In Iraq and Afghanistan, the British military pointed to its colonial experience as a useful resource to perform its various missions in complex and difficult environments. For the Bundeswehr, lacking any institutional experience with counterinsurgency warfare, the participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) became the first combat mission abroad at all. The book explores in which way the British and German Armies have relied on historical experience in the making and adaptation of operational strategy. Eric Sangar defines »historical experience« as a body of useful knowledge that is constructed through the institutional analyses of past military campaigns with the aim of producing normative lessons for military operations in the present. In other words, Eric Sangar deals with the fundamental question if and how Armed Forces can learn from history, or if experience from the past is rather an obstacle to adaptation in the present.