Why joint lessons don’t stick: the barriers to Dutch military learning and how to address them

During the post-Cold War era the Netherlands Armed Forces have accumulated extensive operational experience from diverse missions. Yet this experience has only partly translated into enduring organisational learning, and unevenly. Drawing on research into the ISAF and MINUSMA missions and major exercises based on 74 interviews with service members and civil servants the article identifies the barriers to effective learning within the Joint Lessons Learned Process and explores its relationship with the services. Three categories of impediments are identified: process-related deficiencies, conditional factors, and professional-cultural obstacles. The article proposes four mutually-reinforcing action themes to enhance learning capacity: integration through senior leadership sponsorship, which in turn enables restructured professional incentives, mission exploitation symposia and analytical continuity. The article argues that implementing these recommendations requires coordinated decisions at senior levels rather than relying on isolated bottom-up initiatives.