Military Organization and Terminology

[SelfLoadingRifle]

Just to complicate matters, you have to be conversant with both British and American terminology. For example: Section (Brit) = Squad (U.S.) Platoon, Company, Battalion, Brigade and Division are the same both sides of the pond. However, the Brit Cavalry have their own set of words which you need to know as well. Troop (Brit) = Platoon (U.S.) and Squadron (Brit) = Company (U.S.) The Brit top-end collective noun for Cavalry is Donkey Wallopers... er better make that Regiment - eg The Blues and Royals or 17th/21st Lancers. But this is a purely administrative term and would not be something that you would encounter in the field. Brit Infantry Fighting Vehicles and Armoured Personnel Carriers are (I believe) classed as part of the Infantry and come in Platoons. Brit Artillery comes in Batteries. Mortars (again, I believe) are classed as part of the Infantry and come in Sections and Platoons. I'm not sure if the U.S. Artillery terminology differs. Perhaps someone could advise.

BEWARE: BOTH ARMIES HAVE THEIR OWN SETS OF ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS WHICH CAN BE VERY, VERY, CONFUSING!!!

S.N.A.F.U.

SLR.

[Magpie_Oz]

... The Brit top-end collective noun for Cavalry is Donkey-wallopers... er better make that Regiment - eg The Blues and Royals or 17th/21st Lancers. But this is a purely administrative term and would not be something that you would encounter in the field.

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

[sburke]

The Brit top-end collective noun for Cavalry is Donkey Wallopers... er better make that Regiment -

SLR.

Now that was funny. Sitting here reading along all serious and... Donkey Wallopers? WTF? I know British names can be more interesting than American, but..... 3:45am here, bad time to be reading this stuff.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

Oz

I stand partially corrected. For "purely administrative" read "mostly administrative".

Question: How many times do you see - for example - a squadron from The Royal Corps of Signals, or perhaps a squadron or company (unsure of the terminology they use) from the Royal Military Police actually serving in the field as an organic unit? (Agreed these people - usually higher echelon assets - might well describe themselves as coming from a regiment, although I would argue that corps is the more usual term.) Aren't they usually encountered within other formations? How would you represent the RMP or Royal Sigs in CMSF?

Sappers, the Army Air Corps, Logistics and the Gunners can certainly be found in the field as organic units. The Gunners have a major sense of humour failure if you get too near to their guns. The guns of couse represent their colours.

SLR.

[JonS]

I stand partially corrected. For "purely administrative" read "mostly administrative".

Question: How many times ...

I think Oz's point - which I agree with - is that those regiments are represented directly in fielded forces, and commanded in the field by an RE, or RMP, or RSigs LtCol while on operations. They might be parcelled out to various places in the division in smaller clumps, but they are on ops as a unit (or regiment).

Compare that to, say the Royal Regiment of Scotland, or The Rifles. Those regiments will never ever deploy on ops, even though their constituent battalions regularly do. Or, perhaps the Royal Regiment of Artillery is an even better example - that regiment will never deploy, although it's regiments often do.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

Jon,

I think it is fair to say that the word 'Regiment' has changed meaning over the years. If memory serves, didn't the Royal Hampshire Regiment once consist of a single battalion? This would of course have made the C.O. Colonel of the Regiment as well!

Yes, as you rightly say, the Royal Regiment of Scotland or the Rifles would never deploy on ops as an organic unit, but companies and battalions of them would. These days of course the British Army does its business in battle-groups. CMN would be another matter; different era and different circumstances. A full-blown world war is after all a very different kettle of fish from today's "savage wars of peace".

My question still stands, and I believe is a relevant one for scenario designers. How are higher echelon assets such as Royal Sigs, RE REME or RMP best represented in CMN/CMSF? As green infantry with low ammo scales perhaps? My added suggestion for the RMP would be all buckshee kit vanishes, morale takes a hit, and an appropriate vocal with the word "monkey" be added to the voice files!!!

To any bemused Americans reading this, the British regimental system is incredibly insular and tribal... BUT IT WORKS.

SLR

[Magpie_Oz]

I think it is fair to say that the word 'Regiment' has changed meaning over the years. If memory serves, didn't the Royal Hampshire Regiment once consist of a single battalion? This would of course have made the C.O. Colonel of the Regiment as well!

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".

[sburke]

To any bemused Americans reading this, the British regimental system is incredibly insular and tribal... BUT IT WORKS.

SLR

I just want to see the "Donkey Wallopers" on parade.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

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".

I'm glad that someone finally agrees with me that in this day and age the term 'regiment' has a largely ceremonial and admin function. However I think it is fair to say that you seem to be talking about the relatively recent past. Try looking further back in history. Infantry used to fight in squares. Cavalry used to go to war on horses. The times they are a changin' and both the meaning and function of words such as 'regiment' will continue to change as the military goal-posts move.

"The desert sands are a rotten red,

Red with the wreck of a square that broke.

The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel's dead

And the Regiment blind with dust and smoke."

SLR

[SelfLoadingRifle]

I just want to see the "Donkey Wallopers" on parade.

They can be seen on just about any day of the week trotting up and down the Mall (outside Buckingham Palace) in their tin breast-plates.

I hasten to add that both the Lifeguards and the Blues and Royals are truly excellent regiments.

SLR

[Magpie_Oz]

I'm glad that someone finally agrees with me that in this day and age the term 'regiment' has a largely ceremonial and admin function.

Only for infantry

However I think it is fair to say that you seem to be talking about the relatively recent past. Try looking further back in history. Infantry used to fight in squares. Cavalry used to go to war on horses. The times they are a changin' and both the meaning and function of words such as 'regiment' will continue to change as the military goal-posts move.

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.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

I think we are splitting hairs here. Back in the days of yore an infantry regiment, say the 32nd Regiment of Foot, would consist of two Battalions, one on active service abroad, and the other based in England, acting as a recruiting/training/holding unit whose purpose was to keep the active formation supplied with trained soldiers. Ergo, in practical terms the home Battalion was a supporting unit of the active with personnel (training cadre excepted) starting in one and moving out to the other. Technically the unit that fought at Waterloo was indeed a battalion, but it was commonly referred to as a regiment. Indeed the Wiki entry for the 32nd states: "There were 647 men of all ranks at the start of 18 June 1815, and at the end of the day there were only 131 men left standing; they suffered the greatest loss of any regiment that day." (italics mine.) The 32nd following a number of amalgamations are now part of the Rifles, who would still refer to themselves a regiment, but I'm sure that you'll agree a very different regiment in scale and concept to the original 32nd. Today non-infantry units such as the 1st Butchers, the 2nd Bakery and the 3rd Candle-stick Makery would doubtless also refer to themselves as regiments. The acid test for our purposes is how these splendid chaps would be represented in CM!!

"A moth-eaten rag on a worm-eaten pole

It does not look likely to stir a man's soul.

'Tis the deeds that were done 'neath the moth-eaten rag,

When the pole was a staff and the rag was a flag."

Onen hag ol.

SLR

[JonS]

I'm glad that someone finally agrees with me that in this day and age the term 'regiment' has a largely ceremonial and admin function.

Yes we agree here. Where we part ways is your unique perspective that - for the British - it was not always thus.

[gunnergoz]

The current US system of lineage, CARS (Combat Arms Regimental System) in theory serves to enhance unit morale and cohesion by celebrating unit history and continuity. in practice, however, the Army's penchant to rename and reflag entire units from battalion through division, tends to dilute the effect and frustrates soldiers no end. One day you might all be members of, say, x battalion, y regiment, z division and overnight the army decides to redesignate you as, say, a battalion, b regiment, c division. Usually such changes are due to army downsizing and concurrent efforts to keep older historical units on the active rolls, but it also can't help but aggravate soldiers who may have formed a sense of unit identity and attachment to the old designation.

[JonS]

the Army's penchant to rename and reflag entire units from battalion through division, tends to dilute the effect and frustrates soldiers no end. One day you might all be members of, say, x battalion, y regiment, z division and overnight the army decides to redesignate you as, say, a battalion, b regiment, c division.

Yeah, I'd noticed that. I find the policy highly baffling.

[Magpie_Oz]

Today non-infantry units such as the 1st Butchers, the 2nd Bakery and the 3rd Candle-stick Makery would doubtless also refer to themselves as regiments. The acid test for our purposes is how these splendid chaps would be represented in CM!!

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.

[Magpie_Oz]

The current US system of lineage, CARS (Combat Arms Regimental System) in theory serves to enhance unit morale and cohesion by celebrating unit history and continuity. in practice, however, the Army's penchant to rename and reflag entire units from battalion through division, tends to dilute the effect and frustrates soldiers no end. One day you might all be members of, say, x battalion, y regiment, z division and overnight the army decides to redesignate you as, say, a battalion, b regiment, c division. Usually such changes are due to army downsizing and concurrent efforts to keep older historical units on the active rolls, but it also can't help but aggravate soldiers who may have formed a sense of unit identity and attachment to the old designation.

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.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

Yes we agree here. Where we part ways is your unique perspective that - for the British - it was not always thus.

Let us go back even further to the days of pike and musket. Take for example Sir Nicholas Slanning's Regiment of Foote, another fine Cornish formation that fought on the Royalist side in the English Civil War. This was a bona-fide combat unit with Colonel Slanning as its CO.

My hypothesis still stands. British regiments were originally fighting formations, but the term 'regiment' has changed in meaning over the years and no doubt will continue to do so with the (continuing) advance of time and technology.

SLR

[Brittany_Spear]

Hello:

Need to educate myself so as to better understand briefings and books. I have found a hierarchy on Wikipedia:

---------------------------------

army group, front

army

corps

division

brigade

regiment or group

infantry battalion, U.S. Cavalry squadron, Commonwealth armoured regiment

infantry company, artillery battery, U.S. Cavalry troop, or Commonwealth armour or combat engineering squadron

platoon or Commonwealth troop

section or patrol

squad or crew

----------------------

1) Is this correct or can someone recommend a site that covers this better.

2) Also, when you see something like this, 2/505 PIR, does that mean the 2nd Battalion of the 505 PIR Regiment? And is that the only place the "/" notation is used?

Thanks,

Gerry

I suspect this has been answered by now, but as time goes on it is always a good idea to add to your reference library rather than relying on the internet which is hit or miss.

Original army manuals are here:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/

Good secondary sources include the Osprey series; they are primers and older titles are bad - but are getting better and some of the really bad older titles have been completely revised and replaced.

The Flames of War rule books, for miniatures, are not a bad reference for understanding military terminology and wargame related stuff like unit organization, plus ideas for scenarios and things at the level that CMBN depicts. The various fan websites are also quite good.

Can also do a web search for Tactical Wargames Journal which was published last year or the year before - it's available in electronic form and the last copy published had an article on military organization and nomenclature. Also had a history of the US Army in the Battle of Normandy.

Also try this link for Moves magazine - an old wargame magazine from the 70s:

http://www.archive.org/details/moves-magazine

The entire collection is free for online reading.

[Magpie_Oz]

Let us go back even further to the days of pike and musket. Take for example Sir Nicholas Slanning's Regiment of Foote, another fine Cornish formation that fought on the Royalist side in the English Civil War. This was a bona-fide combat unit with Colonel Slanning as its CO.

My hypothesis still stands. British regiments were originally fighting formations, but the term 'regiment' has changed in meaning over the years and no doubt will continue to do so with the (continuing) advance of time and technology.

SLR

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.

[SelfLoadingRifle]

'Nuff zed'.

"The rest is silence."

SLR.

[gunnergoz]

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.

There is still an effort being made to assign battalions to divisions that have some historical lineage connection to the division. It is not being made easier by recent changes to organization and doctrine.

[JasonC]

And since the subject turned to "regiment" and what the heck it originally meant, a brief gallop through the history of military organization, mobilization systems, old feudalism and what happened to it later, is now in order.

There were these guys called the Romans and they were just nuts about order and for all practical purposes they invented military organization (with admittedly a few halting Hellenic lunges in that general direction to start from...) The division of the day they called a legion and they divided it into 3 lines on the battlefield, and into 10 subdivisions called cohorts to enable tactical flexibility in deployments. The Roman cohort is the direct cause of the organization we call the battalion - though the word "battalion" is just a diminutive of "battle", a medieval term for a whole body of troops however they were raised that fought as one mob on an unarticulated medieval battlefield.

With the cohort you had 6 centuries, which are the ancestors of companies. Despite the name centuries were usually somewhat less than 100 men, more like 60 to 80, but a nominal strength was the origin of the term itself.

A third of a division, to a Roman, meant one of the lines they typically deployed in, but the item one lower down (from just before the end of the Republic at least), the cohort, was the real organization unit used in arranging deployments, etc.

But Rome fell and its usages went with it. It still provided the model of military organization for the successor kingdoms of western Europe, however. Understand that by the end the "Roman" army was almost entirely a Germanic one of non-Italians serving originally in auxiliary formations (especially for cavalry), much more loosely organized, under their own informal "leaders".

These successor states had a system of military mobilization that was based on a militia, basically, mobilizing a levy of adult males owing military service. The smallest administrative divisions used mirrored this military mobilization system. The "hundred" was to raise a company (successor of centuries), and the county (or shire, or earldom) was to raise a regiment (successor of cohorts).

The different terms reflect different paths to the same system emulating a desired or planned mobilization, seldom realized in practice and never with the uniformity the terms themselves imply. A count was simply the royal officer who raised the regiment of his county, itself a bundle of hundreds. The term "sheriff", which means shire-reeve, was an equivalent responsibility, that arose later when counts had already become feudal owners effectively independent of the king, making said kings want their own dependent officers to take the task back. The older Norse term, "ealdorman" (from which we still have "aldermen", literally just "old men") became "earl" and designates the same office - a royal agent charged with raising and commanding the feudal levy of a specific county-sized territory.

Dukes, by the by, come just from the Roman "dux" or leader, the informal term for irregular war leaders of the barbarian kingdoms when they served as Roman auxiliaries; later these become proprietors of military marches or regional commands that grouped multiple counties. They were effectively standing general officers for a specific strategic direction, say the "march" of Austria, or to fight in Wales.

Well that is all just ducky but what does it have to do with where "regiment" comes from and what it came to mean? Answer, enter the entepeneur officer professionals of late medieval and especially early modern times.

See, the feudal levy thing never actually worked. The blokes didn't show up unless the fight was right in their backyard and over something they cared about, and then they ran off because mean tough guys with sharp implements were running straight at them.

Instead people hired ne'er do wells and adventuresome types to serve in their place when called up. Or they just paid the shillings to somebody who said he'd go hire them for them, to discharge their theoretical obligation to show up and give their 40 days service or whatever it was. The royal officials, or counts, or dukes involved weren't too particular about where the warm bodies came from, and preferred to deal with somebody organized, and with men willing to actually fight - for pay, of course.

Thus a whole network of military entrepeneurs were interposed between a purely fictional legal obligation to do military service, that morphed into a tax payment due, and the lords or officials charged with raising troops.

The fellow who raised a company is this manner was a captain, by that very fact.

And the fellow who raised a regiment in this manner was the head of a column, in Spanish - the origin of the term "colonel".

A colonel, in short, is the actual military professional doing the job that counts sitting around on soft cushions were given their large land grants to perform, but could not be bothered to actually get up and do.

But history repeats itself, the second time as farce. The colonels, as proprietors of regiments, which they effectively rented out to the crown for large mark ups, purchased their positions. They were placeholding capitalists in a trice, and governments intent on having military officers who knew which end of the sword to stick into the enemy instead of glorified bondholders, found it necessary to invent new ranks of men who actually worked for a living (and fought, even) to do the job that the now be-cushioned colonels weren't doing either. Thus was the position of "lieutenant colonel" born - as the pro who actually fought, while the colonel headed up the regimental mess and drank port. Similarly, the rank of "major" arose to train the men and see to little details like having anything to eat or wear or fire off at the enemy.

Regiments in the early modern sense date from this time. They are a legacy of the system of military entrepeneurship that predates the modern bureaucratic state, when there were basically no paid positions for professional careerists in any of it, only middlemen seeking their fortunes, in either loot or by skimming the pay of the soldiery - all to make a fictious old mobilization system actually work in practice. But the roots of the old mobilization system they were replacing and thus paralleled and imitated, themselves lay in the tactical bits of Roman legions and the largely failed efforts of the successor kingdoms of western Europe to find ways to raise them out of feudal levies.

Since cohorts and centuries actually made tactical sense, they were copied and re-used, especially in early modern times. They became battalions and companies, but down to Napoleonic times they were recognizably performing the same functions of articulating close order infantry formations on battlefields.

Everything above that was basically haphazard, for quite some time.

Thus the (accurate, as far as they go) comments of others above that regiments raised battalions and put them into the field, but the formations fighting in that field were battalions. (Sometimes, it is true, more than one from the same regiment at the same battle, especially with long service Guards formations - but rare enough to be much like the doubled first cohort of Roman legions).

The term "brigade", on the other hand, was originally a verb. To brigade x with y was to assign them to the same task force or mission. Forces brigaded together would fight together for the duration of a battle or a campaign, but administratively had nothing to do with each other and thus could be reassigned as needs changed from one to the next.

So that is some prehistory. FWIW...

[Erwin]

So Brigade was originally a form of Kampfgruppe, or Task Force?

Very interesting treatise Jason. Thanks.

[Michael Emrys]

So then, how did regiment as an actual tactical formation, as we find in for instance the WW II US and German armies, come into being?

Michael