http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/03/army-ipad/

The United States Army has published their first-ever interactive iPad book, Vanguard of Valor. Although developed and intended for career army personnel, the book is free for anyone to download on an iPad.

According to Spencer Ackerman on Wired’s Danger Room blog, the book has audio, video, simulations and photographs, which let the reader interact with the platoon level narratives.

“The book digitizes and updates the traditional Army practice of recounting “lessons learned” from its conflicts. The eight stories it contains recount the experiences of platoons deployed to Afghanistan’s rugged southern and eastern regions, mostly on the border with Pakistan and mostly during the 2010-12 troop surge. “These are lessons that could easily be lost,” says the Combined Arms Center’s Parson, whose historians and developers created the book. “When children aren’t around, it’s a telltale sign that something bad is about to happen. That’s something to be aware of, the change in our environment.”

I had no idea the Army published these kinds of books, let alone for public consumption.

If you’re into this type of thing, the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas has hundreds of books and handbooks available for download. The Center, what Ackerman calls part of the Army’s “brain trust”, also hosts the ironically named Center for Army Lessons Learned. This Center has published a tonne of books, from the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System and Strategies for Developing and Practicing Cross-Cultural Expertise in the Military to the Media is the Battlefield, which advises soldiers to “Go ugly early” when speaking with reporters.

Of course, these books aren’t telling you anything the Army doesn’t want you to know, but it’s nevertheless an intriguing insight into the way they are trying to understand the conflicts in Afganistan and Iraq, two wars the rest of us seem to have forgotten about.