I was reading about Brigade Combat Teams, and found that this unit of the US Army is normally composed of seven large battalions:
- 3 battalions of infantry or armour
- 1 battalion cavalry/ recon
- 1 battalion of artillery
- 1 battalion of engineers
- 1 massive Brigade Support Battalion with around ten companies (one BSB Company os crossattached to each of the other battalions.
This seems like a massive command to me - British Regiments are often only two Battalions of a similar type, and are also commanded by Colonels, but often (usually) by Brigadiers.
How do other major militaries stack up? NATO?
Also: what will be the future of army organisation for these countries in terms of the size of the command? Are officers going to cintinue to command more and more, or less and less? Or is this mostly a national approach thing?
My grandpa was a one star general and I want to show my girlfriend lol
I read a book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning. It deals with why a Police Battalion composed of ordinary middle class, middle aged men, not the SS, committed massacres and round-ups of Jews for deportations to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942. The men of Unit 101 were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working class background from Hamburg, who had been drafted but found ineligible for regular military duty. After their return to occupied Poland in June 1942, the men were ordered to terrorize the Jewish people in the ghettos during Operation Reinhard and carry out massacres of Polish Jewish population (men, women and children) in the towns of JΓ³zefΓ³w and Εomazy.
The conclusion of the book says that the men of Unit 101 killed out of obedience to authority and peer pressure.
It got me thinking, why did the troops open fired in Jalianwala Bagh on unarmed civilians ? And what was the composition of the troops that actually pulled the trigger ? And why did they were not tried for war crimes, like what happend after WW2 and nazis, since the troops involved in the JΓ³zefΓ³w massacre were tried for war crimes (hence the book by Browning).
[Letter to his wife, from Citizen's Almanac, June 14, 1806]
>The General says he will go into a town or village and wait, and then he will pick out eight or ten men to be put to the sword, to be tried by an English Court. He says that the names of these men he is to give her. She says she will not send them away, that she will send to-morrow to the General her list of the names of the men he is going to try: and then he will send to her what he has, and she will send to the General to-morrow her list of the names of the men he is going to try to-day.
Source:
Stephens, John Richard. "Letter." Citizen's Almanac. New York: Times Mirror Corporation, 1946. 18. Print.
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