Knife Fights

<p><b>From one of the most important Army officers of his generation a memoir of the military's revolution in counterinsurgency warfare</b> <p/> Delivering a profound education in modern warfare John Nagl's <i>Knife Fights</i> 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. <p/>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 <i>Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife</i>--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. <i>Knife Fights </i>is the definitive account of counterinsurgency and its consequences by the man who was the doctrine's leading architect.</p>