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If you have ever written, used or maintained custody of classified
manuals, you would understand the requirement for this admittedly
awkward resolution to the problem.
These manuals are in binders for ease of revision and upgrading. A
security requirement is that they be auditted periodically (usually
quarterly or annually). This audit includes a page check. Some poor
schmuck (me, once upon a time) has to verify that the List of Effective
Pages matches the actual pages EXACTLY.
If someone makes a revision to page 10 of the document, adding just a
paragraph or two so that the next section starts on page 11 instead of
page 10, the revision affects a whole slew of pages that have nothing
but their page numbers changed. However, if the revision inserts a
partial page, page 10a, it has minimal impact on the document as a
whole. The following page is not numbered or anything else. It is "not
part of the document" because further revision on this topic could
produce a page 10b. To explain to the poor schmucks that this was not
an error, someone inflicted the world of tech writers with the offending
phrase "This page is intentionally blank."
