US Army Publishing Directorate – Technical Manuals | Hacker News Reader

US Army Publishing Directorate – Technical Manuals

armypubs.army.mil

67 pointsbelter21 comments

The Army has plenty of problems you see in other large organizations related to bureaucracy, strategic initiatives, retention etc, but one thing I think they do very well is their documentation. It is generally organized into four(ish) categories of Army Doctrine Pubs (ADPs) which are summaries of first principals for the major domains the Army operates in, followed by Army Technique Pubs which cover mid-level techniques and descriptive frameworks for various types of work. Field Manuals (FMs) contain more prescriptive information and tasks for both small and large units, and finally Technical Manuals which are basically instruction manuals for specific pieces of equipment or specific tasks.

I think it's debatable given the pace of change in most technology organizations whether it's even desirable to codify the standard tasks and competencies expected from different classes of information workers (ie. SRE1 vs Data Systems Analyst) but having at least ADP level documents that allow employees to align their efforts with company strategic aims is a good idea and having some sort of reference documents for involved technical tasks probably makes sense when the work is not able to be automated.

What a span of time! KITCHEN EQUIPMENT; REPAIRS AND UTILITIES was published in 1946, and a document on UPS selection/installation/maintenance was published in 2007.

Having worked on a military base, I can confirm that the kitchens have not been repaired since 1946.

I am puzzled why there are only 141 documents. There should be thousands. The US Army has been around a long time and bureaucracy begets documentation.

This is only a subset, apparently only those TM's in the 5 series. Explore the Publications dropdown to find thousands more Technical Manuals and other publications.

These appear to all be from the Corps of Engineers. The menu pulldown shows entries like "TM - Technical Manuals (Range 1-8)" that have thousands of entries each. One example: https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/TM_1_8.aspx

How do we see the actual documents themselves? Clicking on the link only seems to open a docket which has info about the document, by not the document itself.

Yeah only some of them seem to be actually viewable, for example [1] has a link to the PDF but most seem to not have this.

1 - https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/Details.aspx?P...

Anyone got a shortlist of the ones applicable to this audience?

From looking at the list of 141 entries, everything from

TM 5-852-1 ARCTIC AND SUBARCTIC CONSTRUCTION - GENERAL PROVISIONS {AFR 88-19, VOL 1}

onwards looks pretty interesting, as it covers:

- building stuff in arctic

- building stuff to resist nukes

- "security engineering" including electronics

But interestingly enough, I can't figure out how to get PDFs.

> But interestingly enough, I can't figure out how to get PDFs.

Click on the links for each item in the first column. On the details page, you'll get a pdf link.

Connecting from Taiwan I don't actually get a PDF link on the details page.

edit: I see it's maybe not a Taiwan thing (tho some DoD sites are inaccessible from here), some of the other publications sections do have PDF links, just none of the details pages on the TM page in the OP link.

Thanks! Not every directorate has a PDF attached, and given that the first few I tried didn't have them I assumed that none of them had PDFs.

I doubt you'd see anything exciting that's approved for public release

The US Navy docs are held back probably because they won ww2.

The US often operates as part of a coalition and it is desirable for coalition partners to be able to understand how to cooperate with US army units. If you encrypt docs that you want to share with partners, then you have to share your encryption mechanism, which may be much more problematic.

Also, these sorts of docs contain general procedures, not the actual plans of a specific operation.

Some of these docs are literally how to frame a house. Or set up the plumbing for a communal latrine. Much of it is not sensitive.

Yes. Even things like the average speed of an advancing column of tanks, or the largest vehicle that can cross a particular bridge, are going to be fairly obvious to any army that has its own armoured vehicles.

Fun .gov overclassification anecdote: I worked for a startup that had a contract with .mil and, long story short, we needed a snippet of code that described soil slippage under load, as it remains the gold standard in the simulation of various things including armored vehicles.

IIRC, it had been originally written in the 1950s by the Army Corps of Engineers in FORTRAN (then C, then we used it with Modelica). It was — and is — still export-controlled. I had to get permission to send it to our UK (yes, UK) subsidiary for fear that said deeply dark secrets might reach the eyes of our enemies...

You want to go higher on the menu hierarchy and explore from "Home" -> "Publications"

I find some of the "Field Manuals" interesting. Some of them have sections on OSINT

https://armypubs.army.mil/ProductMaps/PubForm/FM.aspx

See this comment I made in another post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33017733#33020509

It's by no means an exhaustive list, but those are some good ones to have. Like I said there, I particularly appreciate the literature on radio.

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