ABSTRACT

This chapter takes the US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency as its primary technical communication artifact. It locates the humanist origins and limitations of the US Army's organizational and informational structure in post-World War II confrontational environments. The chapter articulates a frame for understanding counterinsurgency tactics as both enlivened by a growing posthuman awareness and limited by the dual intractabilities of military hierarchy and neocolonial national interest. It offers practitioners and teachers of technical writing some hands-on tools for using the manual in the classroom to raise students' posthuman awareness. The chapter argues that the ways drawing together posthumanism and the FM 3-24 can be instructive for technical communication students. The need for military lexical literacy requires that students begin to rethink the nature of written communication and audience in terms of the "political, economic, and social implications associated with these meanings".