This website hosts currently 1540 US Army Field Manuals published between 1947 and 2000, They describe doctrine, tactics, and equipment of the US Army during the Cold War and its aftermath.
To ease navigation, the field manuals have been grouped by series, accessible through the navigation on the left. Please note that some series might have no manuals in them, either because we have not aquired or uploaded yet, or because there are currently no field manuals in the series. All manuals are free of copyright, declassified, and have been released to the public. This site was created for historic and scientific purposes and without any financial interest.
If you have any unclassified field manuals that are missing, we would be grateful for an email and the permission to add these to the collection.
This Website is part of the Online Doctrine Library. Other parts of the Library can be accessed by following the links below:
US Army Field Manuals from World War Two
US Field Manuals defining Military Occupational Specialities (MOS), 1976-1980
A big shoutout to Janne from Finland today, who kindly pointed us towards https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/ , where we found another 10 field manuals from the 1990s to add to the collection. Thank you very much, and the Missing Page has been updated aftr we uploaded the new documents.
This is the second part of the large update announced yesterday. Bsides the FMs defining MOS skill levels and knowledge, the new google books cache also yielded a large amount of FMs from between 1940 and 1982, which enabled us to full some gaps. Full statistics again on the About page, but we now haver 80% overall of all field manuals which we know of. There are again slight discrepancies between out bookkeeping, the number of locally saved files, and the number of files online, but we*re working on that.
The new ones often were just better scans of existing files, but there are about 60 new manuals in the library, with beauties such as FM 8-24 Community Health Nursing in the Army (1980) and FM 10-26 The Army Food Advisor (1977), but also key documents like FM 17-36 Divisional Armored and Air Cavalry Units from 1965 and FM 17-95 The Armored Cavalry Regiment from a year later. You'll find them, as always, on the drive.
Google Books scanned a large amount of books from the New York Public Library, amongst them hundreds of FMs. However, since machines are now more important than humans, the scans were simply dumped into the cloud - all named identical, often several volumes clustered together in single files, no keywords, no categories, nothing. Humans might stumble on these by accident, but the AIs read them in full and build their own content representations from them. The overlords do not need humans to read anymore.
Among the volumes scanned we found 340+ FMs published between 1976 and 1980, each defining a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), setting skill levels and knowledge expectations for a solider in a defined role on the battlefield. These files have been cleaned up and uploaded onto a separate google site, which can be be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/us-army-mos-fms
The irony of using googles infrastructure while bashing their AI ventures is not lost on us, and preparations are under way to move everything onto our own hardware, should the need arise. For now, we hope you enjoy the addition to our little collection.
Oh, and this collection also profited from the new content, since there were several FMs interspersed that were on out missing list, so some more updates about these coming in the next days.
Three new files, related in topic, today: FM 21-76, Evasion and Escape, in both its 1956 (Korea) and 1977 (Vietnam) editions, and FM 21-78, Prisoner Of War Resistance , from 1981. All in the File section.