Quote Originally Posted by SJPONeill View Post
So that study finds that, instead of the span of 5-7 commonly held to be manageable, actual practice is much less than that i.e. 1.7? Might that be commanders focusing on their main effort operation and leaving supporting operations to their staff to manage? Does he distinguish in the study between the span of a commander i.e. the individual, and the span of command i.e. a command headquarters and staff? Please don't misread the question as critical of the statement - I think it's a fascinating insight and am just seeking clarification for myself.
I should be careful here. One of the key assessments that Storr makes is that combat is not fractal. Brigades are not big companies and corps are not big brigades - commanders at each level have different things that they must take into consideration during the fight. A Division Commander doesn't care about the range of a GPMG, but to a platoon commander, it's one of his primary concerns. Dead ground is everything to a company but irrelevant to a Brigade.

With this principle in mind, I must make it clear that Storr only argued about the Division. The Brigade and the Corps will have different factors and thus different requirements. I made my guess of "smaller" based on some fundamental aspects of Div command which I extrapolated to the Bde and Corps level.

The figure of 1.7 is from a Dupuy study. Also citied is an unpublished DERA study which, in looking at Division activity in WWII, showed that at no time were all nine battalions of the measured division employed at the same time. Of the 81 days the measured divisions spent in combat, 43 featured only 3 battalions employed. Thus half the time divisions employed only 1/3 of their strength to defeat the enemy. Looking further at this data, divisions only employed a majority of their forces 1/3 of the time. Additional data from Suez and the Gulf further support this view. Fuchs mentioned reserves and rear duties - do these duties routinely use up over half a division's strength, especially when it is committed to frontline activity? These studies seem - at least to me - to give some concrete evidence of what the span of command actually is.

The so what - if 6-10 maneuver companies (and 2-4 battalions and 1-2 brigades) are all that a division commander can realistically employ at once, than the division should be designed around sustaining 6-10 maneuver companies in combat while, at the same time, making the organization as nimble and agile in combat. 6-10 maneuver companies do not likely require an additional 14-17 companies in reserve.

What does this mean for the Brigade and the Corps? I dunno - but the methods behind identifying the above structure (span of command, movement times, relation of space and time, etc, etc) can probably give us a good idea.