John Nagl, retired lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army, was an army tank commander in the first Gulf War of 1991, fresh out of West Point and Oxford. That experience led him to conclude that America’s greatest future threats would come from guerrillas, terrorists, and insurgents. When he returned to Iraq after 9/11, his theories of counterinsurgency met practice. When he left the battlefield he was tapped by General David Petraeus to help draft a new counterinsurgency guide. In his new book, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, he describes his experiences in the field helped him write the new army and marine counterinsurgency field manual, and how it changed the course of two wars and how the army thinks about war.

Knife Fights by John Nagl

(Penguin Press/Courtesy of the publisher)