page_title: John Nagl
section_title: Post-military career
hierarchical_section_title: John Nagl / Post-military career
caption_attribution_description: English: Left to right, Peter Bergen, John Nagl and Daniel R. Green, discussing Nagl's new book, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (2014), at the New America Foundation, 27 October 2014
context_page_description: John A. Nagl is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. He is former president of the Center for a New American Security and current headmaster of The Haverford School. Nagl is an expert in counterinsurgency and has published two books on military strategy.
context_section_description: Nagl retired from the Army and in 2008 became a fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington D.C.. Many commentators, including CNAS fellow Andrew Exum and retired Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, lamented his retirement because they saw it as a significant loss for the Army. There was some speculation that Nagl retired because he had been passed over for promotion or otherwise sidelined by the military, as happened to H.R. McMaster, because of his advocacy of counterinsurgency, which had fallen out of favour with senior commanders by 2008. However, Exum confirmed on his Abu Muqawama blog that Nagl was not eligible for promotion to Colonel in 2008 and argued that Nagl could have greater influence on defense policy outside the military, particularly if he were given an opportunity to serve in the Department of Defense by a future administration.
  After CNAS's founders, Kurt M. Campbell and Michèle Flournoy, left CNAS to serve in the Obama administration, Nagl was named CNAS's president in February 2009 and served until January 2012. Nagl remains a non-resident senior fellow of CNAS. While at CNAS, he co-authored several reports on a wide range of issues, including counterinsurgency, Islamist extremism  and the future of the American military. While he was still in the Army, Nagl wrote a report in 2007 for CNAS which advocates for the creation of a permanent Army advisory corps, a proposal that he argued for in an op-ed in the New York Times. His proposal for an advisory corps was favorably cited by American historian Max Boot in a New York Times op-ed about ways to modernize the State Department and the American military.
  In January 2011, he and CNAS chief executive officer Nathaniel Fick wrote an op-ed in the New York Times supporting the Obama administration's troop surge and reporting on its early successes. In April 2011, he wrote favorably about President Obama decision to name Leon Panetta, then director of the CIA, as Secretary of Defense, and General David Petraeus, then commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, with whom Nagl had worked on the new Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency manual, as director of the CIA, noting the increasingly intertwined nature of the relationship between the intelligence and defense establishments in the United States.
  Nagl served on the Defense Policy Board, which advises the Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He taught in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University in 2009 and is a visiting professor in the war studies department at King's College London. In January 2012, he was named the inaugural Minerva Chair at the US Naval Academy, where he joined the history department at the Naval Academy and conducted research on the relationship between culture and warfare. He taught a course on the history of counterinsurgency to midshipmen at the Naval Academy.
  Dr. Nagl is an Advisory Board Member of Spirit of America, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad and the local people and partners they seek to help.
  Already notable in military circles, his public profile was further raised with an interview on Comedy Central's The Daily Show on August 2007. He was also interviewed with fellow counterinsurgency experts Lewis Sorley and Conrad Crane on the Charlie Rose show about the similarities between counterinsurgency during the Iraq and Vietnam Wars in March 2006.
  Nagl was appointed as headmaster of The Haverford School in august of 2012.
  In October of 2016, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that according to court documents, Nagl had found marijuana in his son's backpack and, as punishment, had confiscated it along with the boy's cellphone. Two days later, he discovered the items missing from where he had hidden them, and found his son using the phone in a bathroom of the family home. When he attempted to take back the phone, the son refused to hand it over;
caption: Left to right, Peter Bergen, John Nagl and Daniel R. Green, discussing Nagl's new book, Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice, at the New America Foundation, 27 October 2014
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