Paul Monk, writing about hope and peril for Venezuela in The Australian quotes Ellsberg:
There are situations, Ellsberg observed, …“in which the US government, starting ignorant, did not, would not learn. There was a whole set of what amounted to institutional ‘anti-learning’ mechanisms working to preserve and guarantee unadaptive and unsuccessful behaviour: the fast turnover in personnel; the lack of institutional memory at any level; the failure to study history; to analyse or even record operational experience or mistakes; the effective pressures for optimistically false reporting at every level, for describing ‘progress’ rather than problems or failures, thus concealing the need for change in approach or learning.”