Re-structuring the BCT

[Infanteer]

Infanteer, do you have any more information on the British BDE Battle Groups? I didn't know there was such a unit in existance.

The Brigade Group is, I think, a Canadian formation created as a response to being unable to deploy a Division (for various reasons) but still wanting to deploy everything and the kitchen sink. It borders on a mini-Division and is listed, doctrinally, as an "independant Corps asset" - mind you this is all Fulda Gap stuff when 4 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group formed the VII Corps reserve (I think I got this right).

Anyways, Battlegroups and Combat Teams are stuff that we in Canada live by when it comes to operations. I'm pretty sure the British use the same or similar doctrine when it comes to task-tailoring forces. Battlegroups are a task-tailored force built around either an Infantry Battalion or, uncommonly these days, and Armoured Regiment (battalion in everyday lingo). The battlegroup will have sub-elements of all the other arms of the Brigade that it requires to accomplish its mission. For example, the Battlegroup in Afghanistan (this is all open source from the CF website) is a Rifle Battalion with an Armoured Squadron (we call companies squadrons in Canada/UK), an Armoured Recconaissance Squadron (again company), a Combat Engineer Squadron (company) and an Artillery Battery. So, the Battalion Commander actually has quite a potent little combined arms force - everything down a notch from what the Brigade Commander has.

Combat Teams are the same thing, but at the Company level. Doctrinally, we work with square combat teams - an Infantry Company, an Armoured Squadron (company), a Field Engineer Troop (platoon), and a FOO/JTAC team. A Battlegroup commander will task-tailor one or more combat teams based off of how he sees the mission being accomplished. We are even seeing "Platoon Groups" in the dispersed operations - I had a section (squad) of Engineers attached to my platoon for almost the entire time in Afghanistan and at times I got a FOO/JTAC party as well. It wasn't uncommon to see a Platoon of Infantry and a Troop (platoon) of tanks married up to go do something. Makes life interesting for the lowly platoon commander!

So, in reality just a system of task-tailoring combined arms forces and, in some cases, who commands them - nothing too special but we do it as a matter of course in Canada because we have almost exclusively been deploying Battlegroups (sans Brigades) to multinational operations for the last 20 years or so. When it does show is when you look at units in and around Kandahar - the Canadian battalion has tanks, artillery and engineers while the American units are more conventional, branch pure units.