Zen Pundit posted an interesting question at his blog. He said that he was asked by Pressfield for views on whether integrating video and other features into an e-book would be desirable. After pondering that question and the responses, I wondered about doing the same for doctrinal publications.

Doctrinal publications are chock full of illustrations, but most of them add little or nothing to understanding. Here is a great example of a meaningless illustration that does nothing to clarify anything...


I'm sure all of the guys at ILE were scratching their heads saying, "I don't get this whole 'principles of war' thing" until they saw this.

However, lots of illustrations might be useful if they were animated (take, for example, battle drills, movement formations, et cetera. Or animations such as THIS ONE could be incorporated into technical manuals.

Just imagine if the PMCS table in a technical manual actually made PMCS stupid-proof. For each step of the process, a Solder could click on a link to seeing that step performed. By clicking on the fault in the electronic PMCS table, the 5988E could be instantly updated. As soon as it is updated, the team chief or one of his minions gets the information pushed to his device. The biggest problem that I noticed as an XO was that Soldiers knew how to diagnose issues and knew what parts needed to be ordered, but they couldn't make heads or tails of the 5988E, so most of the time was spent correcting it, re-explaining to them how to fill it out, and then repeating this process over and over because there is just something about paperwork that doesn't make sense to Soldiers (not a horrible thing, imo).

Feasible? Not feasible? Other ideas?