Last Saturday, we once again had the pleasure of interviewing Lt. Col. John A. Nagl. He's the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam and played a major role in putting together the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
He's also an articulate, thoughtful, and extremely intelligent man who exemplifies the best that the US military (and our country) has to offer. Like General Petraeus, he's very well-educated, having received a doctorate from Oxford. Throughout the interview he mentions other military officers with similar educational backgrounds.
My colleague John Hinderaker noted other rare qualities that these men seem to share. Besides the intellectual horsepower, there's an abundance of courage and a thirst for action. In this brief snippet (nine seconds) from the interview, Lt. Col. Nagl talks about how driving tanks around Iraq and Afghanistan is fun. How many other holders of an Oxford doctorate would say that?
The other common thread is a dedication to physical fitness. Lt. Col. Nagl is probably in better shape than 99% of Americans, but in this clip (thirty seconds) he talks about how General Petraeus--who's taken a bullet in a lung and broken a hip sky-diving--can run him into the ground despite being twenty years older than him. And impressive and select group of men indeed.
The entire interview is about forty minutes long and you can listen to it commercial free here. If you're interested in learning about counterinsurgency strategy and how it's being applied in Iraq from one of the true experts in the field, you'll want to hear this.
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