One reason we provide citations is not just to acknowledge the work of others, but to use those others to support our contentions because they are supposedly more authoritative than we; they lend gravitas. Authority, though, for the field manual, seems to lie in it’s collective production. If I were an officer in the field, I imagine I wouldn’t have time to care whether Mister X or Madam Y wrote Z. What I need to know is that this is Army protocol and it’s best if I follow it, not because it’s the Army way, but because it will help me and my troops live through the day. That seems to be the fundamental purpose, core to the ethos, of such a text. Plug this into the rhetorical triangle of ethos, logos and pathos, and plagiarism in this instance is a non-issue.

But then there’s the hyper-citation. In the context of the field manual, it seems like it must have been written by committee, and writer/editor A was hyper-concerned with citation, and maybe scholarship, while writer/editor B didn’t see the FM as a piece of scholarship, but as a traditional Army text where the source of the words mattered less than the words and what they convey, that they ensconced the Army way. Hence, it contains the two extremes of hyper-citation and what can readily be viewed as plagiarism. But are the words being passed off as original, the lack of citation being overt deception? Not having read it, but based on what you’ve written, Mike, it doesn’t seem that way.

I’m as liberal as a lot of people, and more so than many, but I somewhat understand the military mind having grown up in a military household. I think we revert to the Vietnam era baby-killer hysteria when we conflate civilian leadership and the men and women of the military who are (in my mind) essentially chattel. It’s wholly naive at best, and disingenuous more likely, to fob responsibility off on anyone below the policy making level. Unfortunately, it’s the people below the policy making level who are being killed and maimed. If the plagiarized material in the FM keeps someone who might some day be in my classroom from being killed or maimed, hell, plagiarize away. I think that fits nicely with some Benthamite utility.

I too found the whole “How dare the Army appropriate Author X’s words?” argument odd.

On a completely unrelated note, ever since I started in administration, I’ve thought about starting some kind of site that would be called “Can of WPAss.” canofwpass.org is available; should I get it?