The Royal United Services Institute and the author have kindly granted SWJ permission to post John Nagl’s review of The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War by Brian McAllister Linn that appeared in the April issue of the RUSI Journal.
Brian McAllister Linn’s The Echo of Battle: The Army’s Way of War is an important and profoundly disturbing book for anyone who loves the United States Army or cares about the security of the Western world. Linn, the foremost historian of the Army’s counter-insurgency effort in the Philippines at the start of the last century, fundamentally challenges the Army’s self-concept in the twenty-first century. Linn notes that for the majority of the Army’s history, it has been at peace, preparing for the next war – and, all too often, getting that preparation not just wrong, but almost completely wrong...
Read the entire review here at Small Wars Journal. You can also read a "review of the review" by Mark Safranski at ZenPundit.
John Nagl is a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. A retired US Army officer, his last assignment was as Commanding Officer of 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kansas. He led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm and served as the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom. A West Point graduate and Rhodes Scholar, Nagl earned his doctorate from Oxford University, taught national security studies at West Point, and served as a Military Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and was on the writing team that produced the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
