Battlefield knowledge and barracks reality: Learning practices within the Netherlands Army

Drawing on extensive original empirical research, this article examines the adoption of NATO’s lessons-learned process within the Netherlands Army. It finds that existing accounts of military learning inadequately explain how practices shape formal learning processes and organisational learning in a military context. The case study reveals important, but hitherto neglected, routinised practitioner behaviours which enable and hinder the adoption, engagement with, and effectiveness of formal lessons-learned processes. These practices span three key dimensions: formal and informal relational dynamics, interweaving of diverse temporal orientations and structuring of the material, historical, social, and symbolic context.