A lot of good thoughts here -- I'll reply and add in order in an effort to keep some thoughts organized.
Legion -- you're absolutely right. Those are exactly the problems that we face. One of the things that makes Pelican work is that people come here because they enjoy it. It isn't work. If it was, and we had to participate in forums to meet some quota requirement, we'd never hang out here when we should be working. My suspicion is that smart people won't hang out in a Navy Professional Knowledge Forum (I made that name up on the spot) because it looks too much like work, and there's no direct payout, even if they are the kinds of people who would gladly hand out information if it wasn't work.
"My situation is different" -- and in some cases, it is. There has to be a way to make lessons learned be searchable in such a way that different situations are found based on their similarities without providing so much information as to be useless. Right?
Competent -- security is definitely an issue. Controlling access is a huge problem: if we have enough knowledge to be as valuable as I'd like to be, our adversaries will very likely find it valuable enough to invest in finding a hole -- most likely a person who can be bought. It only takes one well-placed individual to pass out an awful lot of classified information. Thanks for raising that concern; not sure how to address it, but it definitely adds to the list of things I need to worry about.
Kurt -- the Navy already does a lot of that kind of stuff. Safety stand-downs, lessons learned messages, all that nonsense. The trouble is that the word isn't getting around enough. A boat will have a major safety violation due to some specific work control practice failure. They'll do a safety stand-down, submit a lessons learned message, and conduct waterfront training on what they dorked up. Two weeks later, another boat will do EXACTLY THE SAME THING. What the Navy is doing just isn't working. If you had something that actually worked, I'd be _very_ interested to hear about it, though. What was different about how you did lessons learned and stand-downs that made yours effective and ours a waste of time?
Sammy -- great point, and it's worse than that. Nobody stays anywhere for 10 years -- heck, I was only in my last job for 10 MONTHS. I'll be here for 6. Guys going to Iraq get a great deal -- they're staying for 12-15 months. Granted, these are a little atypical, but guys normally don't stay on station for more than 2-3 years, tops. When they arrive, they're dumb. They learn a little from experience because the guys who have the knowledge are too busy doing the job to train them effectively. Then the senior guys leave, and the job's not getting done, and the junior guys (who are now senior, but have no knowledge) are forced to sink-or-swim to get the job done. It's a bad system -- and that's not even the specific problem I'm tasked with addressing, though it's closely related. My task is to get major lessons learned back to the fleet -- Newport News getting run over, Albany hitting the pier during a mooring evolution, guys falling off the MSP and drowning -- those sorts of things. I'm also concerned about the "smaller" things -- submarines coming back from the Gulf or the Med with lessons about what worked -- not just what didn't -- and sharing that experience with other boats.
Big Brass is liable to be a big problem with this whole effort. I'm going to get in trouble if anyone finds out I said this, but there are a lot of different "rice bowls" out there, a lot of different people doing completely unrelated "knowledge management" efforts. Some of them have budgets allocated to the task, with staffs and manning documents and "vision statements" with flag-level support -- and they're still failing miserably because they're fundamentally Bad Ideas. Trying to change the paradigm of how we, as a fleet, learn and transfer knowledge could be Really Hard.
HD, I'd look up MS Sharepoint, but you drive a Boxster, so I can't take you seriously. 
Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll take a look. Do you have a testimonial for it? I assume it worked for you in some way? What scale? What kind of knowledge?
This is good stuff -- this forum always amazes me. Who'd have thought that knowledge transfer on knowledge transfer could happen here?
Dan