The most stunning part of this to me was the humanity showing through, which is completely at odds with anything I’d expect from the military today.
- M1026 manual
It's not all bad; survival manuals are dense but concise and well-structured, for example. On the other hand, the Advanced Combat Helmet comes with a 200+ page manual whose useful content could fill maybe 30 or 40 pages. More abstract topics like leadership, tactics, strategy, and logistics are in many respects manuals about navigating the very large and complex institution of the DoD. The smaller branches produce better output, unofficially or quasi-officially, eg the Marines have some excellent writers as do SOF - not least because soldiers in those branches are expected to exercise greater autonomy and decision-making at all ranks, whereas the army in particular is more of an organizational machine for delivery of combat power, not unlike Amazon for explosions.
1. Military field manuals are not that big, about the size of a paperback book because they have to fit in a pocket.
2. There's a bunch of stuff about measuring your head to pick the right size, which really matters...
3. and how the straps attack to the helmet, which also really matters and is not as obvious as you'd think. You need to know this in case your helmet straps get damaged and you need to re-attach them.
4. The ACH has a bunch of moveable padding inside that can be put into various different configurations for comfort. Bot all of these are equal, though. What's viable for walking around in hot weather is not safe if you're doing a parachute jump.
5. And while you can experiment with the padding you can't just move it around any old way because otherwise you'll have it too high or low on your head and you'll either be exposed or block out a lot of your visual field.
6. The thing is rated to take a direct hit from a bullet and and prevent it from getting through to your skull, though even if it succeeds in that you are probably gonna have lesser injuries. This is the sort of thing worth having some detailed information about.
7. It's designed to have stuff attached to it (drink holders, christmas lights) so you need additional information on how the furniture connects to the helmet.
The reason the manuals get sooo long is that when the army makes a decision about a very basic piece of equipment like this that every soldier has to have, it's committing to buying millions of the things (at about $250 a pop) and issuing them to hundreds of thousands of people, so they really, really do not want people to fuck it up.
Also 'I authorize the Tigerprimer - Guderian' is a shapr contrast with the tedious homilies that decorate contemporary manuals.