Europa Games and Military History

Tag: MOS

Hacks and Crooks

Today we’re uploading another 200 MOS Field Manuals to the library, which brings the total to a little over 3400 of the 4500 FMs we know of as today. We got a bit distracted by discovering a nice way to download full documents from yet a different source, which is yielding a lot of high-resolution-scans of older manuals. So the 200 new ones are an intermediate step, with about 300 more still to be reviewed, and of course the “regular” FMs need to be processed yet.

Enjoy the read, and if you have anything missing to add, we will always be grateful!

The new lords can do without serfs this time

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.