It seems like I see a lot of discussion of how, in Medieval warfare, battle was rare, and economic devastation and raiding were the dominant strategies. Did Medieval knights receive much training on such matters, like how to rustle cattle and maximize the number that get back to the army camp and minimize the number who panic and run off or how to burn enemy crops while avoiding accidental injuries from smoke or fire?
Do we have any surviving manuals with advice on how to conduct such operations, or did everyone just try to glean what they could from Vegetius?
Addendum: Would non-knightly soldiers perhaps receive such training? It seems like the sort of raiding operations I'm talking about would mainly be the purview of cavalry, while the infantry would have had less of a raiding role and be more oriented toward battles and sieges, but 1) I guess there were types of cavalry other than knights or men-at-arms, and 2) maybe infantry could be more effective raiders than I'm imagining?
"Economic devastation and raiding" wasn't a "dominant strategy" as much as a "dominant outcome". The concept of total warfare would only be developed much later; in the pre-gunpowder age, thousands of people living off of the countryside outright stealing from the local population was bound to cause economic devastation, and although most medieval warfare was a localized affair, as armies grew from thousands to tens of thousands through to the early modern era, by the time of the Thirty Years War armies were stripping entire countries bare just to feed themselves (and during the Thirty Years War, the damage was made even worse by the habit of powerful German rulers to quarter their troops in the lands of weaker German rulers, regardless of their neutrality. If you want to read a truly harrowing account of a war that devastated a country in great part because the soldiers needed to eat, read The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgewood).
Further, actual knights wouldn't be doing much raiding unless they were particularly wanting for supplies (or bored, or horny, or they were a particularly petty knight commanded by someone else); any knight worth his salt would send his sergeants out to raid for him, or better yet, would have brought enough supplies for himself, leaving his retinue to raid for themselves. Consequentially, most of the raiding would be done by the regular soldiery, barging through house to house, town to town, taking all they could get their hands on at spear-point.
This is the reason why even the pettiest lords lived in fortified houses (and why any lord worth his salt had a castle).