From As Iraq War Rages, Army Re-Examines Lessons of Vietnam:
For most of the 1980s and 1990s the Army’s understanding of what went wrong in Vietnam was dominated by retired Col. Harry Summers’s history On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. That account argued Viet Cong guerrillas were used by the communist regime to distract the U.S. from the real threat — the conventional North Vietnamese Army. The U.S. didn’t lose because it fought a guerrilla war badly, Col. Summers asserted, but rather because it was prohibited by the civilian leadership from launching a conventional attack on North Vietnam.His book, commissioned by the Army and published in 1981, gave Army officers reason to ignore guerrilla warfare for the two decades that followed.
Now military leaders are reading Col. Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, which contrasts the U.S. Army’s failure with the British experience in Malaya in the 1950s:
He took the “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife” title from a famous aphorism of T.E. Lawrence, also known as Lawrence of Arabia: “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”