Knife Fights Quotes

“Galula had noted that counterinsurgency is only 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—politics mostly, but also economics, development, and information operations.”
― John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

“first, that in a counterinsurgency campaign, the top priority is not to kill the enemy but to protect the population from enemy intimidation. This was a dramatic change from U.S. policy”
― John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

“The other pillar was more original. It centered on the need to build adaptive learning organizations to succeed in counterinsurgency campaigns, which the manual described as competitions in learning.”
― John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

“Bush’s decision to overrule Cheney and fire Rumsfeld in many ways marked the end of the six-year foreign policy string of errors that Tom Ricks correctly described as a Fiasco.”
― John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice

“Paul Bremer’s decrees to disband the Iraqi Army, radically de-Ba’athify Iraq, and prohibit local elections; Bremer reported to Rumsfeld, and the secretary was therefore responsible”
― John A. Nagl, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice