The U.S. Army is big on “lessons learned.” In every
conflict, observers are dispatched to interview soldiers and commanders,
so that they can document the experience. The reports that they
produce often become source material for Army doctrine writers and
training developers.
In recent months, the Army decided that the lessons learned also
should be shared with the weapons-acquisition bureaucracy. The thinking
is that these lessons can help the Army make better spending decisions
and figure out how to invest its research and development dollars.
Col. Michael Hiemstra, director of the Center for Army Lessons
Learned, said that the CALL now has an “upstart organization”
that focuses exclusively on research, development and acquisition.
“I have a couple of new folks who came 18 months ago, specifically
to develop acquisition lessons learned,” he said in an interview.
A subordinate organization to the Army’s Training and Doctrine
Command, CALL employs 70 people at its headquarters, in Fort Leavenworth,
Kan. The majority are government civilians.
“As we do our observations, we feed those lessons into the
Army school system and our combat training centers,” said
Hiemstra.
Two CALL teams were in Afghanistan this year. A group of six went
in January, and a team of 17 was there in March. Each spent 30 days
in the field.
“We are preparing our report,” said Hiemstra. “Once
we finish writing and editing, we’ll submit it to the chain
of command currently in Afghanistan. Once they review it, we’ll
distribute it to the Army, to units that have been designated as
replacement organizations for the ones that are in the theater now,
so they can use the insights and lessons to help develop their training
programs prior to going to Afghanistan.”
Additionally, he said, “We’ll send the information
to combat training centers so they can take a look and see how they
may want to modify their scenarios. We’ll submit it to TRADOC
schools, to help develop instructor programs. We’ll send the
information to others involved in materiel development and acquisition.”
Of particular interest in the field of acquisition is tactical
communications equipment, said Hiemstra. In Afghanistan, he said,
“We had a member of the team specifically looking at things
relating to the ABCS [Army Battle Command System] program.”
Another “equipment lesson” likely to filter into the
acquisition process is the popularity in Afghanistan of the John
Deere Gator light utility vehicle. The Gator, said a CALL report,
was a “highly successful system—used to carry casualties,
ammunition, water, etc. It validates the utility of rapidly acquiring
off-the-shelf systems for certain tactical applications.”
CALL officials strive to protect the integrity of the lessons-learned
reports and ensure that they reflect what actually happened in an
operation, said Hiemstra. But he cannot prevent the CALL findings
from becoming politicized, once the reports are released.
“Once I take lessons and publish them, what people do with
them after that is out of my control,” he said.
Sometimes, the findings of a CALL team are kept secret, because
they may compromise or endanger a unit still fighting the war, he
said. “When we went to Afghanistan in January, we were advised
to be careful about the lessons that we developed, because things
in this operation are so different from things the Army has done
in the past.”
But Hiemstra stressed that, during his four years as the head of
CALL, he has not been censored by higher-ups. “We have never
ran into a situation when someone said, ‘You can’t print
that,’” he asserted. “People understand that,
if the lessons-learned program is to be valid, you have to be able
to say accurately what happened and draw accurate conclusions, in
order to honestly learn something from a particular event.”
Sometimes, however, “that’s hard,” said Hiemstra,
because it means recognizing the need to improve in some areas.
In the end, he added, “It’s the ability of the Army
to take an honest look at itself that [made] the Army of the 1970s
into the successful Army of the 1990s.”
Hiemstra also emphasized that CALL tends to emphasize the positive,
versus the negative. “If an organization or individual did
very well, we’ll discuss it and suggest to other people that
they may consider doing the same thing in their organization.”
On the other hand, “if the performance is not positive, we
won’t dwell on it, we’ll describe the event, and we’ll
say, given this negative event, here are things that you can do
to prevent that from happening.”
CALL teams often have to remind troops they visit that they are
not from the inspector general’s office, Hiemstra said. “When
we go to an organization, we are not there to evaluate, to critique
their performance. ... We go simply to learn. ... We take the lesson
and provide it back to the Army.”
Once in the field, the CALL teams generally are “well received,”
he said. “We have not had undue pressure to change any of
our results.”
Some of the lessons-learned reports from Afghanistan have been
made public. A copy of one report provided to National Defense essentially
concluded that the Army had performed well in Afghanistan, thanks
to the service’s robust training program. Much of the information
in that report already had been published in newspapers during the
past several months.
Notably, the CALL report was critical of the way the Army handled
the news media coverage of the war. “There was much more that
could have been done to inform the media and the American people
about combat operations in Afghanistan,” the report said.
“We simply need to do a better job of educating journalists
about what the Army is all about, as well as getting the journalists
the access they require to report to the American people. Absent
such an effort, the media will be unable to effectively report on
future operations.”
A more detailed report is scheduled to be completed this month,
but will not be released to the public. It will be one of a “number
of products” that CALL plans to generate from the work of
the two teams in Afghanistan.
“Our concern is that operational information does not get
released during current operations,” he said. “A lot
of what we are going to talk about on lessons learned in Afghanistan
may not be distributed widely across open sources. ... If we were
to say we learned something about the enemy and published it openly,
the enemy would know we’ve discovered a vulnerability.”
During the last several months, an e-mail message has been going
around, listing Army lessons learned from Afghanistan. They appear
credible at first sight, since the source cited is the Center for
Army Lessons Learned.
As it turns out, the CALL denies being the source of that report.
Hiemstra describes the e-mail as an “urban legend,”
of the kind that cannot be stopped once it’s unleashed on
the Internet.
“Each time I get it, I send it back to everyone who received
it and tell them it’s an urban legend,” said Hiemstra.
He said that none of the 24 CALL representatives who were in Afghanistan
claims responsibility for any of the information on that e-mail.
“I’m not saying that the information is necessarily
incorrect. But it did not originate at CALL or with any member of
the team that was in Afghanistan,” he said.
Following is a sampler of the lessons circulating in that e-mail: