Twelfth Annual Sommerfeld Lecture

• Author: John A. Nagl
• Position: President of the Center for a New American Security
• Pages: 157-187

2010] TWELFTH ANNUAL SOMMERFELD LECTURE 157

TWELFTH ANNUAL SOMMERFELD LECTURE∗

JOHN A. NAGL†

∗ This is an edited transcript of a lecture delivered by Dr. John A. Nagl on August 2,

2010, to members of the 54th Operational Law of War Course, staff and faculty of The

Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, and their distinguished guests at The

Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Established in 1999, the Sommerfeld Lecture series was established at The Judge

Advocate General’s Legal Center and School to provide a forum for discussing current

issues relevant to operations law. The series is named in honor of Colonel (Ret.) Alan

Sommerfeld. A graduate of the 71st Officer Basic Course, Colonel Sommerfeld’s Army

judge advocate career was divided between the Active and Reserve Components. After

six years of active duty, he became a civilian attorney at Fort Carson, Colorado, and then

at the Missile Defense Agency. He continued to serve in the Army Reserves, and on

September 11, 2001, Colonel Sommerfeld was the Senior Legal Advisor in NORAD’s

Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, where he served as the conduit for the rules of

engagement from the Secretary of Defense to the NORAD staff. He was subsequently

mobilized for two years as a judge advocate for Operation Noble Eagle and became a

founding member of the U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) legal office, where

he served as its Deputy Staff Judge Advocate and then interim Staff Judge Advocate. He

retired from the Reserves in December 2003.

† Dr. John Nagl is the President of the Center for a New American Security. He is also a

member of the Defense Policy Board, a Visiting Professor in the War Studies Department

at Kings College of London, a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the

Veterans of Foreign Wars, and a member of the International Institute of Strategic

Studies. Dr. Nagl is a member of the Joint Force Quarterly Advisory Committee and of

the Advisory Board of the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, a former Young

Leader of the French-American Foundation and the American Council on Germany, and

a member of the American Association of Rhodes Scholars. Dr. Nagl was a

Distinguished Graduate of the U.S. Military Academy Class of 1988 and served as an

armor officer in the U.S. Army for twenty years, retiring with the rank of lieutenant

colonel. His last military assignment was as commander of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor

at Fort Riley, Kansas, training Transition Teams that embed with Iraqi and Afghan units.

He led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm and served as the operations officer of a

tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He earned his doctorate from

Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Nagl taught national security studies at West

Point’s Department of Social Sciences and in Georgetown University’s Security Studies

Program. He served as a Military Assistant to two Deputy Secretaries of Defense and

later worked as a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Nagl also

earned a Master of the Military Arts and Sciences Degree from the Command and

General Staff College, where he received the George C. Marshall Award as the top

graduate. He was awarded the Combat Action Badge by General James Mattis of the

United States Marine Corps, under whose leadership he fought in Al Anbar in 2004. Dr.

Nagl is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from

Malaya and Vietnam and was on the writing team that produced the U.S. Army/Marine

Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. His writings have also been published in The

New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Parameters,

Military Review, Joint Force Quarterly, Armed Forces Journal, The Washington

Quarterly, and Democracy, among others. He was profiled in the Wall Street Journal

158 MILITARY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 206

I’m going to talk to you today about counterinsurgency doctrine and

how you develop learning organizations. That’s really what my doctoral

dissertation was about: learning organizations and how armies adapt to

learn about counterinsurgency. I’m going to talk about the wars we’re

currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and about the future of

conflict, which I think is likely to look not too dissimilar from the wars

we’re currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’d really like to do this interactively. I gave a version of this talk last

month to the Defense Science Board, which is thinking about some of

these same problems, and was scheduled for an hour; we went two and

didn’t get through all of the slides. I’d be completely happy not to get

through all of the slides if we can establish that kind of discussion. The

hard part is always getting somebody to break the ice and ask the first

question and turn it into an interactive discussion. Once we get that

going, I think we’ll be fine.

So where are we going to start? So much of all of this goes back to

Vietnam and the case studies I looked at for my doctoral dissertation. I

came out of West Point, went to Oxford for finishing school, and then

fought in Desert Storm and came out of Desert Storm absolutely

convinced that we were so good at the tank-on-tank, fighter-plane-on-

fighter-plane kind of war that our enemies weren’t going to fight us that

way anymore. We were too good. Our conventional superiority was

going to push our enemies toward the edges of the spectrum, either

toward the high end to try to acquire weapons of mass destruction—as

North Korea has, as Iran has in what I think is likely to be one of the

major national security questions of the next year or two, and as we

thought Iraq had—or toward the low end, toward insurgency and terror.

So I decided to look at that low end—at insurgency and terror—

when the Army sent me back to Oxford after Desert Storm—because we

all make sacrifices for national security—to get my Ph.D. If you study

insurgency and counterinsurgency, you really have to look at Vietnam,

so I spent a bunch of time thinking about Vietnam and could talk for a

long, long time about Vietnam. Western armies, conventional armies,

and The New York Times Magazine. Dr. Nagl has appeared on The Jim Lehrer News

Hour, National Public Radio, 60 Minutes, Washington Journal, and The Daily Show with

Jon Stewart. He has lectured domestically and internationally at military war colleges,

the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and Defense Policy Board, the Office of the Secretary of

Defense, major universities, intelligence agencies, and business forums.