Best comment to date on the topic IMO, John
Citations / Footnotes / Endnotes
As an aside, I wrote a "pocket handbook" for the Marine Corps in 1999 - The Urban Generic Information Requirements Handbook (now called Intelligence vice Information). I took great pains to cite all works and all were removed when edited and to print. I have to say I agreed with that decision for several reasons.
1) The handbook was / is a field-ready guide - a check list to determine information gaps, a quick reference to request information and a baseline support tool for forward deployed units. As such the information contained in the handbook was the heart and soul - citations would have added clutter to the essential elements of the document.
2) Deployed units don't exactly have the time or resources to data-mine citations. Again, the essential elements of information are the important items - the who, what, when, where and why - up front and brief.
3) Documents like the UGIRH were designed to fit into a cargo pocket - as such my footnotes would have added another 15-20 (guesstimate here) pages to a document of this size. Clutter, a much larger document and a significant cost for printing when you are talking thousands of copies.
Just my 2-cents on a related issue.
Price responds to LTC Nagl
Quote:
Refuting Colonel John Nagl
Army's Prime Salesman of Counterinsurgency Manual Seeks to Defend Stolen Scholarship
By DAVID PRICE
Counterpunch, Nov 3/4, 2007
I will note that there is at least one quote included in DP's article that, while attributed, lists no source, id est
Quote:
By this I mean people like the recently retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez who know that the Iraq war is now "a nightmare with no end in sight".