While Nagl raises some interesting points and (I believe) is largely "correct" in his conclusions, his research is terribly superficial, all the less excusably since so much new material is now available. He relies on hackneyed secondary and tertiary sources like Karnow and Sheehan with very little discrimination. His limited historical background is evidenced by his carping on the US Army's tendency to see Vietnam as a repeat of Korea. This is due to the fact that is was, to a large extent. We had created a conterinsurgency constabulary in South Korea that was annihilated by a conventional North Korean invasion. Had we followed Nagl's formula exclusively in Vietnam, the same would have occurred there. Also, the Malayan example is barely relevant. The British took 12 years to eliminate a miniscule guerrilla force with no real foreign support and composed largely of an ethnic minority in a country they controlled absolutely. There were North Malayan mechanized divisions waiting across the border to overrun the country. It's not that the British learned that "less is more" in accomplishing government policy. They realized that they did not have the means of accomplishing anything, so there was little point in trying, hence the largely peaceful abandonment of the Empire in less than a decade. Malaya was a situation so limited in scope that they were embarrassed not to try to solve it. That said, Nagl's ultimate conclusion that security for the population is the key element is exactly what Abrams successfully accomplished despite dwindling resources. It was not until Congress undercut the Saigon regime after the US withdrawal that South Vietnam fell, not to insurgency, but to a massive conventional invasion a la Korea.

This book was required for a class. Turned out to be very interesting and intelligent look at a very, very important topic. I recommend this book to anyone, especially those who feel baffled about what to think about Unconventional Conflict.

Since at least the early 1960s people have been misunderstanding and misinterpreting what the British did in Malaya and how what they did can be applied to other conflicts. The old example used to be Vietnam. Now its Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "emergency" in Malaya was as much a political fight between Chinese and Malays as it was anything to do about communism. The fighting in Malaya unlike Vietnam and unlike Iraq involved an insurgency that was salted through the country. It did not have sympathic uniform regions where almost the entire population were on the side of the insurgents. In particular the removal of population from unsecure villages worked because invariably the targets were chinese.

The other thing that is missed is that military victory in Malaya was as much or more due to skillful political manuvering than it was to helicopters and village relocations. The British undercut the movement by promising to leave Malaya and grant it independence.

The analysis of the British experience with counterinsurgency last century could at best be said to be willfully ignorant. Malaya was not by any means the only british counsterinsurgency operation. There is the disaster of Ireland after World War I. There was Palestine. There was Burma in the 1930s. There was Cyprus, Kenya, Aden and IRAQ(!). In every case, the insurgency that the british faced was eventually dealt with by political concessions (usually independence or more self-government) rather than by force. The British colonial model is not one to emulate because it failed far more often than it was successful in fighting insurgency.

The sad truth is that the record of countries battling an insurgency which has broad local support and friendly bordering states does not suggest any easy strategy for victory. The Malaya strategy would only work in Iraq if the Sunni population were evenly distributed as a minority across the whole country. But it isn't. It has an entire geographic section of Iraq as a base and because of that, the lessons of Malaya just don't apply.

Equally, Vietnam doesn't apply either. Vietnam was a civil war between political groups who were culturally the same. Unlike Malaya, there were no identifiable Chinese villages among Malay villages that could be uprooted as a pacification technique.

In addition, the colonial experience was of less use to the British in the Malaya Empergency than a large base of officers created by the second world war (Force 136 among others) who understood insurgency from the inside out and further had been at times the patrons of the rebel movements when they fought against the Japanese.

As far as Vietnam, I'm at a loss to understand what the author is even thinking. Vietnam in the first couple years was kind of a counterinsurgency war but by 1968, it was a war primarly against a conventional army that crossed the South Vietnamese borders at will. Counterinsurgency in Vietnam could only work (and would have worked) had it been possible to secure the borders of the country. Vietnam was in reality a big army kind of war fought with an army too small for the task. We couldn't even close the relatively short northern border of vietnam.

If the author wanted to learn lessons useful about fighting in Iraq from the British, he would have done better to examine the long counterinsurgency war of the British in Iraq during the 1920s and 1930s. But nobody wants to do that because the lessons of that war directly contradict the entire broad strategy of what the US has been trying to do in Iraq.

And if in future anyone in the US military wants to suggest reorganizations of the forces to meet future war threats, the conflict to analyze is not Iraq. Its the conflict last year in Lebannon between Hezbelloah and Israel. The question is not how the US is going to beat an insurgency in Iraq with second-rate equipment, its how a

The book goes into some length about how to win a counterinsurgency war. It postulates that there are 2 main methods:

a) Pull out all the stops, kill all the rebels and don't hesitate to "hold the civilian population accountable", by reprisals if necessary.

Nagl says that these methods _can_ be successful. He cites the German response to WW2 partisan operations. He very quickly dismisses this approach however and does not cover it, due to disgust, basically.

Solely in terms of effectiveness, Russia's been doing exactly that in Chechnya (and Afghanistan), with limited success. Israel doesn't seem to be making all that much headway either, though it is more restrained. Algeria's pacification has been more successful, but at an abominable cost. I would argue that any Western nation using this approach will lose its soul.

b) Isolate the rebels from the population.

For this approach, Nagl makes it quite clear that the military needs to minimize the use of force. And that it needs to pay much more attention to the political dimension of the insurgency. In his view, Britain won in Malaysia, despite a rather disheartening start, because it came around to understanding that its army would never "fix and annihilate" the rebels.

Instead, it helped the population defend itself, built up civilian infrastructure and governance. "Nation-building", in other words. It emphasized intelligence gathering. And it cut sweet deals with defecting rebels to encourage them to rat on their buddies. It concentrated on consolidating regions, quite slowly, rather than search & destroy operations. And it gradually came to rely on small unit tactics.

The book's main interest is in allowing us to contrast what worked in Malaysia with what we see of the US military tactics nowadays. The US military is not stupid and clearly knows of these precedents. Indeed Nagl cites the Marines as having a good understanding of insurgencies. So, is the US military high command really still stuck in its Vietnam body count mindset? Or are its tactics being dictated from the top, by the administration? Certainly the administration is on the record about its views on nation-building and unlawful combatants. Guantanamo is hardly ideal propaganda to lure rebels to switch sides. At the same time, the over-reliance on airpower is, presumably, driven by the military. Not sure who is in the driver seat however when emphasizing intelligence means spending more and more on electronic means to spy on goat herders.

These speculations are not in the book. But when you read it and you contrast successful methods with current policy, the reader can't help wondering what is going on.

Politically, I think the US administration, due to its ideology and dogmatism, is all spin & sticks and no carrots. I support the Afghanistan mission and I agree that the terrorists need to be stopped. That support turns to anger however, when the methods used to fight these wars are so unproductive. Most of the US administration spin is useful only to sell the war to the part of the US electorate that supported it in the first place and has no value in winning world or Muslim opinion. Increasingly, it has less and less value in winning US public opinion as well. Being against terrorism does not mean you have to support losing strategies, quite the reverse.

Interestingly, Nagl uses "frequency of incidents" metrics throughout to measure success in fighting the insurgency. Look at Iraq's. And he also does not seem to equate quantity (of troops) with quality (of effort).

Last, but not least, one lesson I do hope we have learned from Vietnam is not to take our anger out on the troops themselves, who are just carrying out policy in a very very difficult and stressful situation.

This is a flawed and boring dissertation comparing how armies learn. This institutional view uses the Malaysian Emergency and the British Army in comparison to the Vietnam War and the US Army. This is a well-researched thesis by a rising star in our Army, but he draws the wrong conclusions from Malaya and terms Vietnam a defeat. He seems to believe that our army did not adapt its tactics in Vietnam. That is incorrect.

The real question is why do we forget our lessons so quickly? Why do our leaders cling to major weapons systems when this type of conflict is one of dismounted infantry, civil affairs and psyops troops?