When You're Not Training, You Should Be Downloading Like A Mofo

Once again, Sam Culper's Forward Observer mag website is always a conex box full of goodies, most of them for nothing more than the price of mouseclicks and electrons.

Today, he's posted a metric buttload of Intel bookshelf items, pdf files by the bunch, and if you don't go there today and download every single one of them, you're wrong.

In case you're still here, there's no second option coming.

I have all those pdfs already, and the books I don't have, I'm looking at ordering as necessary. Anyone without the free stuff should be grabbing them with both hands.

Your tax dollars have created the instruction manuals for the single greatest military machine in world history, period, and you can learn about what they'll be doing, and what you should be doing, on a host of topics.

You will see this material again, boys and girls.
Possibly in a Darwin Award-winning way, should you fail to grasp the importance of at least the fundamentals.

We're working on some different things, and if your plate is full at the moment, I understand if you're not going to read and digest this entire boon of reference materials tonight before bedtime.

But things on the internet aren't always forever.
The FO page, or the links provided, could go away at any point in time.
Things in your computer, a thumb drive, and in hard copy on your shelf have a much better lifespan.

Go. Grab the lot. If not for you, for the ACE you set up in sportier times, from disasters to riots, to something far worse.

And for you civilians out there, or military types who only look at the pictures, I'm going to give another pearl, for nothing. Write this one down if you need to.

Every military manual has a "References" page at the back. It lists every other military publication that has an impact on, or will aid in the understanding or accomplishment, of the fundamentals of the one you're looking at.

So once you find a great reference book, look for the "References" it lists in the back.
Write them down/print them out.
Then Google them, and see if there's a pdf of the next one.
If there is, grab it too.
Continue down the same process, until you've exhausted each and every rathole of pdf goodness you can find. For maybe a C-note's worth of external drive, like a TB or 2, you can essentially download the entire unclassified Pentagon library into your pocket.
Lather, rinse, repeat.

Bear in mind this isn't just for you.
You may meet someone who can use the information better than you can.
Now you have it.

Second pearl. Same price.

You should put all the basic references on a thumb drive. Times 10, or 20, or 50. Give them away to people you think could use it. Or to LMIs (Like Minded Individuals) who are or might be part of your notional neighborhood protection group, come the day. 8GB thumb drives are like $5@ these days. They'll hold craptons of information. Like every manual *I* suggested to you at the outset of the current basic training course of instruction.

You could should also do the same thing for all the weaponry pdfs.
And all the engineer pdfs.
And all the medical pdfs.
And all the survival pdfs.
Ad infinitum.

Third pearl. Still cost-free.

This sort of experience (reducing large quantities of documents, drawings, and information to the size of three nickels) is what those in the intelligence trade for companies known as "Far Beyond Insanity", "Christians In Action", and "No Such Agency" refer to as tradecraft. As in spy tradecraft.

George Lucas was a piker, and didn't know about Moore's Law when he wrote Star Wars:
Leia and Company could have made 3000 thumb drives, each with the entire construction plans for the entire DeathStar, and put each complete set on something the size of a pack of gum, then sent them outwards in all directions, while Darth was looking for some snotty-ass droids.

32GB. USB and smart-phone plug-ins. $32 at Office Depot.
Holds 500,000 pages of images, or 21,000,000 pages of text.
That's 643 complete sets of the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Is the size of a stack of 5 quarters. Can fit on a key ring.
Consequently scares the shit out of counter-espionage agencies.
You can't stop the signal.

You work out where that skillset may come into play in the near future.

Now, enough fun and games.
Get over to Forward Observer, burn up some bandwidth, and start vacuuming up data like you were doing a Friday cleaning on the barracks to get the weekend off.

Thanksgiving plenty like this should never go to waste.

 

Super extra bonus: If Crisis Or War Comes

Sweden released this worldwide today, as a 20 pg. (11 in the pdf, because they're 2 pages per pdf page) standard handbook for their citizens in case there's a war, or an internal (read Muslim "immigrant"/terrorist) crisis.

And yes, it's in English. Take a peek.