Army Asks Its Personnel to Wikify Field Manuals

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life, using the same software behind Wikipedia. The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army's array of colleges and research centers, who have traditionally written the manuals. 'For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,' said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army's Battle Command Knowledge System. 'The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.' Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued an ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. Reaction so far from the rank and file has been tepid, but the brass is optimistic; even in an open-source world, soldiers still know how to take an order."

Comments

This is a good idea

[Darkness404]

This is a good idea. Even though I haven't read any field manuals I have read numerous instruction booklets, documentation and books about programs and often times what the official documentation says and what you need to do are totally different. Many times even though the "official" way to do something is doable, it might be awkward or slow, and you can do an "unofficial" way and save time and get 95% or more of the same results. I expect that army field manuals are no different.

Re:This is a good idea

[Brian Gordon]

Yeah but there may be compelling reasons why they want it done the official way that your common foot soldier doesn't know about. The trick is to make the more-efficient unofficial policy official wherever possible, not to encourage everyone to do their own thing and get it done faster.

If grunts serendipitously discover that moist towelettes are great for cleaning guns, then the right people should be informed. They should not just use tons of moist towelettes at the cost of hygiene and the unit's general health.

Re:This is a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have prefered not to write this anonymously, but because what I have to say is not very "pro soldiers". Its not anti-soldier either, its an observation from having been in the armed forces myself.

I have worked on a deployment as an intelligence analyst in the Balkans. My job was to read "patrol reports" squad leaders / platoon leaders would write up after their patrols. I can say this with experience that most of the grunts I have worked with have a reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student. Their ability to translate experience into the written word is often very poor, and hard to translate. A lot of the work was shoddy at best, and required additional "questioning" of the patrol leader and its members in order to find out any information of value. Probably 20% of the time, the additional questioning yielded actual useful information.

This lack of literacy does not entail that these individuals are stupid or incapable. That is a very dangerous assumption to make, and is often not true at all. Its very simple, most of the infantrymen learn by doing, and not by reading. They are experts at executing breaches and urban combat operations once instructed, and can adapt very well. But I wouldnt trust them to write a document I'm going to hand to fresh recruits. Thats work best left for the officers.

For some of the listed field manuals (in particular Army Unmanned Aircraft Systems Operations) this will probably work, for others, it will probably end up being white washed by field experienced officers. I expect most soldiers will also expect the white wash to occur, but I think this is a very good compromise and positive adaptation of technology to shape doctrine and benefit from collective experiences.

My question for the slashdot crowd is this: Is there better technology than a wiki to organize collective experience?

Re:This is a good idea

[ParticleGirl]

I can say this with experience that most of the grunts I have worked with have a reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student. Their ability to translate experience into the written word is often very poor, and hard to translate. (...) I wouldnt trust them to write a document I'm going to hand to fresh recruits. Thats work best left for the.

I am sure you know what you are talking about, and I have no military experience... but it appears that the reports you were reading were required of the squad and patrol readers.

One thing that wikis in general have going for them (and I would assume that the same principle applies here) is that contributors are self-selected. People tend to write if/when they have something they feel needs to be said, and people who choose to write often (not always, of course!) tend to be better equipped to do so than those who would rather not. Sometimes they're even concise. Hopefully this applies here, to the benefit of the military. Maybe people with something useful to say will have an easy way to make it heard.

Re:This is a good idea

[internettoughguy]

I think he was very careful in his wording not to bash them, but it's just a fact of life that serving in the lower ranks of the military requires the lowest standards of education out of almost any job. (the police are the same here too) Although i would say that most of the soldiers here (NZ) would have a standard of literacy high enough to provide each other with useful written intelligence.

Re:This is a good idea

[haystor]

He went and said that useful information came out of the poorly written patrol reports and then says a wiki won't work. Someone doesn't understand how wiki does work. It's not like someone comes along and writes a pristine document. It's a give and take.

If a soldier comes in and writes that a lubricant used in maintenance, "fucking freezes when it's cold", they can ask him when and where and find out of if that corresponds with doctrine.

A soldier with a beef about how the manual is wrong will quite likely want to be heard. And the way I would see it working (through personal experience in the military) is they would pester the guy in their platoon who can write to submit it. Or if this sort of thing is getting tracked, the Lt's will be all over this, soliciting ideas from the troops.

Re:This is a good idea

[PopeRatzo]

You know, if they could write, they probably wouldn't have taken up soldiering.

I don't think you realize how many great writers were once soldiers. Norman Mailer and Tim O'Brien come to mind, but there are many many more. Joe Haldeman was a grunt in Viet Nam. John Steinbeck was in the Army in WWII with a commando unit but was denied a commission because of his left-wing politics. If I wasn't half-drunk, I'd go look in my literary biographies and list a bunch more. When I was fresh out of grad school, I taught a writing class at a land-grant college not far from a very large military base. I remember one retired staff sergeant who'd been in Saigon around the time of the fall and he could write the birds out of the trees. He was writing a novel when I got an appointment to a tonier school and I heard he died before it was finished, from illnesses probably related to Agent Orange.

All kinds of people enlist in the service, for lots of different reasons. There was a time in this country when most young men faced the possibility of wearing a uniform, including yours truly. It was only a lucky pick in a lottery that kept me over here smoking weed and playing student. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking that they're all stupid just because they might have fought in a stupid war.

Re:This is a good idea

[ahabswhale]

Ordinarily I would agree that this would be a good idea (since I'm pro-wiki for this kind of thing) but I think this will fail due to culture. Lower ranks will be very reluctant to change something written by someone higher rank especially in cases where the lower rank is enlisted and the higher rank is an officer. You could even argue that it's a sign of disrespect and the enlisted could end up on charges of insubordination.

Re:This is a good idea

[Anonymous Coward]

... I would mod you down but I'm out of points, so here's my own contradicting experience.... (end paraphrase)

Did it ever occur to you that the debate benefits from you contributing a post instead of a down-modding? I certainly think this post did way more for your cause and the general information level.

We don't read field manuals

[cenobyte40k]

The problem with american military doctrine is that the American military does not read it's field manuals, and even when it does it doesn't follow them.

Re:We don't read field manuals

[cpghost]

and even when it does it doesn't follow them.

and even when it does it doesn't understand them. There, fixed for you.

Re:We don't read field manuals

[Dravik]

No, they understand them perfectly. They just happen to be years out of date and not applicable to the current equipment and/or enemy.

Re:Check please

[frosty_tsm]

If you check back later, you'll find the following edit:

"... unless in a peace keeping mission where you were ordered to walk around with your weapon unloaded and ammo stored back at base."

with the history showing the name of some bureaucrat who's never served in the military.

end-run around accountability

[Speare]

1) define legal rules for prisoner treatment as "use only techniques listed in the Field Manual"

2) wikify the Field Manual

3) ...

4) oppress it!

Re:Wow

[More_Cowbell]

Queue nerds flaming about how real war isn't a videogame.

I would say modern warfare is quite often exactly like a video game... (e.g. drones that can be piloted from thousands of miles away.)

too broad.

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

as a consultant that has such CAC card (no, it's not repetitive)

I believe the access too broad for this to be effective.. Although there does exist STRONG accountability within the credentialed system, no anonymous access or anything allowed on the network. This will probably work ok, but there will be much more overhead in the moderation and administration than exists even in wikipedia out publicly.

Re:Shouldn't it be like this already?

[belmolis]

Because in many cases the person experienced in the field has only his or her own limited, personal experience to go by, whereas the researcher is able to draw on a large number of examples in a wide variety of situations, which gives him or her a better picture of what is really going on. The person experienced in the field may indeed have valuable information and insights, but at the same time, he or she may have a narrow perspective or limited information. And of course researchers are usually people with special aptitude, training, skills, and resources for doing research, which is not true of the person in the field.

In the past...

[DaveAtFraud]

In the past, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) looked at the threat, defined and acquired the means of dealing with the threat and then trained the people at the sharp end how to use what TRADOC or the other commands had acquired to dispatch the threat. Since everything but the threat was theoretical, the only way to do things was to have the FM written by TRADOC. No one had any real experience on which to base a FM. This made a lot of sense when the overall threat was assumed to be the Warsaw Pact armies rolling through the Fulda Gap with their latest collection of toys.

Fast forward to the 21st century and both the overall threat and the specific means of implementing the threat aren't as clearly defined. On the other hand, we have people in the field getting real experience dealing with the current threat. It just makes sense to get the people with the experience to data dump into a FM that represents how things really work. Conversely, no one but the analysts and people at TRADOC had any idea of how to deal with the cold war threats. Asking the people at the sharp end back then to write the FM wouldn't have made any sense either.

Cheers,
Dave

Sounds Good On Paper...

[IonOtter]

...but in practice, this could have potential for serious disaster.

There are just some things that should NEVER be subject to change without extensive and careful review.

Case in point: MRCs or Maintenance Requirement Cards.

Basically, they're mini manuals on how to perform preventative maintenance on your gear, some of which can be outrageously deadly if you don't follow the instructions to the exact letter. You really wouldn't believe how much stuff on a ship gets the label "MANKILLER", and I've no doubt the Army is little different, quite probably much worse. MRC cards have, quite literally in many cases, been written with the blood of those who discovered the "wrong way" to perform maintenance or took a "shortcut".

Army field manuals are much like MRC cards; they've been written either by those who've shed the blood, or by those who had to mop up the mess from those who didn't survive. They might look nice and boring in the way they read, but that dry tone of the manuals carries many, many lives behind it.

I hope these edits are subject to extensive review, and won't just pop up for everyone to follow with a click of a mouse? Otherwise, someone might try to get their lulz, and we might see subjects like...

Maintenance Requirement for the M33A1/M59 High Explosive Fragmentation Grenade