Why this title “Knife Fights”? I remember that the title of your previous book “How to Eat Soup with a Knife” intended to give us a sense on a special kind of warfare. It’s hard, and it’s not going to go away, so we’d better get better at it if we want to win. The bad news is that irregular warfare has been a growing challenge over the past two centuries, and the information revolution, demographics, and resource scarcity make it likely to be the kind of war the United States is most likely to face for the rest of this century. In irregular war, winning the support or at least the acquiescence of the civilian population is key to winning the war their safety and long-term support are essential to the success of whichever side wins.įor a number of reasons including American conventional military superiority and the existence of nuclear weapons, conventional war has been on the decline since the 20 th century. In conventional war, the civilian population is essentially an obstacle to progress.

This combined political/economic/military challenge is what makes irregular warfare “the graduate level of war”. In irregular warfare, politics and economics continue throughout the war, and are in fact key weapons of war. In conventional war, politics stops until the war is over. In irregular warfare, the converse is true: finding is hard, but killing or capturing is easy. In conventional war, identifying your enemy is comparatively easy, but killing him is hard.

What are the lessons that we need to remember from the post 9/11 campaigns as we move forward?Īmerican conventional military superiority will drive our opponents to irregular warfare: insurgency and terrorism. John Nagl on his just released book Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, The Penguin Press, New York, 2014. Knife Fights: John Nagl’s Reflections on the Practice of Modern War

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