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

[tcopeland]

> most of the grunts I have worked with have a
> reading / writing level of less an 8th grade student.

Check out the Army reading list section for cadets, soldiers, and NCOs. Some good stuff there... especially Keegan's "Face of Battle". On the other hand, I have no idea how many folks in those ranks have read any of those.

Re:This is a good idea

[Carrion Creeper]

As a former soldier, the most successful part of this program will probably be getting new ideas into the hands of the people who write field manuals. Decisions about official policy still must be researched to find out if particular circumstances the soldiers mention are as frequent as they claim, and checked against reality, reason, and military law. Cleaning your weapon with moist towelettes may be great, but it may also corrode the weapon over time. On the other hand, it will help get a wider variety of information in the hands of someone who can put that out to everyone else, because maybe moist towelettes do a great job and nobody was willing to mention it in any official capacity.

The other great thing about this is that it will tell the policy makers all the brain dead stupid shit people are doing, so they can mention a few extra pertinent negatives in the next version of the manual.

Re:This is a good idea

[mordors9]

I would point out that when Charlie Rangel and some other politicians started denigrating the volunteer soldiers as a bunch of lower class, uneducated people with no prospects, as study found that they were generally middle class and better educated than the citizenry as a whole. http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/cda05-08.cfm

Re:This is a good idea

[iamhassi]

"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. "

I served, and I think you're full of it. "Most" is a rather definite word, that's a majority, more than half, and from my experience I would strongly disagree with that assessment. They weren't all wonderful writers like your average programmer (lol) but they could write up a patrol report that made sense.

And what was the point of your little soldier bashing post? That they shouldn't have a wiki because they suck at writing? That those that want to write shouldn't be allowed, that only the technical writers should have the ability and the grunts should just shut up and get shot at? I'm even more pissed mods marked it Score:5, Insightful. Shame I used all my mod points up yesterday, I had mod points good until tomorrow.

I think a wiki is a fantastic idea and I'm shocked the Army would even consider it, very un-Army like, to give the grunts a voice. This is not the Army I remember, only good can come of this, and developing the wiki and similar programs should be encouraged.

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

[Rei]

I wonder how far they'll go along the "no original research" route?

"Guns fire bullets.[citation needed]"

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:Check please

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean [citation needed]? Seems pretty clear to me already... :)

Wiki entry:

In case you come under attack, shoot back. [clarification needed]

I read those instructions as a free pass to be a team-killing bastard.

Perhaps the Key Difference

[kevinatilusa]

between this and Wikipedia is that each edit will be linked to an ID which in turn is linked to a known service(wo)man.

Combine this with the way that the final manual will be the product of review teams rather than the wiki-style entries themselves, and this seems as much a very efficient public feedback/comment system (using wiki software and formatting) as a true wiki.

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.

General sockpuppet disagrees too

[ring-eldest]

This just in: the military command structure has decided to put ARPANET to use as originally intended a scant 40 years after development!

On a (slightly) more serious note, the rank and file and upper brass have differing views on how their opinions are going to be received by the other side. Of course they do! The higher level officers have always expected their suggestions to be taken seriously and responded to with a prompt, "Yes, sir!" They see no problem here. The grunts have a long history of learning exactly how much their input is both required and appreciated by those men, especially when it comes unsolicited. This is one of those rare situations in the military where both sides' reactions are perfectly understandable and even... rational.

infotopia

[martas]

there's a book called Infotopia (http://www.amazon.com/Infotopia-Many-Minds-Produce-Knowledge/dp/0195189280), about how information is generated and shared in an increasingly tech advanced society, and this is one of the things it mentions in its "vision for the future" in the intro. interesting book. quite optimistic.

Re:In other new.

[Dunbal]

Standard SOP for solid waste burning is SERGEANT MAJOR IS A COCK SUCKER!

[citation needed]

Wikiality

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, Stephen Colbert is now commander-in-chief of US forces in the middle east, and the number of elephant attacks has tripled in the last 6 months.

Who to believe?

[Sir_Sri]

This would seem to pose a problem when there are conflicting viewpoints - esspecially among higher ups. Wikipedia has this problem too, but wikipedia articles on controversial topics aren't really actionable (and you can't plead your case that oh, you read this on wikipedia it must have been true! when something is wrong that you did act on wikipedia from). Army doctrine is.

If you take a look at the current US army and marine corps counterinsurgency field manual Chapter 2is titled "Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities". I bet with 200k troops or so active at any given time on recolonization (I term I would prefer to counter insurgency), there are going to be at least a dozen different high level officers with different ideas on how to get things done, and some with contradictory ideas both seeing success (or failure). Figuring out which goes in the manual, which doesn't, and why is the sort of thing that requires people at the top to act as editors, pick sides and end up essentially censoring one group of people is likely to build dissent - and public dissent. It's different when they're silenced in a research lab, the only people who've know they've been shut up are immediate colleagues, but when you make opinions widely public (or in the case of an army wide wiki, mostly public), even wildly wrong ones, you're giving the people who dissent a voice to end up on faux news touting how their solution to 'counter insurgency' would have been to gas the lot of them! It even made it into the field manual before it was pulled! The government isn't supporting our commanders who want to use more/less/different whatever.

Certainly a military wiki has its place, but I'm betting there are going to be some kinks to be worked out yet. One of the virtues of the military structure is deffering responsibility for being wrong. If I'm colonel A and General B tells me to do something I know to be wildly misguided (but not illegal), I go and do it, and when questioned about it, can say with honesty, and possibly with written orders to squarely place the blame on General B. On the other hand with the wiki system if Generals C, D, E and F all say things on a topic, not all of which is consistent, and the one I happened to see was General E's opinion which happens to be wrong who's fault is it now? Colonel A for not researching enough Gen. E for being wrong, or the Lt who was moderating the discussion for not blocking the wrongness of E that was agreed upon by C, D and F.

oooooohhh...

[sootman]

... prepare for edit wars unlike any you've ever seen before.

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.

Re:Hurry up and mod me down biatch!

[PopeRatzo]

Is it my imagination or have there been far more racist trolls on /. since Obama got elected?

No, it's actually Obama posting these things to try to make racists look bad.

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

First Aid and Field Medicine

[Tekfactory]

A while back I was reading a survival page from a practicing guide and Park Ranger working in the Texas desert. He had made a point about the standard "suck out the poison" from a snakebite advice still being in the army field manual long after anyone in the medical community, or desert survival park ranger community had given up the practice.

http://ridgerunnersurvival.tripod.com/da1.htm

Now the page is from 2000 and he's quoting the various field manuals up to 1992. There's also advice on why water rationing as described in the manuals is a bad idea. Digging a condensation trap will cost you more sweat than it will gather in drinking water, etc.

So I wonder what other areas it might be better to enlist some subject matter experts in, the idea of opening it up to more voices outside the war colleges is good, maybe they should open it up even more.

And like a good wiki-citizen he cites the books he references and his credentials.

The best soldiers have initiative.

[tjstork]

This isn't really new, per se, but it is a reassertion of one of the best values of American soldiery - the guy on the ground should have some room to make some decisions for himself or herself. Good commanders have always encouraged their subordinates to lead, and given them tools to do so. Bad commanders don't.