Nichols, that's great stuff and is probably a winning solution for a military with spare capacity and the numbers that the US enjoys. The articles are very useful and if nothing else the ability to compare the way in which a much larger Armed Force is able to target its resources will be an interesting debate in my thesis. Unfortunately, the British Army is only a little over 100K strong (and likely to get smaller in the 2010 Strategic Defence Review) and so there is no spare capacity to enable our personnel to target their learning in this way.

That said, perhaps it is actually that the organisational culture of the British Military hierarchy is not sufficiently mature to approach the issue in tis way?

As an aside I completed an exchange exercise with CGSC a few years ago and the Rudy/Francois model does have some potential. The falling down point is that us men (and I mean men in particular) are rubbish at staying in touch with friends - so my wife says anyway!!

Many thanks for the links to the articles.