Speak No Evil
As a fourth empirical chapter, Chapter 6 identifies the sources that motivate elites to share their knowledge of strategic errors. Employing a survey experiment on elites, the chapter presents hypotheses about the impact of three different sources: the United States, NATO's secretariat and international media. Surprisingly, experimental results indicate that NATO elites are less likely to record or share knowledge of a strategic error if an action is framed as such by the United States. Results also demonstrate that NATO elites are slightly more likely to record if the action is framed as such an error by the secretariat. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why a powerful state would counter-intuitively have a dampening effect on an international organization’s capacity for retaining knowledge across time and space. Findings support the book’s argument that the secretariat plays a critical role in facilitating the development of institutional memory about past strategic errors.