In war, survival often depends not just on strength or firepower, but on how fast an army can adapt—and whether it can do so in time to save lives. In late 2023, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pushed into Gaza following the October 7 Hamas invasion, one horrific moment underscored the urgency of battlefield adaptation. While navigating the complex urban terrain in a column, Israeli infantry soldiers had been staying inside their armored personnel carriers too long as they waited for the lead vehicle—typically a bulldozer or tank—to clear the path forward. Hamas exploited this hesitation and attacked that specific type of vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade from a close and elevated position, killing eleven soldiers in one attack. Hamas had not only found a way around Israel’s advanced active protection systems, but also recognized the vulnerability in the IDF’s dismount timing. Hours later, another Israeli unit spotted a militant attempting the same tactic.
In response, the IDF did something remarkable. They paused combat operations for twenty-four hours across multiple brigades. The goal was not discipline but diffusion: ensuring that all personnel, from brigade commanders to squad leaders, received the lesson and immediately adjusted their tactics. Soldiers would no longer sit in idling armored personnel carriers before dismounting. One moment of battlefield horror became a lifesaving protocol—disseminated in a day.
But how do you make a military learn at the speed of battle?
Three Vectors of Learning: Digital, Document, and Direct
Over five visits to Israel and Gaza since the war began, I had the opportunity to observe firsthand how the IDF adapted in real time to the brutal realities of urban combat. What began as informal conversations soon turned into focused inquiry, as I recognized the uniqueness of what I was seeing. I spoke with commanders, learning officers, and frontline troops, and followed tactical evolutions as they unfolded on the ground. The more I asked, the clearer it became: the IDF was not just learning—it was learning how to learn. And it was doing so with speed, purpose, and institutional resolve that few modern militaries have achieved.
The IDF discovered that email, chat messages, and digital alerts—standard in most modern militaries—often fell short. Commanders and staff in combat zones face floods of messages, many marked urgent. The result: Important lessons could get buried. To address this, the IDF turned to three vectors of communication: digital, document, and direct.
Digital tools remained in use—email, chat, and text—but their limitations became painfully obvious in the fog and friction of combat. Commanders and soldiers alike were inundated with messages, many flagged as urgent, until the very concept of urgency lost meaning. Important tactical updates were easily buried under a deluge of logistics reports, administrative reminders, and battlefield communications. Under the stress of urban combat, it became impossible to discern the vital from the routine. Urgency became ordinary.
Recognizing this, the IDF’s learning officers turned to a more tactile, deliberate method for transmitting critical information: the hard copy document. For nonimmediate but still essential lessons—like equipment failures or emerging enemy patterns—they created single-page briefs and distributed them in a uniquely identifiable format. These briefs were placed in white bags and sent with fresh food during resupply.
This was not arbitrary. The learning officers understood the rhythm and culture of combat life. Meals are one of the few predictable, collective moments in the day of a frontline unit—a pause in the chaos when soldiers are physically and mentally most open to receiving information. The white bag was designed to capitalize on that window. It stood out in a sea of green and black military containers filled with ammunition, gear, and other supplies. Over time, soldiers came to culturally associate the white bag with something far more important than a single meal: lifesaving knowledge. It became part of the ritual. Soldiers would see the bag, know it was different, and read the page inside while eating. Information transmission became intuitive.
This simple innovation, delivering learning in sync with the operational rhythm, allowed the IDF to embed education into the very fabric of resupply and routine. It wasn’t just clever—it was cultural engineering, turning routine moments into institutionalized learning touchpoints.
But the most urgent lessons needed more than print or pixels. They required people.
The Evolution of the Learning Officer
Out of necessity, the IDF resurrected a human solution that was a lesson from the Second Lebanon War: a dedicated officer whose sole mission was to observe, collect, and disseminate lessons in real time. This was not an additional duty; it was a core battlefield function. Initially, there were one or two reserve officers per division assigned to a learning role. But after repeated life-or-death incidents, like the targeting of armored personnel carriers, the IDF rapidly expanded the initiative.
Under the leadership of Brigadier General (res.) Guy Hazoot, the IDF ground forces surged their learning officer cadre from just ten reserve officers to approximately 150, embedding designated learning officers down to the battalion level. These officers did not simply take notes; they engaged directly with frontline commanders, observed patterns, and helped rewire unit behavior in hours, not days. What began as a division-level experiment quickly reshaped the IDF’s operational tempo—making learning not a side activity but a continuous, embedded function of combat operations at every echelon.
Learning Requires a Human Face
The most powerful element of this new system was not just physical presence—it was trust. When a learning officer walked into a battalion command post and looked a battalion commander in the eye, the message conveyed wasn’t just information. It was belief, urgency, and personal responsibility. This wasn’t a briefing from a stranger; it was a trusted peer, often with an established relationship, bringing a hard-earned lesson from another battlefield moment.
Tone of voice, body language, and nonverbal cues carried as much weight as the words themselves. In combat, trust amplifies urgency. A commander, hearing from a known and respected officer, could immediately discern the gravity of a new threat or procedural change, even without written orders. That interpersonal connection allowed the information to overcome any skepticism that it might otherwise have met and avoid any delay before going straight into action. Some of the appointments were drawn from the battalion’s own reserve cadre, furthering the interpersonal connection.
Learning officers weren’t just messengers—they were conduits. Their role extended beyond their immediate units. They actively sought out lessons learned from the battlefield, grabbed hold of them, and passed them to their fellow learning officers, often in real time or during end-of-day coordination meetings. The result was like a hive mind among IDF personnel and units inside Gaza: a synchronized, self-updating network of tactical adaptation that moved at the speed of battle.
These face-to-face engagements became the third and most immediate prong of the IDF’s battlefield learning system—complementing digital messages and printed documents with personal briefings. In the relentless churn of urban warfare, where terrain, threat, and tempo shift by the minute, no tool proved more effective than real-time human exchange. It was this direct connection—peer to peer, soldier to soldier—that turned knowledge into action fast enough to save lives.
The institutionalization of the learning officer was the catalyst. It signaled that battlefield adaptation wasn’t a luxury but an operational imperative. This momentum filtered down through the ranks. Commanders began embedding learning into their daily processes, not just informally but as a core component of mission execution. The most effective IDF units built feedback loops into their routines: soliciting lessons during morning and evening briefs, mandating a lessons learned paragraph in every mission order, and making real-time adaptation part of the operational battle rhythm. Learning didn’t remain an abstract principle. It became embedded—habitual, expected, and enforced at every level of command.
Implications for the Army
The US Army does not currently anything equivalent to the IDF’s learning officer system. The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) remains the service’s principal institution for capturing and disseminating operational insights, and it did implement a forward-learning architecture during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using the Worldwide Individual Augmentee System (WIAS), CALL mobilized individual members of the Army Reserve and Army National Guard as liaison officers embedded with some deploying units. These individuals served as two-way conduits—identifying tactical gaps and feeding them back to the institutional Army, while also pushing solutions and best practices forward into the field. CALL also maintained a Lessons Learned Integration contract staffed by over two hundred contractor man-year equivalents, some of whom were forward deployed and others stationed at Fort Leavenworth to support real-time analysis and dissemination. Its “News from the Front” bulletins paralleled Israel’s white-bag briefs in intent and function.
However, this capability, while significant, was temporary, reliant on Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funding, and never institutionalized as a standing component of the Army’s operational structure. The number of CALL liaison officers was limited relative to the scale of US deployments. They were not embedded across all deployed units—certainly not at every brigade or battalion in combat. Coverage was also uneven, often dictated by availability rather than operational demand. As the missions concluded and OCO budgets declined, so too did this forward learning infrastructure. A small number of CALL WIAS-based positions remain today, but no enduring, embedded learning officer system exists across the Army.
Another once-promising mechanism, the Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG), offered the US Army a unique frontline learning advantage. Composed of specially selected soldiers and civilians with deep operational experience, AWG embedded small advisory teams with deployed units across multiple theaters, providing immediate feedback on enemy adaptations and advising commanders on countermeasures. But in 2020 the Army announced that the group would be disbanded, a casualty of shifting priorities and budget constraints. Its closure eliminated one of the Army’s most agile and responsive mechanisms for real-time battlefield adaptation—one that, unlike institutional centers, thrived on direct presence, speed, and trust.
Meanwhile, technological solutions continue to proliferate—alerts, dashboards, notifications—but they fail to address the human factor in combat. No algorithm can substitute for the trusted voice of a peer or commander delivering a life-saving lesson face to face. Speed, trust, and presence—not software—are what drive battlefield adaptation.
The IDF’s experience has demonstrated that in modern urban war, adaptation must move at the speed of battle. For the US Army, this means rethinking how it institutionalizes learning—not just in after-action reviews, but in the fight itself. Direct, embedded learning officers—empowered, connected, and present—may be the only way to bridge the gap between insight and action fast enough to matter.
Urban combat will not slow down for PowerPoint. In a fight where decisions and adaptations unfold in seconds, a military’s ability to learn has become a matter of life or death. We must continue to use all three methods—digital, document, and direct communication—to survive and adapt. But only direct, designated, and empowered learning officers can close the gap between what is known and what is done—fast enough to save lives.
John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit
