-man crusade to get the Army to take counter-insurgency seriously. I first met him then and was impressed with his single-minded pursuit of his goal. Along the way, he attracted the attention of rising senior officers that included Gen. David Petraeus, who had shown a talent for the kind of operations Mr. Nagl was championing.

Gen. Petraeus’ chance to operationalize his and Mr. Nagl’s ideas came in 2005 when he became the doctrine czar for the Army. He decided to revise Army counter-insurgency doctrine in partnership with his Marine Corps counterpart, Gen. Jim Mattis, and he called on Mr. Nagl to manage the effort. They assembled an all-star team of military and civilian experts to do the writing and reviewing of what became Field Manual (FM) 23-4. Gen. Petraeus was astute enough to get buy-in from the media as well. Mr. Nagl gives a compelling account of this process. When Gen. Petraeus took over the Iraq war effort in 2006, he implemented the doctrine that was written to be an interagency as well as a military document. It is only the second military manual to be published commercially; the first was the Marine Corps’ “Small Wars Manual.”

When I became a State Department governance adviser with a Provincial Reconstruction Team that was partnered with an Army brigade in the Abu Ghraib district of Iraq, I participated in a classic application of the new doctrine in doing its clear-hold-build process within a year; it worked. In nine months, the brigade and the one that replaced it succeeded in wresting the district from al Qaeda in Iraq control and getting the population involved in the process. Tragically, all that was lost this year. Where we Americans failed in Iraq and Afghanistan was not at the tactical or operational levels. Strategically so far, we have failed to insist on competent governance at the national level. Without that, no doctrine will work.

If I have a complaint with the book, it is that Mr. Nagl occasionally lapses into Army speak with terms such as “slick Humvees” and “heavy metal units” without explaining them to the lay reader. I write this off to poor editing.

When the commandant of the Marine Corps approved FM 23-4, the manual was implemented smoothly by the corps. The Army, however, is another matter. It is a much larger and less centralized organization. Mr. Nagl and the “Coindenistas,” as they came to be called, had to fight many battles against those in the Army who thought Iraq and Afghanistan were mere annoyances that had to be endured before getting back to the “real business” of warfighting. Sadly, the battles fought within the Army took a toll on Mr. Nagl’s career, and he retired to go into the think tank world, ending up as the president of the Center for a New American Security. He is now the headmaster of a prep school.

I would like to see John put his considerable talents to work on the tactical and operational problems posed by hybrid entities such as the Islamic State in which conventional warfare merges with terrorism and insurgency in a devil’s brew.

Gary Anderson, a retired Marine Corps colonel, is an adjunct professor at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.