In 1985, Congress required the Department of the Defense to destroy the U.S. stockpile of chemical agents and munitions and to establish an organization within the Army to manage the agent destruction program. Later, Congress also directed DOD to research and develop technological alternatives to incineration for disposing of chemical agents and munitions. These activities evolved into the Chem-Demil Program. The Chem-Demil Program includes the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program, created in 1988, to enhance the emergency management and response capabilities of communities near the storage sites in case of an accident. The Nonstockpile Chemical Materiel Product was added in 1993 to destroy any chemical weapons or materiel not included in the stockpile disposal program. The Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project has or plans to use incineration to destroy chemical agents at five sites: Johnston Atoll in the Pacific Ocean; Anniston, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Umatilla, Oregon; and Tooele, Utah. Tooele is the only site with a facility currently operating. The three other stateside facilities are scheduled to begin operations in fiscal years 2002-2003. The Johnston Atoll facility has finished destroying its stockpile and is being closed. The Alternative Technologies and Approaches Project will use non-incineration methods (such as agent neutralization by chemical treatment) to destroy agents in bulk containers at Newport, Indiana, and Aberdeen, Maryland. The Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment Program is also researching alternative methods to destroy agents in weapons at Pueblo, Colorado, and Blue Grass, Kentucky. The Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army share management roles and responsibilities in the Chem-Demil Program. The Program Manager of the Assembled Chemical Weapons Assessment Program reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. Thus, it is independent of the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization, who reports to the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Installations and Environment). In 1997, the United States ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty committing member nations to dispose of selected chemical agents and materiel by April 29, 2007. In September 2001, the Army updated the life cycle cost estimate for the Chem-Demil Program from $15 billion to $24 billion. The new cost estimate extended the agent destruction schedule at four of the eight stateside sites beyond the initial target date of April 2007. Despite setbacks experienced at Johnston Atoll, Tooele, Utah, and Umatilla, Oregon, among others, the incineration program has successfully destroyed over 25 percent of the original stockpile (see table 1). The Lessons Learned Program was created in part because many different contractors were involved in the incineration program, and a system was needed to collect and preserve the institutional knowledge and acquired experience. The program is intended to identify, capture, evaluate, store, and share (implement) lessons learned during the different phases of the chemical stockpile demilitarization process. It collects two different kinds of lessons: “design” lessons covering engineering and technical processes and “programmatic” lessons involving management, quality assurance, emergency response, and public outreach. As criteria for assessing the knowledge management processes used by the Lessons Learned Program, we identified four of a number of federal organizations that practice knowledge management and operate lessons learned programs. In making our selections, we reviewed literature and spoke with knowledge management experts to find organizations recognized for their ability to share lessons or effectively manage knowledge. We identified the following organizations: the Center for Army Lessons Learned, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Federal Transit Authority (for more details, see appendix II). There are two levels of authority involved in developing lessons learned from proposed engineering changes. A Configuration Control Board composed of headquarters staff in the Office of the Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization has authority to approve, reject, or defer engineering change proposals that involve costs above a set limit or affecting multiple sites. The Field Configuration Control Boards have authority over changes at their sites involving lower costs. In September 2001, the Lessons Review Team (consisting of headquarters staff) was established to screen all lessons and engineering changes and provide the information needed to determine which lessons require a response from sites. For more information on the lessons learned process, see appendix III. The Lessons Learned Program has made valuable contributions in support of the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project’s efforts to safely destroy the chemical stockpile. It has generally operated consistently with knowledge management principles and lessons sharing best practices and has successfully captured and shared thousands of lessons. However, the program does not apply or incorporate all knowledge management principles and lessons sharing best practices. For example, the program does not provide needed guidance for senior managers; it does not have formal a validation procedure to determine whether a problem has been fixed; and the database of lessons learned needs improvement. The Lessons Learned Program has contributed to the Chem-Demil Program’s goal of destroying the chemical weapons stockpile while promoting safety, maintaining schedule, and saving or avoiding costs. We found that the Chem-Demil Program’s management, through its leadership, encourages headquarters, field staff, and contractor personnel in the incineration program to use the Lessons Learned Program. It has provided funding and has established processes to capture, evaluate, store, and share lessons. It is committed to continuous improvement and has provided the technology needed to support the lessons learned process. Finally, it fosters a culture in which knowledge sharing is an important element of day-to-day operations. While it is difficult to quantify the benefits of each lesson, available data indicate that lessons learned have generally helped avoid on-the-job injuries (by using government-furnished-approved tools that are better suited to specific tasks), reduce costs (by improving the containers used to transport weapons), or maintain schedules (by improving the design of a socket to disassemble weapons). We also found that lessons from accidental releases of chemical agents at Johnston Atoll and Tooele, Utah, were implemented at other incineration sites under construction, thus incorporating improvements into the design of those new facilities. The Lessons Learned Program does not have guidance explaining how senior managers (at headquarters) should use it in support of their decision making process. Specifically, there is no guidance that defines the procedures to be followed when an alternative to a lesson is chosen or when a lesson is not implemented. Lessons learned guidance for another federal government agency recommends that lessons be used to optimize management decision making and to interact with other management tools such as reviews, investigations, root-cause analyses, and priorities. We reviewed documentation of lessons learned from incidents at the Johnston Atoll and Tooele, Utah facilities, and found that three other facilities—Anniston, Umatilla, and Pine Bluff—had not implemented a lesson that had evolved from problems with pipes in the pollution abatement systems. The Tooele site had used a superior and more expensive material (hastelloy) to fix their problem than the material used at the other sites. Headquarters decided not to implement the lesson at the three sites primarily because it would have involved higher initial costs. This decision ultimately caused serious safety concerns, higher costs, and delayed the schedule. In February 2002, pipes at Anniston had failures similar to those experienced at the first two sites. This raised safety concerns and resulted in a 4-week delay to replace the pipes with hastelloy. It is too early to determine whether the material used at the Umatilla and Pine Bluff sites will have the same problems. Although they need flexibility to manage the program, senior managers also need guidance to help make decisions that allow them to consider the potential impact of not implementing lessons learned. This process would include safety and risk analyses that can provide criteria should they decide not to adopt a lesson learned. There is no formal procedure to ensure that the lessons or corrective actions that have been implemented have fully addressed a deficiency. Chem-Demil Program guidance for engineering change proposals does require that changes be tracked and reported after implementation, but there is no similar requirement in the guidance for the Lessons Learned Program (which includes programmatic lessons). Both contractor and incineration project officials also confirmed that there are no procedures for monitoring the effectiveness of corrective actions. As a result, a problem could reoccur and affect safety and costs. As shown in figure 1, the Lessons Learned Program process does not contain the final validation stage (dashed line), which most knowledge management systems and Army guidance consider as a necessary step. As we previously reported, Army guidance states that lessons learned programs should have a means for testing or validating whether a corrective action has resolved a deficiency. The standard issued for another federal lessons learned program indicates that analyses should be made to evaluate improvements or to identify positive or negative trends. The standard also states that corrective actions associated with lessons learned should be evaluated for effect and prioritized. Without such a validation procedure in the architecture of the Lessons Learned Program, there is little assurance that problems have been resolved, and the possibility of repeating past mistakes remains. The lessons learned database includes about 3,400 issues, 3,055 engineering change proposals, and 2,198 lessons. But it is not easy to obtain fast and ready access to relevant information. Furthermore, the lessons in the database are not prioritized, making it difficult to identify which lessons are most important and which need to be verified and validated. It is important that an organization employ appropriate technology to support the participants of a lessons learned program. Having a technology be available does not automatically guarantee its use or acceptance. According to lessons sharing best practices, the goal of technology is to (1) match a solution to users’ needs, (2) establish a simple content structure so that items may be found easily and retrieved quickly, and (3) deliver only relevant information from all possible sources.