US Army Field Manual 6-22: Developing Leaders

Chapter 4: Learning and Developmental Activities

An electronic transcription, with enhanced encoding

Shoulders of Giants

Field Manual 6-22 and this project

US Army Field Manual 6-22, Developing Leaders, is a foundational document of unacknowledged importance whose influence is difficult to gauge, but immense. Updated and refined over decades, it represents in a highly evolved form the efforts and aspirations of generations of leaders and patriots, to pass on hard-won knowledge where it most matters to do so.

Today, ADP 6-22 and ADRP 6-22, proposing a comprehensive model of leadership, succeed FM 6-22 in the current publication series. FM 6-22 itself has a long and illustrious history through many editions. The offering on this site transcribes a part (Chapter 4) of the FM 6-22 edition of 2022. (Note: since this project was completed, FM 6-22 has been updated again. Don't expect the text here to be fully up to date.)

The project presented here originated at the National Institute for Standards and Technologies as an open-source demonstration of technology standards at work. Implicitly, it makes the case for the document's importance by presenting this work in a form that invites comparison and relation to similarly important publications, whether government agency publications or others. One example of this is the set of NIST guidelines published as Special Publication 800-53, Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations.

The commonality is illustrated by converting the publication, originally designed for the printed page and released in PDF, into two legible and workable XML-based formats. These are suitable not only for publication, on screen or paper media, but also for reuse and reconfiguration in ways that serve the needs of its readers and consumers of every description.

Why two target formats? Interestingly, another principle is illustrated in this project, namely the complementarity of technical standards. Where two such languages, as systems of document description, converge on domain semantics - a way of saying they have certain family resemblances - one standard becomes a springboard to another. In this project, producing NISO STS XML from the raw data makes it easier to produce the second, more rigorous target, namely OSCAL.

This paradox becomes familiar, once we enter a realm of free interchange between not only data, but data encoding standards and technologies. When we make a document available in one standard encoding, this makes it easier to acquire in others.

Consequently, while it is possible to imagine an audience for the Field Manual as such and for itself, it is also possible to imagine an audience whose interest is not in this document in particular, but in all such or similarly structured documents.

This scope of interest is very broad.

A reading view (“classical” layout)

This page view emulates the original print publication in its general layout and typography, while making adjustments for the web platform.

A tabular summary view

This view shows only the summary tables of Attributes and Competencies, for casual browsing.

A single table, drawn at random

For anyone who wishes to drill on the Leadership Attributes and Competencies. On request, the page refreshes with a new title for a requirements category, that is an attribute or competency. Open the box for details. These two steps invite you to reflect on the attribute or competency named before reading.

Another button makes it easy to retain a link identifying a table view by copying it to the system clipboard.

Technically, this page is the same as the tabular summary with a little restyling and scripting.

Process results: the STS XML for Chapter 4

The pipeline produces an interim result in the form of compliant NISO STS XML, a tag set designed to support standards documentation. As an STS example, this file can be saved and studied. For a rendering, use STS software such as the STS Viewer at NIST. A good information source on STS is the (community-supported) Supporting Materials page.

The conversion pipeline making this XML from HTML sources shows, among other things, how XProc can apply heuristic logic to flawed or problematic (broken) data to interpolate and represent latent structures.

Also visible in this example is an interesting case of conceptual overlap across structural levels. The numbered paragraphs within Chapter 4 together make a sequence spanning across the hierarchy of the parts that contain them.

Process results: OSCAL XML

From the STS, a pipeline can build an OSCAL version with no information loss, transposing STS organization and labels into OSCAL. Still capturing the full text of the chapter, this markup is more highly structured and formalized than earlier versions, describing the work as an OSCAL catalog, or set of security controls, considered in a broad sense.

In particular, information that remains in tabular form in the STS version can be given a more semantic expression (tagging) in its OSCAL expression. The mapping between the original sections of Chapter 4 into a sequence of OSCAL controls (or in fact, into two separate and juxtaposed sequences) is instructive and useful, shedding light on the intellectual organization and composition of the original text as it was conceived, authored and edited by teams of skilled professionals.

To study and compare any of these XML files, try using the Docuscope client-side (browser) application.

XProc in action

XProc in the XProc Zone repository is used:

To acquire useful resources (STS and OSCAL schemas for validation)
To run conversion from an exported HTML version into STS and OSCAL
To run conversions producing rendered (clean, reusable) web versions from the OSCAL version, taking advantage of its relatively rigorous and clean data description.

Acknowledgements

As noted above, dedicated soldiers and civilians over generations have contributed to writing and producing this work in its editions. If writing a document like this is what an army does in peacetime, we need more of it.

The electronic encoding aspect of this work is largely ported from an earlier project performed at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), ITL/CSD, as a contribution to the OSCAL initiative. While not pretending to be the intended beneficiary of that work (that being the reader), the developer thanks these sponsors and the US taxpayer for enabling this effort to demonstrate the viability and use of non-proprietary technical standards for document production and publication.

Thanks to MF for alerting me to the existence of FM 6-22.

Links

An original distribution of the PDF source for this document is available (at time of writing).

On line, FM 6-22 flashcards have been seen, and you can pay money to buy a copy of the complete document - written and produced at US taxpayers' expense - from online vendors.