Combat Studies Institute

Operational Leadership Experiences in the Global War on Terrorism: An Interview with Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl. Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2007. http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll13/id/331 (accessed 12August 2011).

This is an interview with Lieutenant Colonel John A. Nagl, author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam. Nagl served as the operations officer for Task Force 1-34 Armor during the battalion’s September 2003 to September 2004 deployment to Iraq’s volatile Anbar Province. In this email interview, Nagl explains that, even though the term “counterinsurgency” was not yet “being widely used to describe what was happening in Iraq” the waging of it in the face of a “very determined enemy” became the overarching mission of his task force.