John Nagl

New Technologies, the Future of Warfare and U.S. Military Capabilities

Dr. John Nagl is a Professorial Lecturer at the Elliott School of George Washington University. He is a longtime student of U.S. defense strategy with a particular focus on counterinsurgency and irregular warfare, which is the use of force to achieve political results below the level of conventional armed conflict.

Dr. Nagl is a Distinguished Graduate of West Point and a retired Army officer. He served in combat in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom and was awarded Bronze Star medals in both conflicts. After his 20-year career in the Army, he was a Senior Fellow at and later President of the Center for a New American Security, an independent, bipartisan organization that develops national security and defense policies. He has been a member of the Defense Policy Board and the Reserve Forces Policy Board, which provide independent advice and recommendations to senior military officials. He has also been a member of the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank, and served as a Fellow of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Dr. Nagl has taught national security studies at West Point and in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program and served in the Pentagon as a Military Assistant to two Deputy Secretaries of Defense. He also served for eight years as the head of the Haverford School, outside of Philadelphia.

Dr. Nagl has written several books, including Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War (2014) and Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (2002). He has co-authored two recent volumes on the Ukraine War: A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force (2024) and A Long Hard Year: Russia-Ukraine War Lessons Learned 2023 (2026). He was on the team that wrote the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Manual and has written numerous articles that have been published widely, including in military journals, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy. He has been profiled in The New York Times and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Commission on Wartime Contracting.

Dr. Nagl earned his Master’s and Doctoral degrees in International Relations at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He earned a Master of Military Arts and Sciences (MMAS) from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, where he received the George C. Marshall Award as the top graduate.