Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
1. Field manuals are designed for an audience that will apply their contents, whether it be a manual on how to repair a vehicle or a counter-insurgency manual. As such, their writing focus should, and must, be on the application of the knowledge contained in the manual and anything else is, for that audience, unimportant.
Just to squash any risk of this whole tempest in a teapot getting too easy, :

I agree with the core thought there.

But the intro loosely converges the extremes of technical manuals and doctrine. And of course there's the heinous middle ground of tactics, techniques and procedures, and any number of documents expounding thereon. There's a big difference, although not always easy (or useful, or necessary) to agree on where the dividing lines are.

None need be footnoed. Utility in application rules. Utility does, however, mean different things to different audiences, as many here have hammered home already.