Teaching the Army

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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:
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* 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."
Read more at Military.com. And visit my Flickr to see pics of one Army organization that relies heavily on CALL: The Joint Readiness Training Center in Louisiana.
-- David Axe
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