Hi Folks,

I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible, and possibly profitable, to reframe the debate a touch. I'd like to toss out a few statements and see what people think about them.

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.

2. The subject matter of field manuals varies widely in terms of the predictive validity of the knowledge contained in the manual. In some cases, the knowledge should be prescriptive (i.e. do X, Y and Z and the equipment will work), while in other cases the knowledge should be either descriptive (i.e. this has worked in some situations) or attempting to produce highly interactive and adaptable courses of action in a broadly defined environment (sorry, can't come up with a single word for that).

3. The value add of references, citations, links to other sources in any format vary based on the nature of the knowledge presented.
  • In cases where the writing is prescriptive, references, citations, etc. are just useless verbiage.
  • In cases where the writing is descriptive, they may prove useful but could easily be in the form of an bibliography and reading list.
  • In that third, unnamed, case they may be useless in the immediate form for training, but are quite useful for those who wish to go deeper into the subject since they help frame the debate.
4. Manual are NOT scholarly works but, in both the second and third case, contain or may contain scholarly elements.

5. Especially in that 3rd case, the scholarly elements contained in the work are likely to be part of ongoing debates with a low predictive value. In other words, since they can't be tested directly in many cases, they are interpretations. Being able to follow up on these debates, should individuals choose to do so, is valuable to the long term reworking of the doctrine.

Marc