The small organization tasked with making sure the Army learns from its experiences is growing to keep up with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Center for Army Lessons Learned, or CALL, based at Ft. Leavenworth in rural Kansas, has grown from 30 to 130 people since 2003 and has doubled the number of teams it sends out to combat zones.  

"CALL captures contemporary, current, near-real-time observations, insights and lessons from the Global War on Terror," says Col. Larry Saul, a Vietnam veteran and CALL director.

CALL's collection "mechanism", Saul says, is threefold:

It has eight deployed liaison officers serving six-month tours that report back lessons from the front: two in Afghanistan and six in Iraq. Saul says he's looking to add another two to Iraq as well as two to Kuwait.

Collections and Analysis Teams consisting of as many as a dozen officers deploy for six weeks to study particular problems -- "say, Improvised Explosive Devices or aviation operations or management of a command post," Saul says. CALL can support four teams at a time and is budgeted for around 20 deployments per year.

Finally, Army units send their After-Action Reports to CALL for analysis and dissemination, "particularly after a significant operation," Saul says.

"After collection, initially we do a hasty analysis looking at those things that might provide solutions to a life-threatening situation, looking for a gold nugget. Then we develop and determine the best proactice [to address the problem]. Later on, we do a more deliberate analysis of the problem."

"Flash to bang, it could be as short as a three-month period" from conceptualizing the problem to sending out a team to publishing results, Saul says.

CALL publishes its findings in pamphlets, handbooks, newsletters and large bound volumes. But its most important outlet is its website at http://call.army.mil,  which has a secure-access section for classified lessons. 

"The website has been termed by a variety of people as a national treasure," Saul says. It logs as many as 500,000 visitors per month and contains 1.4 terabytes of data. "That equates to about 3 million flat pages."

"That infomation is used primarily by units or trainers as they prepare for deployments to theater," Saul says.

At the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk, Louisiana, which orchestrates realistic training at a sprawling range that simulates Iraq, a two-man CALL detachment keeps lessons flowing back and forth between combat units and CALL headquarters in Kansas. Ft. Polk spokesman Maj. Eric Baus says that the Army in large part has CALL to thank for the realism of training at the post.

Taking a cue from the Army, the Marines have begun their own lessons-learned operation -- with a twist, according to Maj. Gen Keith Stalder, chief of Marine Corps Training Command. In departure from the Army, the Marines host free-form seminars for leaders returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, where they can share lessons with each other and with the training establishment.