Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife
Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam
By John A. Nagl
I. TITLE: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife is a metaphor that likened the Insurgency fighting to eating soup with a knife. It is very slow and messy; and when you are not careful, it will hurt you and will probably leave you pretty bloody at times.
The book is generally a comparison between the British and the United States approaches in dealing with insurgency problem. Both confronted a communist inspired insurgency but the two dealt with the problem differently and eventually theyproduced different and contrasting results.
II. THE British Army in the Malaya. As described in detail in this book, the British succeeded in Malaya because they did not stick too much on the published doctrines of their National Army in such a way that they consider the actual situation in the ground by doing the following:
Deviated from the traditional Army Doctrine of conventionally annihilating the enemy forces.
Religiously collated lessons learned from the front lines and analyzed how to avoid repeating it.
Lessons learned from the field were verified and confirmed using trusted personnel. This prevents painting a wrong picture of the actual field scenario as many commanders tend to sanitize their reports.
Lessons learned were written into a booklet form and were distributed to troops.
Made innovations in tactics that are unique to the area of operations such as:
Walking backwards to hide actual direction of troops
Purposely leaving footprints to fool the enemy
Developing Battle Drills for Jungles
Focusing on small unit operations
Using of voice aircraft – transmitting propaganda and psychological warfare materials/recordings
Dropping of propaganda and psychological warfare materials/leaflets
Food and water control and denial
Infiltrating the enemy by masquerading as enemy units or personnel
Relocating villages that were supporting the insurgents, and control food rationing.
The use of “Magic Box” to find out who are the supporters and members of the communist terrorists
The British Army was fairly quick to realize that in Malaya, the political situation came ahead of the military -- and the goal was to create a secure environment. To that end, political and military efforts were put under a unified command.
The optimum use of locals. Locals were relied on and heavily integrated into British efforts.
Communist Terrorists (CTs) were encouraged to come over to the government side, where they were treated well and taken on as advisors and asked to record messages for or speak personally to their old allies.
Lines of communication were open from the bottom up, and the officer in charge frequently went to personally visit various areas under his command to see how things were going.
Used politico-military-economic approaches to address the insurgency.
Likened insurgency to a fish in a pond of water; where the water is the support of the masses. The British Army attempted to separate the fish from water by isolating the communities so that the communities can’t support the insurgents.
The training of personnel was decentralized in such a way that training depends on the needs of the area of operations.
Focused on nation building as part of counter insurgency.
III. The United States Army in Vietnam. In contrast, Vietnam was marked by many disconnects and blunders that rendered the US Army efforts less effective. Some of these disconnects and blunders are the following:
There was a disconnect between the goals of the military high command (protecting Vietnam from an external invasion) and the situation on the ground (an internal insurgency).
There was a disconnect between continuing analysis of the situation and the ideas of the military high command. The analysis of the ground requires unique and new approaches to counter insurgency but the high command insisted on fighting a conventional war against the insurgent opponent.
There was an over-emphasis of positivism on the part US Army leadership, downplaying the gains and capability of the enemy and considers the insurgency tactics of ambushes and raids as cowardly tactics.
Over-optimism on the “Search and Destroy” strategy in which the US Army believed to be the only way to win the war in Vietnam because it was proven effective in the past wars in Europe and during the World War II.
The US Army cannot depart from its established doctrine of totally annihilating the enemy to stop the latter’s will to fight, as such, it continued to conduct predictable conventional strategies and tactics.
The US Army downplayed Insurgency War and consider it as “small-time” war that is less important and less prestigious to deal with than the conventional wars that the US Army fought in European theaters.
The US Army resisted and ignored the wisdom of President John F Kennedy, which suggested that the Army needs to adopt new approaches to insurgency fighting.
The US Army ignored the advisory Group sent by the British government; despite the fact that the British Army was very successful in the recent campaign with the communist insurgency in the Malaya.
The political sector was less involved in addressing the insurgency.
There is no clear plan and intention to turn-over Vietnam to the Vietnamese. The US never prepared the Vietnamese to rule themselves and to address the insurgency problem locally.
Focused mainly on military approach to address the insurgency problem by destroying the enemy’s army.
Lessons learned from the field were easily forgotten and not written as part of the US Army doctrine due to the firm belief that insurgency is not the army’s true business. The US Army’s believed that the army’s true business is to fight a conventional war against a conventional enemy.
The US army did a lot of combat innovations but these innovations are focused on annihilating the enemy and not on addressing the root cause of insurgency.
Adopted centralized training and focused on the established Army Doctrine.
IV. Conclusion
The difference of approaches to counter insurgency between the two armies is not on the ability to realize that there is a need to change strategy, but on the ability of the organization to accept and implement the needed changes. The organizational culture of flexibility made the British Army adapt well to the situation; while the organizational culture of strictly sticking to the established doctrine of the US Army gave them difficulty to adjust to the situation and ignore other options in fighting insurgency.
The military culture of “The boss is always right” prevented the US Army from considering the suggestions and recommendations of study groups, after action reviews and junior officers from the field. Leaders of the US Army, conditioned by the culture they have absorbed through the years of fighting conventional wars, have prevented changes in the situational mission and roles. Moreover, the US Army leadership glorified so much their successes in World War II that prevented them from considering other approaches to war fighting.
The British military culture on the other hand, being honed by many years of colonial wars and policing chores in numerous British colonies, required it to integrate efforts of military, police and political component of the government. This made the British Army more flexible to innovations because they were immersed to a wide array of cultures, terrain, political climate and diverse resistances. Further, the innovative and varied experiences of the British Army made it amenable to changes in organizational processes and ready to confront multifaceted and complex wars of the future.
