But the training program here has one major advantage: Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. LTC Nagl is the commander of 1-34 Armor, one of the battalions directly involved in training MiTT teams. LTC Nagl is also the author of Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, one of the best books on counterinsurgency ever written by an American. LTC Nagl is one of the Army's new breed of soldier-scholars, and having him here means we can learn directly from him. LTC Nagl came in to give us a talk a few weeks back as the capstone to our counterinsurgency training, and it was one of the most valuable experiences we've had here. I would be doing LTC Nagl a disservice if I tried to summarize his thesis, so I won't try. Suffice it to say LTC Nagl is not only a very smart guy, but an excellent teacher, and we are very fortunate to have him here. I confess that I did wonder if the Army was better served with him here where he can train MiTT team members as opposed to having him in Iraq where he can be where the rubber meets the road, but I have no idea what the right answer to that would be. One of the major advantages the U.S. ended up with during WWII in the Pacific was the fact we rotated veteran pilots back to the U.S. while Japan kept their best pilots in combat, leading the U.S. to slowly but surely thoroughly outclass Japanese pilots as better-trained Americans faced off with the increasingly attrited Japanese veterans and poorly-trained rookies. Finding that balance is extremely difficult, and I'm glad I don't have to figure it out.

In addition to three full days of counterinsurgency training, we have been provided with a number of resources we can use on our own time. We were all given copies of David Galula's seminal counterinsurgency text Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, a book American officers would have done well to read when it was published, as it might have done them a lot of good in Vietnam. That and Field Manual (FM) 3-24, Counterinsurgency, give an excellent overview of how insurgencies work and how counterinsurgencies can counter them. There is no one-size fits all template for counterinsurgency, it should be noted, but the materials do help to establish baselines for us to build on. Add to that the practical exercises we worked in training where we attempt to deal with real-world insurgency situations, then compare our proposed solutions to what actually happened, and we at least have a good idea of the complexities involved in the counterinsurgency fight.

Of course, that still leaves us with the issue of how to communicate that information to our Iraqi counterparts. And that's another part of our training I'll talk about another time.

READER COMMENTS

Anyone interested in reading something by Lt Colonel Nagl might like to start with his preface to Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, available online at the publisher's website. The University of Chicago Press is also releasing an edition of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual--an edition which features a foreword by Nagl.