A Cautionary Tale

Abstract

JOHN NAGL STILL HESITATES WHEN HE TALKS about his decision to leave the army. A former Rhodes scholar and tank-battalion operations officer in Iraq, Nagl helped General David Petraeus write the army’s new counterinsurgency field manual with its updated doctrine that is credited with bringing Iraq’s insurgency under control. But despite the considerable influence Nagl had in the army, and despite his reputation as a skilled leader, he retired in 2008 having not yet reached the rank of full colonel. Today, Nagl still has the same short haircut he had 24 years ago when we met as cadets—I an Air Force Academy doolie (or freshman), he a visiting West Pointer—but now he presides over a Washington think tank. The funny thing is, even as a civilian, he can’t stop talking about the army—”our army”—as if he had never left. He won’t say it outright, but it’s clear to me, and to many of his former colleagues, that the army fumbled badly in letting him go. His resignation has been haunting me, and it punctuates a paradox that has been publicly ignored for too long.

In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy—freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested.

—Victor Davis Hanson¹