| For over two hundred years the U.S. military has conducted operations other than "major war." Rarely, however, has the institution translated the experience to doctrine, education, or training, leaving each generation with only personal experience, ingenuity, and initiative to accomplish the mission. Yet despite cultural resistance to such missions, an examination of the post-Cold War U.S. military indicates a shift in this trend. New doctrine, new training scenarios, and lately, new educational curricula based on the past fifteen years of operational experience, reflects an organizational effort toward institutional learning. This shift is a result of post-Vietnam structures and processes actively designed to capture and disseminate experiential knowledge.; The new learning systems succeeded in creating an institutional learning culture in the U.S. military by assisting a generation of soldiers in adapting contemporaneously to the challenges of peace operations from Somalia to the Balkans. They present an example for other organizations whose leaders wish to capture and institutionalize experiential knowledge. In contrast to theories of military change that focus on organizational culture and external political intervention as the most significant obstacles to and catalysts for change, the research presented here demonstrates how internal institutional structures and processes can prevent, promote, or permit military change through learning. Whereas previous attempts to disseminate and institutionalize experiential learning were often stymied by the military's cultural preference for "big war" and its structural inabilities to transfer knowledge, the case of the post-Cold War military suggests that organizational systems designed to actively capture and disseminate new lessons can act as a powerful counterweight to cultural resistance to military change.; Despite this progress, the new military learning systems seem less effective in generating lessons for the civil-military tasks associated with nation building in Iraq. This demonstrates that identifying lessons from the field regarding what economic development, governance, and reconstruction projects work over the long term will require a modified education-oriented version of the military lesson-learned process described here. This research suggests, however, that a new learning culture has emerged in the U.S. military; one that may enable this generation of military professionals to overcome such institutional obstacles. |
