That's not rhetorical. I'm curious how this document is instilled in the short period of boot camp training before they are shipped off to their deployments.
Edit: I was also not a college grad at the time. People can still read without a degree.
The requirements are a bit different for officers and warrant officers. The training of officers and warrant officers is much more academically oriented. A 152F, Apache attack helicopter pilot is required to basically memorize the entire Technical Manual for their aircraft as well as many details about Army procedure for radios, weapon engagement, airspace management, etc. There are also joint publications, that are shared across the army, navy, airforce, marines, etc (sometimes with NATO allies) that folks in certain roles (pilots, FACs, officers) must be aware of.
Hopefully you find this helpful.
The value isn't in the content of the publication (hence why it's public), it's in the training that soldiers undergo to make the information 1st-hand nature.
Example--you can read about the OODA loop. Reading about it doesn't make you good at using it. That takes training, and the Army has specific exercises that helps a baseline soldier know the fundamentals.
Like with nearly all skills, start with first principles, ingrain them with drills and repetation, then build advanced skills based on those fundamentals.
The trick here is to actually learn via repetition so you internalize much of the training in a way that it becomes subconscious. The same would apply to me asking a developer how to build an iOS app (random example) -- you probably have so much internalized knowledge that you can write a few hundred pages on UX, UI, underlying tech infrastructure, coding practices, etc.
This. If I had to put numbers on it, I'd probably say: 4th grade = 250 pages (excluding social skills); 8th grade = 1000 pages; 12th grade = 2000 pages; bachelor's = 10,000 pages; PhD = 15,000 pages
Then about 100 pages(?) for each year of work experience.
Seriously though. The goal isn't to make every soldier an expert. At the most this will be discussed for a few hours in Basic Training, and units that are in the training phase of their cycle can spend a little time on it.
Basic training is the Hello World of military training. When Soldiers aren't deployed the spend about half of their work hours on training that is planned and executed at the company (~120 person) level. The Platoon Leader and Platoon Sergeant will most likely incorporate this into other activities. Other specialized training programs (SAPPER, Ranger, SF, ...) will use this document extensively as part of their training.
It's probably important to note that each branch has more specific things they need to know. Much of the Marine Corps relies on cross-training to fulfill this demand because their goal is much more open-ended than the rest of the branches (to my knowledge it's something like, "seize forward operation bases and areas of operation".)
To put it in a metaphor: bootcamp is considered dipping your toes in the water, your MOS school is like getting in ankle deep, the fleet is being nose deep with only your clothes on. When you get to "the fleet" is when your real training will begin and it is unending; the only thing that changes over time is that you figure out your clothes are actually flotation devices (fun fact, they actually are). You will spend night after night in the field training, they'll institute artificial stress, and attempt to train you into dealing with it. They'll use simulations like paint rounds, explosions, medical evacuations, and simulation towns in group-training settings with real civilians doing all the erratic things real civilians would do when caught in the middle of a gun fight or normal operation. No expense is really spared, you will actually fight like you play and that is a regular mantra. I'm reminded of a time in 29 Palms where my unit airlifted a radio truck onto a mountain so they could broadcast on the other side of it, which is exactly what you would do in country if you couldn't get to the top of the mountain.
Aside from that you'll be subject to the typical "death by powerpoint" classes that continue to drive in some of these trainings, but they're always referring you to a manual to learn more from. When people do screw up, they'll usually make them teach a class to show everyone what they learned.
I don't know if there's an official statistic on this, but a majority of the training that is conducted in the Marines I would be willing to put three paychecks on is conducted by Lance Corporal through Sergeant.
The goal is to cross-train enough people and foster enough interest that a team can be mostly self-sustaining.
Literally the second sentence in the document, on p. ix:
> Included in the intended audience are Soldiers
They mean soldiers who need to develop training to deliver to other soldiers.
Had the actual written meaning been exclusively those tasked with integrating training, then the wording would have said so. As it is currently written, the intended audience is all soldiers.
Your interpretation, irrespective of accuracy, is at odds with what is written in the actual document.
Apparently a lot, based on some of the replies in this sub-thread. I, on the other hand, fully agree with you and have no trouble understanding this distinction.
The poster to which my original comment was a response to, however, claimed that soldiers were not the intended audience.
Sometimes 'soldier' means anyone in the Army.
Sometimes 'soldier' means anyone in the Army but not commissioned officers.
Sometimes 'soldier' means only private members of the Army.
In this case obviously 'soldiers' are intended to read it - as people in the Army are intended to read it. But also 'soldiers' are not intended to read it, as private soldiers would normally get training and would not have to read it.
Reading requires context and domain knowledge.
If you have context and domain knowledge, this document is perfectly clear on the audience.
(I've had multiple training jobs in the (British) Army.)
If it is true that junior soldiers are not expected to read a document such as this, then the document should not state that the intended audience is soldiers.
A military manual is not a James Joyce novel. If the manual says the intended audience is soldiers, then you should not be able to come in and say 'actually, regardless of what they wrote, that's not what they really meant'.
"We tried to make this understandable by Soldiers, among others, as far as reading level and expected context & background knowledge"
> ...particularly those tasked with integrating ASA concepts into training
"This subset of soldiers are the ones we mostly expect to read it, or to be required to read it, though, so expect that the content is tuned to and most suitable for their needs"
Nowhere does it say that all soldiers read this or that anyone expects that a typical soldier be required to read it. They are stating the background of their intended audience (Soldier, among others, should suffice) and those whom they expect to be best-served by the document ("those tasked with integrating ASA concepts into training"). This sentence is about as clear as English gets, to the point that I'm baffled this exchange is taking place. It says nothing about "junior soldiers [being] expected to read a document such as this".
> A military manual is not a James Joyce novel. If the manual says the intended audience is soldiers, then you should not be able to come in and say 'actually, regardless of what they wrote, that's not what they really meant'.
Your confidence and repeated insistence that your reading is correct here is not warranted. You're wrong. It is not ambiguous whether you're wrong.
And nowhere do I make this claim. The discussion is bout the intended, not the required, audience. And the intended audience is explicitly stated to be Soldiers in the manual itself.
Then consider, given the context of the whole thread, how "expected" was intended here:
> Junior soldiers are not expected to read documents like this.
Webster's for "expect": 1 c. to consider bound in duty or obligated
(1a and 1b also more-or-less apply)
That's what I take as the use of expect here, fitting with the thread before. Most soldiers are not obligated to read this work. No-one will be surprised or disappointed or pissed-off if most soldiers never crack it open.
And then consider how I (and others) may have read your use of "expected" in your response to that:
> If it is true that junior soldiers are not expected to read a document such as this, then the document should not state that the intended audience is soldiers.
By this you mean that the authors anticipate (sense 2 of "expect" in Webster's) that some of those reading it will be soldiers, that they expect (some!) soldiers to be among their readers—at least I assume so, given your agreement with the notion that most soldiers are not obligated to read the text.
You've been writing past everyone in this thread because your original response was a non sequitur to the thread-in-progress, which was about who is obligated or intended, in practice, to read this document.
chrisseaton was addressing something different from what you're trying to argue over. You aren't even contradicting him because you're talking about different things.
Besides, your reading is every bit as "connotative" as chrisseaton's, except that you're ignoring a big chunk of the (not long!) sentence you quoted in order to preserve yours as the exclusively correct reading. In particular, there are two senses of "audience" at play, between this thread and the text in question. Your reading that the piece is intended to be understandable by a "Soldier"—so that is the "audience"—does have support in the text, clearly, but the contention that the "audience", in the sense of who is actually expected to read it, and so for whose needs we may expect the text to have been crafted, is more precisely specified in the second part of the sentence, is also supported by the text, and is what comes out when the entire sentence is considered. That second sense is what was under discussion, originally.
100% memorization is neither achieved nor expected.