LTC John Nagl is a military assistant in the office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He is a graduate of West Point and holds the M.Phil. and D.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford University. His doctoral dissertation has been published as "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam", a book described as a "cult classic" by National Review Online. Nagl taught national security studies at West Point's Department of Social Sciences, led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm, and served as the Operations Officer of a tank battalion task force in Khalidiyah, Iraq from September 2003 through September 2004. He has been selected to command a tank battalion.