USAMC LOGSA (United States Army Materiel Command - Logistics Support Activity) have created a web site, where almost all technical manuals and other documents for US Army hardware are available in electronic form. The URL is:
http://www.logsa.army.mil/etms/find_etm.cfm
The only requirement to access most documents is 128-bit SSL encryption installed in Internet browser. Of course there is many documents that are not available for download - access is restricted to authorized military personel only - more on that later.
On this webpage you can see several search fields - the most important is "TM Title Text". Here you can enter keyword that will let you find the desired document. Remember that it only searches in titles, it does not search in contents of documents, so it is sometimes tricky to find the right keyword. All documents are in Adobe Acrobat format, so you must have the free Acrobat Reader software installed to access them. I suggest latest 6.0 version, as some documents there are already in this new format. Most documents are pretty large - from a few hundred KB even up to 50 MB, so don't try to download them on slow network connections!
Once you put the keyword in the "TM Title Text" field and click Search button, you will be presented with the list of available documents. The list is not easy to read, but you should quickly get used to it.. Each document title is a link to the document file. You can move your mouse cursor over links and look at the status bar at the bottom of your browser (if you don't have it visible, turn it on in "View' menu of the browser) - there you will see the actual URL's for documents. All that are in https://www.logsa.army.mil/etms/data/A/ folder are available for general download ("public release" documents). Others, in /B/, /C/ and other folders require military authorization. Unfortunately documents for most modern equipment (like Abrams tank, Bradley AFVs etc.) are protected this way. Still you may be surprised what documents you CAN access there! For example I downloaded full operator's manuals and technical manuals for M109A5 Paladin and M110A2 howitzers, AH-64A helicopter, M113 vehicles family, Humvee family and many, many others.
There are four categories of documents useful for modelers (at least I mostly look for these three):
- operator's manuals - general "how to" instructions, plus some basic maintenance procedures - of course with many drawings, pictures, schematics,
- maintenance manuals (various kinds of them: unit, organizational etc.) - cover all service and maintenance procedures with detailed drawings. From these you can learn how all these parts of the vehicle are put together.
- transportation guides - plans and dimensions of vehicles are given in these,
- repair parts and special tools lists - these are complete lists of ALL parts that the vehicle is build of, with drawings that allow identifing each of them.
Some tips:
- if you want to download painting instructions for NATO three-color camouflage pattern, you can find it by entering "43-0209" in "TM Number" field. It is over 15 MB document (in Acrobat 6.0 format), but worth downloading - includes camouflage patterns for almost all modern US Army military vehicles.
- to find documents about Humvee family vehicles I suggest you use M998 keyword in "TM Title Text" field. It is the first model listed in the titles, so is the easiest to find. And manuals usually cover all variants of the family.
- remember that official format of vehicle naming is "M" followed by a number, whithout dashes or spaces! So search for "M998", "M113" or "M109", but not for "M-113" or "M 109", because you will find nothing.
So now: go and download!
Just don't overload and kill the Army server - I will still need to access it in the future
Best Regards,
Pawel
