Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
A Corps Cmdr can also decide on the spot to attack a few hills farther or to attempt an immediate river crossing with the effect that he'll advance another 50 km in a few hours.
River crossings demand a lot of planning, especially opposed ones, and you may march 50km in a few hours, but 50km opposed advanced will take about 24 hours or more, based on all the analysis I know of.
A Corps Cmdr can also sense a crisis in one spot and tell a Bde to disengage elsewhere immediately in order to re-engage at the crisis.
How many vehicles in a Brigade? Brigades cannot just break contact and skoot off somewhere. You need to draw back to assembly areas, plan routes, de-conflict convoys on the MSR etc etc etc.
Then think about a Bde or Corps being called to another spot ASAP. We don't suggest that the correct answer to the theatre Cmdr is "OK, we'll begin to move in 36 hrs.", do we?
How far and what's the state of readiness. Switching a Corps between armies, would require at least 24 hours. If you can show me it being done quicker, then I'm all ears.
Today's armies are fully motorised with vehicles that can march at 60-90 km/h!
Convoy planning speeds have not changed since WW2 - where all US and UK armies were fully motorised.
Men can keep functioning satisfactorily on only 5 hrs sleep/day for quite a long time. Sleep is a leadership problem.
Concur, but you cannot keep a planning staff working 24 hours a day
My take on battlefield agility and quickness is that this is something that can be trained. It takes a few weeks of free play exercises only.
Begin by booting a sluggish Cmdr, then proceed kicking asses and keep "killing" slow Cmdrs during the exercises so their 2nd in Cmd get a chance to prove how quick they are.
I do not know. We have little evidence and experience in this area.
About oversized staffs:
30% of a staff does 70% of the work (if not 20/80!).
5% of the staff officers create 30% of the work - and that's almost entirely unnecessary work because some people simply spin around, keeping people busy for no reason.
There are a few extensive studies in this area, that reach very firm conclusions, backed up by experience. Formations do not demand much more than 20 officers. The IDF thinks you can work with as little as 10.
Make sure you have the right Cmdr for the formation and he knows the key people of his staff.
Concur.
Then force him to select 100 personnel for his staff, take away all others and form some experimental Bn with them.
Then force him to ditch another 10 in the next month, again, again, again and again.
At the formation level no experimentation is necessary, at least based on the studies I have seen and the officers I have talked to who study this.