Video Transcript
I love military manuals. And I love that the Department of Defense, has produced them with your tax dollars. And so as long as they don't contain anything that's classified, they are public and freely available. And you should collect as many as you can. But if you wanted to narrow down some specific hard skills and fundamentals, you couldn't do better than the Marine Rifle Squad publication and the Marine Scouting and Patrolling publication. And they contain a lot of fantastic fundamentals. I'm not going to talk too much about the contents of these particular publications. The Army Calls of Manuals, these are publications. And they don't really feel manuals. If you look inside, you will see that there's a ton of really important fundamentals about how you set up a Marine Rifle Squad, a four rifleman, the way that you organize it, some of the different things that you do, everything from hand signals to different formations that you might want to use for covering different types of terrain, different kinds of offensive and defensive maneuvers.
You can see all of that in a PDF file that is available for download, not only from the Department of Defense, but we're hosting it on our site as well. And then a perfect companion for that is scouting and patrolling, which are some of the different jobs that go along with a Marine Rifle Squad or multiple squads that are operating together. So you can check out the contents of these documents for yourself by downloading those free PDFs, and you should.
But we also wanted to print these on paper. Having stuff on paper is fantastic as a reference, again, not a field reference. If you find yourself in the field under fire and you want to look down here through the Scout Observation and Employment area so you could figure out what grouping you should use, it's probably not going to go well for you. But having stuff on paper, having it able to be on the shelf, readable at your leisure, and to take notes on the sides of the margins is really important. And so we wanted to find some really good military manuals to sell. And the problem is, when we bought a bunch of these off of Amazon and other places, they turned out kind of terrible. Like, I was very excited for this one, slightly smaller Marine Rifle format. But it's just super scaled down, almost unreadably blurry Xerox copies of the old version of this. So we decided to make our own. And we re-typeset this just slightly using more readable fonts. And we used modern AI tools to upscale some of the drawings and diagrams so that they're not quite as blurry. We added page numbers and section headers so it's a little bit easier. And then instead of pages that say this page intentionally left blank, we added some lines to make notes a little bit easier to take. So just little quality of life things that make this a better, more readable, easily usable document. But all the section numbers are still the same. And the data on each page is correct. So if you're reading other publications and you want to reference offensive operations section three page 19, that's right here. But it's also page 55 of the book. And the table of contents is now--you know, you can see the whole thing all at once. So I'm really happy with how these turned out. And they make it much easier to go through these documents and refer to different things.
So here's what I would like you guys to do. Number one, get the PDF files and skim through those. And if you really want paper copies, I'm confident that we have the best printed versions of them available anywhere. But I also want you to talk to our customer service guys, [email protected]. Let them know what other publications or manuals we should bring out in the future. Because a lot of this stuff is really, really handy to have. You can also ask random questions about stuff that is inside here, like where you get your terrain model kit contents. I'm sure that our customer service guys will have some answers for you.