John Nagl

John Albert Nagl (born February 28, 1966) is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. He is a former president of the Center for a New American Security and former headmaster of The Haverford School. Nagl is an expert in counterinsurgency and has published two books on military strategy.

Nagl was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Preparatory School in 1984. He then attended the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he studied international relations and graduated near the top of his class in 1988. As a newly commissioned second lieutenant, he was chosen as a Rhodes Scholar and studied international relations at St John's College, Oxford, earning his MPhil in 1990.

Entering the Armor Branch of the US Army, Nagl led a tank platoon in the 1st Cavalry Division during the Gulf War. After returning from the Middle East, he commanded A Troop of the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment in the 1st Armored Division in Büdingen, Germany.

Nagl later returned to Oxford to earn his DPhil at St Antony's College in 1997. At Oxford, his focus was on counterinsurgency. Nagl's doctoral dissertation was a comparative study of the British and American militaries as they dealt with insurgencies in Malaya and Vietnam, respectively. While at Oxford, he wrote several book reviews in a variety of military journals, focusing initially on the history of armored warfare, and later on the Vietnam War and guerrilla warfare.

In 1997, Nagl was appointed as a social sciences professor at West Point. While teaching at West Point, he was affiliated with the Strategic Studies Institute at the United States Army War College for which he co-authored a book on military professionalism in 1999. He later received the George C. Marshall Award for being the top graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College in 2001. A revised version of his dissertation was published in 2002 as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, titled after an observation made by T. E. Lawrence about the challenges of fighting guerrilla forces. He served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans for the 24th Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas. Nagl deployed to Iraq in 2003 as the operations officer of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor Regiment, 1st Infantry Division stationed near Khaldiya. While in Iraq, he was profiled in the New York Times Magazine in January 2004.

After returning from Iraq, Nagl served as military assistant to Paul Wolfowitz, then Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Wolfowitz's successor, Gordon England, until 2006. While he was military assistant to Wolfowitz and England, Nagl co-authored the new United States Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency field manual as part of a team overseen by Generals David Petraeus, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and James N. Mattis, the former commander of United States Central Command.

In 2006, Nagl was given command of the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor Regiment to help train Embedded Training Teams, small groups of American soldiers tasked to develop the Afghan National Army and Iraqi security forces.

Nagl retired from the Army and in 2008 became a fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C. Many commentators, including CNAS fellow Andrew Exum and retired Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, lamented his retirement because they saw it as a significant loss for the Army. There was some speculation that Nagl retired because he had been passed over for promotion or otherwise sidelined by the military, as happened to H.R. McMaster, because of his advocacy of counterinsurgency, which had fallen out of favour with senior commanders by 2008. However, Exum confirmed on his Abu Muqawama blog that Nagl was not eligible for promotion to Colonel in 2008 and argued that Nagl could have a greater influence on defense policy outside the military, particularly if he were allowed to serve in the Department of Defense by a future administration.