Five years back, the Inspector General overseeing Afghanistan's reconstruction started this project.

It was called Lessons Learned.

Lessons Learned is a phrase within the military.

There is something called the Office of Lessons learned in the Army.

This is Fred Kaplan. He is Slate's war stories columnist.

And it helps in educating, it feeds back into military doctrine that affects training in the future.

How many, how many battles do they reconsider?

All of them.

All of them.

Like a battle that was done in Iraq, you know, two years ago that was either particularly

successful or particularly unsuccessful.

They'll look at that.

And they will go interview dozens or hundreds of people who are involved in it.

They'll look at the plans. They'll look at everything.

And, yeah, it's one of the most useful things that the military does.

And I don't know, probably not a lot of militaries do this.

The lessons the Inspector General's office was hoping to learn when it launched this team,

those were a little different.

This was conducted by an agency that was set up to look into essentially waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan. And they were looking primarily at corruption and its effect on

the war. The team conducted interview after interview, and eventually those conversations got

compiled into these dense bureaucratic reports with titles like capturing and institutionalizing

lessons from complex stabilization efforts.

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