Journalist and historian Thomas Ricks chastises the Pentagon for dropping its oral history program

by John T. Kuehn

John T. Kuehn is the General William Stofft Professor of Military History and has served on the faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College since July 2000, retiring from the naval service in 2004. He earned a Ph.D. in History from Kansas State University in 2007. He is the author of Agents of Innovation (2008) and co-authored Eyewitness Pacific Theater (2008) with D.M. Giangreco, and A Military History of Japan (2014).

The United States Army established the Operational Leadership Experiences (OLE) project in 2005 in order to capture the hard-won insights of the folks involved in the various aspects of the Global War on Terror, primarily the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also operational experience elsewhere such as in the Philippines, the Horn of Africa and support operations. It was primarily an oral history program, but had valuable application as a repository of anecdotal experiences and insights gained (or, more crudely, lessons learned). Here is a link to describe the program and which provides access to some of the interviews.

The Combat Studies Institute (CSI) at Fort Leavenworth had charge of the program and cast a pretty wide net. One of the main means for collecting this data involved the canvassing of all incoming Command and General Staff College (CGSC) classes by the Department of Military History during the first weeks of the course. The author was among those history faculty that handed out (and then collected up) forms to all of our officer-students during the first military history class and solicit feedback. The forms were turned over to CSI. CSI would then contact the individuals based on its own internal metric and interview them about their operational experience downrange in the Global War on Terror.

In summary, OLE was a contemporary oral history project, taking advantage of recent memory (which degrades over time as to veracity) to get the experiences recalled “while still fresh.” For a period of time, maybe 2-3 years, those students interviewed could meet some CGSC requirements for strategic communication if they were interviewed. But that motivating factor ended several years ago. It was a valuable program and leveraged the experience of thousands through these transcribed interviews and, I suspect, also served a bit of a therapeutic purpose too, albeit that secondary result was probably unintended. The interviewers were primarily professional military historians, so it was no haphazard deal. It is now being cancelled, reputedly for budget reasons, but it is clear to the author that for at least the next ten years or so we will continue to get officers through CGSC with operational experiences in combat and combat support that will now not be captured and aggregated. ...

Read entire article at Foreign Policy