Within the Army there is a project underway to manage doctrine more effectively by redefining what is doctrine; then producing, maintaining, and making doctrinal material more accessible to the user. This involves both reducing the number of field manuals (to less than one hundred, perhaps fifty), and reducing the size of field manuals to facilitate ease of use, ease of maintenance and clarity.

To help reduce the size of each manual (arbitrary goal of not more than 200 pages) the use of quotes and historical vignettes will likely be discouraged. I think this is a mistake. Doctrinal manuals should not become just a series of checklists.

Doctrinal manuals should establish fundamental principles (as a common frame of reference) and explain their application in current military operations. The use of quotes from key leaders past and present together with a series of historical vignettes should be used to illustrate how these fundamental principles have been applied during military operations in the past -- a point of departure from which the current practitioner can gain some insight into how to deal with situations that may arise in future operations.

The recently published Army counterinsurgency field manual (FM 3-24) is a case in point -- the quotes and historical vignettes that it contains both reinforce its stated principles and make it come alive (it is a very good read that is not only a valued cornerstone in the library of current military practitioners but one that also remains on the bedside table of many in Congress). Lets not throw this baby out with the bathwater.