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LESSONS LEARNED
A HISTORY OF US ARMY LESSON LEARNING
BY
DENNIS J. VETOCK
CARLISLE BARRACKS, PAUS ARMY MILITARY HISTORY INSTITUTE1988
 
. . . I shall be content if it is judged useful by thoseinquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as anaid to the interpretation of the future. . . .- Thucydides,The History of the Peloponnesian Warcirca 430 B.C.
This is a special study addressing a current concern and is based on thehistorical materials available at the US Army Military History Institute, afield activity of the Department of the Army. The views expressed in thispublication are those of the author and not necessarily those of theDepartment of Defense or any elements thereof. Furthermore, this effortis not connected in any way with the US Army Center of Military History.ii
 
PREFACE
Let us ask how armies learn their lessons. Wetake for granted that armies seek to profit fromtheir experience and thereby improve theirperformance. How, specifically, do theyaccomplish this? What procedures actuallytransform usable experienceintoimprovedperformance? Whatever they are,theseprocedures should not be taken for granted butshould be identified and analyzed. We need toknow when and how armies - including ourown - have made effective use of operationalexperiences. This need is more timely than ever forthe US Army, since it recently established theCenter for ArmyLessons Learned (CALL).Unfortunately, no comparative or historical studieson the subject are available to offer insights andunderstanding to the new agency or to the Armyas a whole. Lacking, too, is a coherent explanationof the lesson-learning phenomenon itself. Whatfollows is intended to serve as the neededhistorical background.The purpose of this study is to examine whenandhow theUS Army has madecontemporaneous use of its combat experiencesto learn lessons in wartime. It focuses on thelesson-learning process itself: the approaches andprocedures that transformed battlefield data intothe usable experiences we call lessons and howthose lessons became learned, that is, applied.Moreover, it looks at this process chiefly during awar, not afterwards. Postwar lessons cannotaffect that war’s outcome, although they may wellbenefit those who will fight the next war.Contemporaneously derived lessons offerimmediate opportunity to affect ongoing combatoperations.Excluded from focus are high-level matters, liketheories of war, national defense policy, andstrategy. Sights have been set on combat tactics,techniques and organization in order to avoid thedistracting contentiousnessassociatedwithsweeping lessons that can never be proven, onlyargued.Battlefield-level lessons are morepragmatic, tangible, even measurable, and theyoffer a manageable approach to begin tounderstand how lessons have been learned.This effort is not intended as the final history ofthe subject but its first comprehensiveexamination. It explores how the US Army usedthe experiences of war during the war itself. Thehistorical framework of ideas and events presentedhere should be considered an invitation for furtherresearch and analysis by others to advance ourknowledge of this important concept and practice.Source material for this study came exclusivelyfrom the rich and varied holdings of the US ArmyMilitary History Institute. Because of the pervasivenature of the lesson learning concept, and the factthat no body of secondary literature specificallyaddresses it, the following account is a testamentto the scope of information available toresearchers in the Army’s chief repository forunofficial historical materials. The NationalArchives and Records Agency serves as custodianof the Army’s official records, while MHI servesthe auxiliary function of concentrating andpreserving selected non-record copies ofdocuments, alongwithmilitary-relatedpublications and the personal papers of numerousArmy officers. Unfortunately, constraints of timeallowed little more than cursory exploitation of thethousands of boxes of personal papers. Printeddocuments form the bulk of the primary sourcematerial consulted.Carlisle Barracks, Pa.September 1999
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