The article attempts to prove the general belief of an army being a typical command-and-control structure and not a learning organization to be merely a popular fallacy. The rich organizational culture of the Indian Army has evolved from the generative process of life and organizational learning over a long period. The Army is a fountainhead of proven leadership and management tenets, all refined continuously by seamless, institutionalized individual, collective and organizational learning. The Army has the tradition of its officers constantly `learning to lead' and `leading to learn' with practically no margin for error, thus ensuring that the learning objectives keep getting integrated into the organizational culture. The author establishes that the Army is indeed a learning organization by comparing and contrasting the characteristics of a learning organization as defined by various academics and consultants and the actual practices of the Army.

Since time immemorial, an army is believed to be purely a command-and-control structure. Times have changed though and we have modern armies with state-of-the-art weaponry. The hi-tech war waged by the US Army in the liberation of Kuwait from the clutches of Iraq, which was brought live to the drawing rooms of millions, amply demonstrated the learning involved in transforming an ordinary citizen into a tech-savvy, discerning professional and retaining him at that cutting edge performance.

Steeped in hierarchical organizational structures, synonymous with commands, orders, discipline, do-or-die situations and the much-maligned court-martials, how could a command-and-control organization like an army, ever qualify to be a learning organization? Well, it is often said that, `army is not a job, it is a way of life' and that `soldiers keep learning to live and fight another day'. What is the quantum of learning required to make it a way of life? Is the generative process of life and organizational learning peculiar to business organizations alone? Is it not the army, which is a fountainhead of proven leadership and management tenets that transformed ordinary, semi-literate persons into efficient soldiers who reach the ultimate point of self-actualization that does not deter them from making even the supreme sacrifice for their country? The objective of the discussion here is not just rhetoric but to examine how the army is indeed a learning organization in more ways than one.

Equally interesting and path-breaking have been the theory of `Unbounded Learning' of Peter Murray, which states that learning has to span across all layers of the organization in an open and unfettered environment that should result in creating organizational capabilities. There has been a lot of discussion on the differences between organizational learning and a learning organization also.

HRM Review Magazine, Indian Army, Organizational Culture, Organizational Learning, Organizational Structures, Cary Cooper, Penny West, Practice Oriented Prescriptive Literature, Scholarly Literature, National Defence Academy, Indian Military Academy, Acquisition of Technical Skills.