Magpie_Oz

Interestingly however the notion of referring to a body of men on the battlefield as a regiment spawned mainly from the nature of how that body of men had been raised. The English civil war units on the Royalist side were referred to as "Slanning's Regiment", or what ever, due to the fact that the body of men were raised from a particular area, by a particular person who usually also paid the expenses for training, provisioning and equipping the unit. The Parliamentary Infantry, the public forces if you will, were referred to as Brigades. So really the use of the term regiment was still related to the administrative linage of the unit when it came to the infantry and essentially the same as it is today.

Hmmm, I'd always though the US were trying to adopt a flexible "modular" arrangement so that the basic building block was the battalion and then higher formations were clipped together in a mission oriented organisation. I believe that extended out of the whole "Pentatomic" disaster. Or it could be a highly developed mechanism to "stuff the lads around", which seems to be the end result, if not necessarily the original intent, of most Army policy.

It isn't a matter of how they choose to refer to themselves but rather the FACT that a regiment as a tactical formation only has meaning for those other than knuckle-draggers, as has always been the case. Not sure what you are getting at tho', wouldn't other arms just be soldiers without heavy weapons? or in some cases WITH much heavier weapons? Obviously Armour and Cav are already very much in the game to give the rockapes something to cower behind, as are the Arty, being the ones who actually do the "destroy" part of "Close with and Destroy" and Aviation as well. Sigs are already there as people can talk to each other, EME are there, the gear is working, Caterers are there, no one starves to death, Chaplins are there as they are not all sitting in the corner sulking, buddy aid shows us the Medics are about and the troops are not naked so I'm guessing Ordnance has popped in occasionally.

Only for infantry Nope, as JonS said earlier, pretty sure the British army has never actually fielded a regiment of infantry check out this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Battle_of_the_Waterloo_Campaign The meaning of Regiment has never changed, it has always been different between Infantry and everyone else.

http://www.amazon.com/Lockheed-C130-Hercules-Peter-Smith/dp/1840371978 http://www.webjam.com/robbythec130 ?????????

But no the is precisely the point it wouldn't as an Infantry Regiment is purely admin/ceremonial. The Colonel of the Regiment is usually a retired officer with the Colonel in Chief being a Royal. All "corps pure" unit organisations stop at battalion level, it is just that battalion level units in most things other than Infantry are termed "Regiment".

No that is not correct the term Regiment is used in Signals , Engineers, Artillery, Armour (and others) as battlefield formations. Regiments in these units are the same comparative command level as a Battalion, without containing as many people. Often such supporting units are often not deployed in that large a group. For example the current 1 Armoured Division of the UK contains 7th Armoured Brigade 20th Armoured Brigade 1st Division Headquarters and Signal Regiment 1 Regiment Army Air Corps (Lynx) 28 Engineer Regiment, Royal Engineers 1 Regiment, Royal Military Police 1 Logistic Support Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps 2 Logistic Support Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps Additionally there are various Regiments, in particular Artillery (Section, Battery, Regiment) , attached to the 2 Brigades. Troop or Platoon is decided by who "owns" the unit in question. If 4 MICV's are an organic part of an infantry battalion and the crew are members of the Corps of Infantry then they are Platoons, if they are an attachment from another formation and members are Corps of Armour then they are Troops. This site http://bayonetstrength.150m.com/General/site_map.htm might help

Have a look here http://www.feldgrau.com/12ss.html I think the German formations seemed to use 12 SS Panzer Regiment and 12 SS Artillery Regiment etc to mean "the Panzer Regiment of the 12th SS Division". Possibly pointing again to Regiment denoting the linage and arms "pure" arrangement?

Sounds pretty much like Real life

As a general rule of thumb in Commonwealth organisations a Regiment is a Corps "pure" formation from which units are detached to make up other units. So an Infantry Regiment, Royal Australian Regiment or Middlesex Regiment for example will only have infantry. But the battalions of those regiments are attached to form the actual tactical manoeuvre units. This is why Signals, Arty, Engineers and Armour all go by Troop, Squadron, Regiment. As to those levels all members of the unit are part of the same corps. The notion being that the Tps or Sqns or Regiments themselves are deployed under tactical command of a larger formation. An armoured regiment will not contain any soldiers from the Signals corps for example (ok is some cases they do as a special attachment). IN earlier times in the US Army the term Task Force and Team was used in a similar manner. A Task Force was a battalion that had swapped out one of its companies and a Team was a company that had swapped out on of its platoons. So a Tank Battalion might cross attach a Tank Company to a Mech Battalion to create an Armoured Task Force and a Mech Task Force. Within the Tank Task force the tank company would detach one of its platoons to create two teams, one Tank heavy and one Infantry heavy. The other two Companies would remain "pure" and be termed companies not teams In theory if an Infantry unit was created above battalion which contained only infantry it would be termed a Regiment. The term Brigade is used to indicate it has other supporting arms and services.

Well the Vogons are going to kill us all for a Hyperspace bypass anyway so the Kettles won't be a problem. And if the Keplertwentytoobians have unfriended us, then screw them, who needs them

"Pretty cool. Let's send a radio signal to Kepler 22b! Then we only have to wait 1200 years for the response " "Angels or Apes but never men" Issac Asimov

LOL how about Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove ? Which shows that contrary to : "That is one side of the equation I think almost nobody thought of either until the late 80s at least, Magpie." they were thinking along those lines in 1964, also "Fail Safe" from the same year. Might want to also check out Bertrand Russell, the penny dropped for him the same day Fat Man dropped for Nagasaki

I reckon the silliest thing with these low level weapons as it puts the ability to goad a strategic response down at the Tac level. I'd expect that the chain of escalation would be pretty quick from Davo to Johnno to Thunderjet to Stratojet to Atlas to ........ sticks and stones

Nancy boys. On that, interesting to note that SS uniforms are popular with the Gay community, those guys certainly have an eye for fashion.