Selective Learning: Why Militaries Adopt Some Lessons but Leave Others Behind

• In Event: Irregular War and Military Effectiveness

Abstract

Among the 30 Allies of NATO, individual militaries have dedicated infrastructure and personnel to record thousands of lessons from multilateral operations (e.g. KFOR in Kosovo, ISAF in Afghanistan). Organizational change literature would predict that most, if not all, lessons that are both feasible and cost-effective should be adopted to improve performance, particularly given the potentially deadly high stakes of inaction. However, recent studies suggest that many collected lessons, including low-cost ones, are never implemented (“organizational amnesia”) (e.g. Hardt 2018; Dyson 2019; Saideman 2016). Our paper therefore answers this question: In multilateral military operations, why do national militaries learn certain lessons from the battlefield but leave other lessons behind? Existing and relevant research has largely focused on individual militaries or individual operations without addressing the broader.
We tested competing theories, including our original theory that builds on proportional reasoning scholarship, to explain variation in operational-level learning in Allied national militaries. We examined four armies from leading troop-contributing states (US, UK, France, Canada)to NATO operations. Within these armies, we conducted 23 elite interviews with military officials working in the learning and the doctrine offices, respectively, and we employed qualitative content analysis on interview responses. Rather than a simple matter of constrained resources determining learning, we find that lessons are most likely to be adopted when 1) a critical mass of army officials share the same socially-constructed view of threat to soldiers’ and civilians’ lives and 2) there exists top-down pressure. Our research provides a critical contribution to the learning literature in international security studies through our introduction of both an original theoretical argument and our unique empirical insights from those critical elite gatekeepers working within national militaries' respective bureaucracies.

Authors

• Heidi Hardt, University of California, Irvine

• Kristen Aanstoos, University of Southern California