The US and British armies have faced intelligent and adaptive enemies in Iraq and continue to do so in Afghanistan. While both armies have proved adept at fighting high‐intensity conflict, their initial performance against asymmetric threats and diffuse insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated how much each army had to learn about conducting counterinsurgency operations. This article examines one important means by which the US and British armies have transformed themselves into more flexible and responsive organizations that are able to harness innovation at the front effectively. It traces the development of the lessons‐learned systems in both armies from the start of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq to today. These changes have resulted in significant development within the organization of both armies. Reform of US and British army learning capabilities offers an important insight into the drivers of military change. The reformed lessons‐learned systems have been better integrated into training, experimentation, and doctrine and force development. While there are still challenges to be overcome, both armies have created robust structures that facilitate the movement of knowledge from recent experience at the front to the rest of the organization. As such, these reforms provide us with a useful case‐study that enhances our understanding of the role of ‘bottom‐up’ initiatives in military innovation.

After nearly a decade of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is unsurprising that both the UK and US militaries have drawn heavily on their experiences to inform new doctrine. Recent British and American doctrinal developments have attempted to rationalize intervention, combining elements of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, peace support and state-building in a way that reflects their experiences in these seemingly intractable conflicts. The UK response, JDP 3-40. Security and Stabilisation: the military contribution, 1 is a bold attempt to expand the horizons of operational military doctrine by articulating a holistic, politically focused strategic approach to intervention. This article explores the issues raised by the creation of Stabilization doctrine, setting it in political and strategic context, analysing its key features, and examining its relationship with and impact on related British and US doctrine. 2 It concludes by discussing the obstacles that Stabilization must overcome if it is to make a major contribution to the military's ability to undertake such interventions and posing broader questions about the proper function of military doctrine.In essence, Security and Stabilisation reveals as much about the frictions between policy direction, strategy formulation and doctrinal development as it does about the lessons learned by the British military in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this document the challenges of policy, strategy and military operations are inextricably interwoven, creating a hybrid piece of doctrine simultaneously worthy of great praise for its ambition and flawed by that ambition. Paradoxically, the panoramic scope of the doctrine exposes an inherent tension between the necessity for unambiguous operational guidance for military officers engaged in stabilization and the desire to communicate the complexity of a comprehensive strategy for stabilization. To understand the ways in which this affects the utility of British Stabilization doctrine, one must first grasp the context in which it evolved.

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