Description
The ability to learn from exercises and operational experiences is essential to effective military adaptation, emulation and innovation, however little research has been undertaken on formal military ‘lessons-learned processes’. Drawing on extensive ESRC-funded original empirical research (ES/V004190/1) this paper examines the diffusion of the NATO lessons-learned process within a NATO member state (the Netherlands) and NATO partner state (Ukraine). In doing so the paper makes two important contributions to our conceptual and theoretical understanding of military learning. First, it draws attention to the utility of the academic literature on absorptive capacity to provide a diagnostic toolkit to explore best practice in military learning. Second, the paper contributes to theorising military learning. It finds that while structural variables, including threat level, organisational culture and bureaucratic politics play an important role in the identification and adoption of lessons-learned best-practice, it also illustrates the insights that process-based analysis can provide in improving descriptions and explanations of military learning. The paper argues that process research offers new tools for providing a ‘peek through the window’ at what is going on in organisational learning, as a contribution to military research and application in wider fields of public and private sector engagement in extreme contexts.
