Delivering a profound education in modern warfare, John Nagl’s Knife Fights is essential reading for anyone who cares
about the fate of America’s soldiers and the purposes for which their lives are put at risk.
As an army tank commander in the first Gulf War, Nagl was an early convert to the view that America’s greatest future
threats would come from asymmetric warfare—guerrillas, terrorists, and insurgents. His Oxford thesis on the lessons of
Vietnam—eventually published as a book called Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife—became the bible of the
counterinsurgency movement. But it would take 9/11 and the botched aftermath of the Iraq invasion to give his ideas
contemporary relevance. After a year’s hard fighting in Iraq’s Anbar Province, where Nagl served as operations officer of a
tank battalion in the 1st Infantry Division, he was asked by General David Petraeus to coauthor the new Army and Marine
Corps counterinsurgency field manual—rewriting core doctrine that would change the course of two wars and the thinking
of an army. Knife Fights is the definitive account of counterinsurgency and its consequences by the man who was the
doctrine’s leading architect.