Since Vietnam, the US Army has focused an unprecedented degree of effort on capturing lessons learned in training and on the battlefield and communicating them to other affected units. The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), established after Operation URGENT FURY, is the prime example of the Army's efforts to institutionalize the process of learning during the Cold War. CALL continues to function and provide lessons learned in the current Global War on Terror, while other grassroots organizations have sprung up within the Army to target the learning needs of specific segments of the force. One such organization is CompanyCommand.com, an online professional forum of Army leaders dedicated to outstanding leadership at the small-unit level. This talk will discuss the evolution of organizational learning in the Army since Vietnam, and examine how organizations like CALL and CompanyCommand complement one other in the pursuit of excellence.

Captain Raymond A. Kimball is a native of Reading, Pennsylvania, and was commissioned through the United States Military Academy in 1995. After completing initial officer and flight training, he was assigned to the 1st Battalion (Attack), 10th Aviation Regiment, at Fort Drum, New York in November 1996. While assigned to the 10th Mountain Division, he served as an aeroscout platoon leader and logistics and support officer. In those positions, he participated in the full range of Army operations, from home station training to counter-drug operations along the Mexican border to peacekeeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In May of 2001, after completing further officer training, he reported to the 3rd Infantry Division, where he was assigned to the 3rd Squadron, 7th U.S. Cavalry. He took command of F Troop, 3-7 Cavalry in July of 2001. The troop consisted of 88 soldiers and $6 million in equipment and was responsible for all aspects of support and maintenance for the squadron's sixteen scout helicopters. In January of 2003, the troop deployed as part of 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry, to Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. During combat operations the troop supported 870 flight hours over a period of twenty-one days while moving 700 kilometers through enemy territory without the loss of a single soldier. He gave up command of F Troop in June of 2003 and returned to the United States to begin graduate studies in history at Stanford. In addition to his coursework, he serves as a research assistant to the Preventive Defense Project in CISAC. For the past two years, he has also served as a Topic Lead and advisor to CompanyCommand.com. His next assignment will be as an Associate Professor of History at the United States Military Academy. His awards include the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Achievement Medal, and the Humanitarian Service Medal. He is married to the former Mindy Hynds of Vacaville, California; they have one son, Daniel.

The presentation examines the practical problems of reducing the danger of accidental launch and suggests that the current approach to the problem should be reconsidered. First, the U.S. launch-on-warning posture may represent a bigger problem than that of Russia. Second, the efforts to repair or augment the Russian early-warning system should not be pursued as part of the de-alerting agenda, since they probably increase risk of an accidental launch. Finally, the notion of transparency in de-alerting should be reconsidered, for verification prevents de-alerting from being effective. (A short summary of the presentation can be found at russian forces).

Pavel Podvig joined CISAC as a research associate in 2004. Before that he was a researcher at the Center for Arms Control, Energy and Environmental Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). He spent several years as a visiting researcher with the Security Studies Program at MIT and with the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University, and he taught physics in MIPT's General Physics Department for more than ten years. At the Center for Arms Control Studies, he worked on various technical and political issues of missile defense; U.S.-Russian arms control negotiations, and structure and history of the Russian strategic forces. During that time he was a principal investigator of a Russian Nuclear Forces research project, which produced a book, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces. Podvig graduated with honors from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1988, with a degree in physics. In 2004 he received a PhD in political science from the Moscow Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

Lien-Hang T. Nguyen is a doctoral candidate at Yale University and a CISAC social science fellow. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled "Between the Storms: An International History of the Second Indochina War, 1968-1973," for which she did multiarchival research in Vietnam, the United States, and Europe. She has two upcoming chapters in volumes on the First and Third Indochina Wars, to be published by the presses at Harvard University and the London School of Economics, respectively. She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Association for Asian Studies, and she serves on the executive committee of the Vietnam Studies Group. She received an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Barry Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He served as chair of the Political Science Department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at Stanford.Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. Weingast authored (with Robert Bates, Avner Grief, Margaret Levi, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal) Analytic Narratives, published in 1998. Weingast is editor, with Kenneth A. Shepsle, of Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions (University of Michigan Press, 1995). His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy.

Douglass C. North was the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is currently the Hoover Institution's Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow. His 1990 Cambridge University Press Book, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, is a staple in graduate courses in political economy around the world. North's current research activities include research on property rights, transaction costs, economic organization in history, a theory of the state, the free rider problem, ideology, growth of government, economic and social change, and a theory of institutional change.

John Wallis is a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He is the author of American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War, with Robert Gallman, NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1992, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on American economic history.

Richard Bush is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of its Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies. The Center serves as a locus for research, analysis, and debate to enhance policy development on the pressing political, eco-nomic, and security issues facing Northeast Asia and U.S. interests in the region.

Bush came to Brookings in July 2002, after serving almost five years as the Chairman and Managing Director of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), the mechanism through which the United States Government conducts substantive relations with Taiwan in the absence of diplomatic relations.

Dr. Bush began his professional career in 1977 with the China Council of The Asia Society. In July 1983 he became a staff consultant on the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. In January 1993 he moved up to the full committee, where he worked on Asia issues and served as liaison with Democratic Members. In July 1995, he became National Intelligence Officer for East Asia and a member of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates the analytic work of the intelligence committee. He left the NIC in September 1997 to become head of AIT.

Richard Bush received his undergraduate education at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. He did his graduate work in political science at Columbia University, getting an M.A. in 1973 and his Ph.D. in 1978. He is the author of a num-ber of articles on U.S. relations with China and Taiwan, and of At Cross Purposes, a book of essays on the history of America's relations with Taiwan.

Co-hosted with the Hoover Institution.