The fundamentals the Irish National Army used in the Irish Civil War (1922–23) are a model for the successful application of a classic counterinsurgency which, if understood earlier, could have made a difference in the United States’ most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. John A. Nagl and Gareth Prendergast explain.
Keywords: counterinsurgency, Ireland, Irish Civil War, military strategy, treaty
Listen here.
Stephanie Crider (Host)
Welcome to
Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
I am speaking with Gareth Prendergast and John A. Nagl today.
Prendergast is a serving colonel in the Irish Army and the author of
Clear-Hold-Build: How the Free State Won the Irish Civil War
Nagl is the General John J. Pershing Professor of Warfighting Studies in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. They coauthored “Turning Tactical Victories into Strategic Success: Counterinsurgency in the Irish Civil War, 1922–23,” which you can find in the Summer 2026 issue of
Parameters.
This podcast has been a long time in the making. Thank you both for showing up today.
John A. Nagl
Delighted to be here, Stephanie.
Gareth Prendergast
Hello, Stephanie.
Host
Let’s just start at the beginning. How did you two meet?
Prendergast
I met John at a conference in, Ireland, well, 15 years ago. And, I’d heard all about him. I’d read his book. I bought him a pint of Guinness, and we were chatting at the bar for the evening in the officer’s mess. I felt we obviously made a connection. So, a few years later, when I asked him if he’d like to write the foreword to my book, he was very generous, and he said he would—but I had to invite him to Ireland and buy him a pint of Guinness.
So, I did that.
Nagl
That seemed reasonable to me. It seemed like a reasonable ask on my part.
Prendergast
Yeah.
So, I met him in Ireland, and he says, “Oh, you’re not the guy I remember. You’re a different person.” So…
But he still came all the way over to Ireland, and he still wrote the foreword to my book. And, I hope we’ve become good friends ever since.
And, I would like to thank him.
Nagl
Yeah, Gareth and I have spent time together, both, on his island and, here in the United States. And, I was really honored to write the foreword to his book, which is another example of the basic principles of counterinsurgency being applied to a case that many people on this side of the Atlantic don’t know very well.
And, it illustrates, to me, the enduring value of the counterinsurgency doctrine that General David Petraeus, General Jim Mattis, [Dr.] Conrad [C.] Crane of our own Army War College, [and] a number of people wrote, now 20 years ago.
And, that continues to, I think, influence how—not just the American military, but a number of militaries around the world—think about this very challenging kind of war.
Host
Why did you decide to write this article?
Prendergast
It’s primarily from my book. And, I just wanted to highlight to people in America (and to a newer audience) the dangers, first of all, of a civil war and how you can blindly follow an ideology, or your leadership, as it happened in the Irish Civil War, into a vicious encounter—even though you don’t fully understand what you’re fighting for.
And, I also wanted to demonstrate how the clear-hold-build philosophy that was developed by the Americans during the Iraq conflict actually worked during the Irish Civil War. And, I thought the Irish Civil War, as John said earlier, would be a very good case study to study clear, hold, build.
And, when John offered to write an article with me, I [said], “Yeah, this would be fantastic to do it in such a prestigious magazine as
Parameters.”
And it’s just a pleasure to be able to write an article with John Nagl.
Host
Well, we’re delighted to have both of you in
Parameters.
Nagl
We are happy to be in
Parameters.
Gareth is being modest, I think, which is a bit of the Irish one. First, his brother is a student here at the Army War College this year—his taller and better-looking brother. I think he’s the smart one, and his brother, John, is the good-looking one.
His book has done remarkably well in Ireland, and I think deserves more attention here on this side of the pond.
Prendergast
Thanks very much, John, for [those] kind words.
Nagl
And, just a reminder that Ireland and America have both suffered from horrible civil wars. And, I think we have a great deal to learn from each other—from each other’s experiences and, the effort [required] to make sure that those sorts of horrors never happen again here, or in other countries, to the extent that we can.
Host
A few minutes ago, Gareth, you alluded to the similarities between the Irish Civil War and conflicts in the twenty-first century. What makes this conflict, in your view, so relevant to the challenges faced by armies in the twenty-first century, particularly in places, as you mentioned, like Iraq and Afghanistan?
Prendergast
I think one of the key elements of it is why the antitreaty IRA (Irish Republican Army) started the civil war over an ideology. John and I are both graduates of the US Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, [Kansas], (and actually, John is a Marshall Award-winning graduate). But, one of the first things we learn over there is the Clausewitzian quote that no one starts a war, or rather, no one in his sense, ought to do so without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by the war and how he intends to conduct it.
I think that’s as true today, especially if we look at what’s happening in Iran, as what happened during the Irish Civil War. We see the protagonists, the antitreaty IRA side, try to win it militarily with no real political or strategic end state. They [believed] that just by killing more of the opposite sides, they would they would win the war.
As the war progressed, they weren’t offering an alternative [to the] the people, a strategic end state, a political matter. It just shows to me that you can’t win a war militarily. COA (course of action) counts for insurgency is only 20 percent military. It’s 80 percent everything else.
And, the Free State, or the pro-treaty side, realize that, and they competed for the popular will of the population by restoring essential services, the economy, governance, and providing an ulterior end state of a free state that’s not yet a republic, but it’s a stepping stone to a republic.
And eventually, they won the popular narrative with the population, alienating and isolating the antitreaty IRA side.
Host
A key pillar of the Irish Free State success was the use of locally recruited soldiers and police who lived among the population, which contrasts with modern approaches that rely largely on isolated forward operating bases. What are the key advantages of this embedded local-first approach, and why do you think it is so difficult for modern military forces to replicate?
Prendergast
I agree with that 100 percent because when I was a young officer in Lebanon, back in the early 1990s, we lived in the towns and villages. We had our platoon bases inherent and embedded with the local population. We would have our meetings with the mayors and the mukhtars on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
Now, that was dangerous, but it still afforded us a common bond with the people we were there to protect, and you can’t just commute to work, as they say in counterinsurgency. But, as it got more dangerous, the Irish and other UN nations retreated into bigger bases, and I think the same happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, during the conflict. John can correct me if I’m wrong.
It was only during the surge that they later came back out and started to push into the population areas. And, I’m saying that the Free State, the national army during the Irish Civil War, realized this, and they realized that they had to spread out into the Irish countryside. And in total, they set up nearly 380 bases throughout Ireland with an army that rose to the size of 60,000 soldiers.
And, even in the county of Cork, where I concentrate my studies, they set up 64 different platoon-size bases, so as to provide the security, to get the general information, and to basically win the confidence of the population. And, the British Army could never achieve that in the previous war of independence against the IRA. They say the young British soldier in the bases had as much strategic awareness as a soldier in Nepal as he has of Cork.
So, I think the lessons from the Irish Civil War are very prevalent today [regarding] what happened in Iraq, what happened in Afghanistan, and what might happen in the future. So,
there’s a lot of learnings from that.
Nagl
I think that’s exactly right. And, I think there’s a question of risk. In order to succeed in these kind of wars, you have to be willing to accept risk for your soldiers in order to keep the population safer, and it is only if your soldiers are taking that risk in support of the population that the population will trust you with the information you need to reduce the insurgents and win the war. So, there’s a trust basis that has to be formed between the population and the people conducting the counterinsurgency, and it took a long time to develop that. And, some hard lessons had to be relearned, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, from previous conflicts, including the one that Gareth and I write about.
Host
Part of the Free State strategy was, of course, military, but it was also about good governance, restoring the economy, providing essential services. In a conflict, which of these nonmilitary elements do you believe was the single most critical factor in winning the hearts and minds of the neutral majority and ultimately defeating the insurgency?
Prendergast
I write about three things: governance, the economy, and the restoration of essential services, but I think that the restoration of the essential services was basically what won the war for the Free State because the antitreaty went around with a policy of trying to make government and governance impossible by destroying up every piece of infrastructure and railway track and signals, vehicle, and telegraph facilities.
And, as the writers at the time (says), that if they wanted to understand why it became growing unpopularity amongst the population, all they had to do was look at the nearest collapsed bridge. And, they never realized the effect that they were having on the local economy, people moving their cattle around, people using their trade, getting the fares, trying to do communications and trade, and how seriously it affected the daily life.
As one of three locals said that as bad as the British were ever, at least they never commandeered the doctor’s or the priest’s car like the antitreaty IRA did during the Irish Civil War. So, if the population is to see that you’re meant to swim amongst [them], the IRA never realized that, and by destroying bridges, by affecting the economy, they really, really alienated themselves from the population.
And, the population didn’t have to like the Free State, but they just tolerated them because they brought a sense of stability and canceled out all the chaos that the IRA were bringing. So, they offered a better alternative. At the end of 10 years of continuous fighting, from 1913 up to 1923, the population were tired, and they just wanted to get back to the safe and secure environment. Nowadays, armies try to establish [stability] throughout the world, and that’s what the Free State did. They just provided that better alternative.
Nagl
I’m just struck by how similar that is to what happened in Iraq and ultimately led to the Sahwa, or the awakening among the Sunni tribes in Al-Anbar Province, where I had fought, with so little success in 2003 and 2004. As ultimately, they decided that ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State in Iraq, presented an even greater threat to them than the Americans did, and they decided to start cooperating with us—not because they liked us but because the alternative was worse.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes over and over again, and that’s why we captured the same lines of effort that Gareth talks about in his book, that we talked about in the article, [and] that we captured in the counterinsurgency field manual [
Counterinsurgency, FM 3-24].
Host
The article describes a fascinating dynamic where the Free State leveraged the British Army officers for their technical expertise, despite their unpopularity. How is the leadership able to navigate this politically sensitive issue, and what does it teach us about the importance of pragmatism and being an adaptive learning organization during a conflict?
Prendergast
The Irish Civil War was fought just after the First World War. Within Ireland at that time, there was hundreds of thousands of men and women who were veterans of combat, and they could be tapped into their skill sets, and leadership qualities could be tapped into. So, when the majority of the IRA went against the treaty, the Free State government needed a recruiting pool of trained soldiers—so they used the British Army veterans.
The population of Dublin at the time was 300,000 people. There was 30,000 veterans of World War I living in Dublin at that time. Cork was even more. Cork had 76,000 people living in it—16,000 veterans. That’s 1 in 5 people. Even more men were veterans of [the] British Army or the British Navy, so they knew how to fire the artillery, they knew how to operate the communication systems, they knew how to drive the trucks, [and] be medics.
So you see, the Free State side, Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy, writing to the British Legion, saying, “Can we have these skill sets?” because if you’re going to quickly establish the army (and John will know from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan), you want to reestablish an army, or a host nation, of force.
You need these skill sets, and these skill sets take months and years to generate. But, throughout Ireland, there were trained artillery personnel, trained drivers, trained [medics], and, basically, the Free State tapped into this. And, when it comes to the officers, the officers brought the discipline and the leadership and the ability to write orders and to fight conventional campaigns that the antitreaty IRA had never had in their leadership. They had no professional military education. And this ties into what were the strategic end states? What were you hoping to achieve? What did you want to do it? So, the IRA, when they tried to fight in a conventional war, that’s where they lost most of their casualties. And then, they retreated back into the guerrilla warfare.
They started to do well at that towards the middle of the [Irish] Civil War, but then when the Free State captured the British Army officers (I mean by capturing in that their skill sets and knowledge—because 50 percent of the Free State officers at that time were veterans of World War I), they then dramatically changed the organization of the Free State.
They pushed out into bases. They used armor more. They battle grouped their organizations, and this brought the fight to the IRA. And, I have a whole chapter dedicated in my book—and a section in the article—about how to use those skill sets to effectively pursue a counterinsurgency campaign. So, it was a very pragmatic idea by the Free State, but it was an existential threat, and they needed to use every asset they had available.
And, the British Army officers who were trained and ready to go were certainly that asset.
Host
What can the end of the Irish Civil War teach us about how to terminate a counterinsurgency campaign in a way that leads to lasting strategic success, rather than just a temporary pause in violence?
Prendergast
After a decade of conflict on the island of Ireland, the IRA never really surrendered. They never signed the peace treaty. They just put their guns away to fight another war and another day. But luckily enough, their leadership set up a political party, and they started to adopt the political way to get a republic rather than a violent way.
So, the gunmen started to disappear out of Irish life and out of Irish politics, and in 1923, the civil war ended. In 1926, the antitreaty IRA, lost the civil war. They set up a political party called Fianna Fáil, and in 1932, Fianna Fáil won the election and took power. And the Free State soldiers asked our commanding officers, “Do we shoot them now, or do we salute them?”
The head of the Free State Army said that “Democracy has spoken. These are our new political masters, and if we want to be a political state and a moderate democracy, we have to accept that.”
So, I believe, at that time, Ireland became a full democracy, and the gunmen definitely left. And, the Fianna Fáil party has governed Ireland for 60 of the last 80 years as a result.
It’s just a sign that politics is a far better way to solve these crises than violence, and Ireland has managed to do that and kept the violence far up in the northern parts of the island—away from us. Now, if these guns are still buried around the island after the civil war, hopefully (and thankfully) they haven’t been taken out since.
Nagl
I think this is a great example of the importance—when you’re fighting a war—of understanding that the people you’re fighting, many of them are going to be responsible for the postwar society. And so, you’ve got to fight always with an eye toward what is the political end state you’re trying to achieve. The wonderful thinker, theologian, leader, Saint Augustine, said, “The only purpose of a war is to build a better peace.”
And soldiers, even as they’re using violence, I think, have to keep in the back of their mind that the people they’re fighting against may become some of the political leaders of the country in years to come, and be willing to negotiate and be willing to achieve only some of their goals and understand that negotiation is how the vast majority of war’s end.
Host
What are the takeaways for our listeners? What are your concluding thoughts on this topic?
Prendergast
A lot of people talk about Malaysia or Malaya being the significant counterinsurgency campaign. John even wrote an excellent book on it,
Eating Soup with a Knife. There’s other case studies out there [about] how you can study a counterinsurgency. And, the other thing is that as much as we want to fight conventional wars and big battle wars with large equipment, we keep getting dragged back to counterinsurgencies throughout our history.
So, we can’t, as we say in Ireland, throw the baby out with the bathwater. We always have to keep an eye on a counterinsurgency, the stability operations, and what type of case studies and examples we can learn from. And as John says, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot. And, he who fails to learn from history is destined to repeat it.
So, I just want to bring the whole Irish Civil War into that academic discussion, and having John and yourself inviting me onto this show, and having John write the foreword to my book and invite me over to the War College last year to talk about it, it’s certainly helped me do that.
So, thank you so much for all your help and support on that. I really appreciate it.
Nagl
And Gareth, I haven’t had a chance to tell you this yet, but just last week I spoke with an American Special Forces officer who wants to write his doctoral dissertation on this very case that you and I have written this article about. So, he’s ordered a copy of your book. Your sales have gone up by one here in the States.
And after he reads it, I’m going to put the two of you in touch with each other. I’m just so delighted that, you know, your quest for a PhD, which I think was influenced at least a little bit by mine, in turn, is now going to inspire another officer to learn the lessons of history and to learn from our brothers and sisters in other countries.
My favorite part of the Army War College is the 75 or so international fellows we have here every year, from 75 countries around the globe, including Gareth’s brother, John, [who] is only the second Irishman to attend the Army War College. And, we just have so much to learn from each other, from each other’s histories [and] from each other’s experiences. And, the more we do that—the tighter bonds we can build across oceans, across borders—the better we can, together, serve the mission of global peace and security that Gareth and I have both tried to serve in conflict zones around the world lo, these many, many years.
So, it’s just been a privilege to be friends with a number of Irish Army officers and to learn their country and their history, and hopefully, to share that with some of my countrymen.
Host
This conversation was worth the wait. Thank you for your time today.
Listeners, you can read the genesis article at
press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 56, issue 2. For more Army War College podcasts, check out
Conversations on Strategy,
SSI Live,
CLSC Dialogues, and
A Better Peace.