Great WSJ article today on the military learning how to wage counter-insurgency warfare, partly by learning the right lessons from Vietnam. A focus of the piece is Lt. Col. John Nagl’s excellent book, “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency from Malaya and Vietnam.” Here’s a key bit:

Col. Nagl’s book is one of a half dozen Vietnam histories — most of them highly critical of the U.S. military in Vietnam — that are changing the military’s views on how to fight guerrilla wars. Two other books that have also become must-reading among senior Army officers are retired Col. Lewis Sorley’s “A Better War,” which chronicles the last years of the Vietnam War, and Col. H.R. McMaster’s “Dereliction of Duty,” which focuses on the early years.
The embrace of these Vietnam histories reflects an emerging consensus in the Army that in order to move forward in Iraq, it must better understand the mistakes of Vietnam.
In the past, it was commonly held in military circles that the Army failed in Vietnam because civilian leaders forced it to fight a limited war instead of the all-out assault it longed to wage. That belief helped shape the doctrine espoused in the 1980s by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell. They argued that the military should fight only wars in which it could apply quick, overwhelming force to destroy the enemy.
The newer analyses of Vietnam are now supplanting that theory — and changing the way the Army fights. The argument that the military must exercise restraint is a central point of the Army’s new counterinsurgency doctrine. The doctrine, which runs about 120 pages and is still in draft form, is a handbook on how to wage guerrilla wars.
It offers Army and Marine Corps officers advice on everything from strategy development to intelligence gathering. Col. Nagl is among the four primary authors of the doctrine. Conrad Crane, a historian at the U.S. Army War College, is overseeing the effort.

I wrote about Nagl’s book here.