See No Evil

As a second empirical chapter, Chapter 4 employs a comparative case approach to test the book’s argument against competing explanations in three cases of contemporary NATO crisis management. The results of these cases draw on NATO elites’ responses to open-ended survey questions. The first case assesses elites’ memory of strategic errors from a long crisis management operation: ISAF in Afghanistan. The second case presents elites’ memory of strategic errors from a short operation: Operation Unified Protector in Libya. The third case discusses elites’ memory of strategic errors in a crisis management case where no operation occurred: NATO’s actions in response to the crisis in Ukraine. The chapter begins by describing the methodology and then provides evidence of institutional memory development in each case. The chapter concludes with a discussion of findings that support the book’s argument as elites employed informal processes when contributing to NATO’s institutional memory.