Dr. John A. Nagl lectures at the 31st Annual Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Lecture Series. Dr. Nagl served as an Armor Officer in the US Army for 20 years and is one of the most influential US military officers of his generation. He was heavily involved in the adoption of a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan in the mid-2000s. He also appeared on The Daily Show. Dr. Nagl graduated with distinction from West Point with the class of 1988 and received his masters degree from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He served as a tank platoon commander during the First Gulf War. Recognizing the changing nature of warfare, he returned to Oxford to pursue a PhD. His dissertation, entitled Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, became one of the fundamental academic texts used to argue for a change in US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the mid-2000s, he was on the team that helped write the Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual that outlines US counterinsurgency strategy. Knife Fights, Dr. Nagl's recently released memoir, details his experiences in the modern American military.