Interview with Dr. John Nagl
Interview with Dr. John Nagl
by Octavian Manea
Download the full article: Interview with Dr. John Nagl
“Counterinsurgencies are after all learning competitions.”
What is the legacy of David Galula for US Counterinsurgency doctrine? Is he an intellectual father?
The most important thinker in the field is probably Mao whose doctrine of insurgency understood that insurgency is not a component or a precursor of conventional war but could by itself accomplish military objectives. The greatest thinker in my eyes in COIN remains David Galula who has the enormous advantage of having studied and seen the evolution of insurgency in France during WW2, then spending a great deal of time in Asia, and really having thought through the problem for more than a decade before he practiced COIN himself for a number of years. His book is probably the single biggest influence on FM 3-24, the COIN Field Manual. David Galula is the best COIN theoretician as Kennan was for containment.
What are the lessons of Lawrence of Arabia for COIN doctrine?
Lawrence is more important for insurgency than counterinsurgency. Lawrence was an insurgent himself. The lesson I drew from him is the extraordinary difficulty of conducting COIN, drawing upon on his own thinking about how hard it was for the Turkish army to confront him. Any good strategist is going to look at the battlefield from the enemy perspective and Lawrence did this. He understood the advantages the insurgents have and the disadvantages, and that is probably the greatest insight he provided to the study of COIN. The other significant understanding is when you are working with a host nation population, either leading them in an insurgency or counterinsurgency campaign; it is possible to do too much as the intervening power. Ultimately the host nation has to carry the majority of the weight.
How important is the developing of the local troops for winning a COIN campaign?
Ultimately foreign countries cannot defeat an insurgency. Only the host nation forces can do that. But the intervening powers bring enormous advantages to the fight and if you can properly integrate the host nation forces and the intervening forces you can multiply the effects of both and the natural advantages of both. That is the objective, but we have struggled to do that as effectively as we could, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Download the full article: Interview with Dr. John Nagl
Interview with Dr. John Nagl conducted by Octavian Manea (Editor of FP Romania, the Romanian edition of Foreign Policy).
