Returning to a Division Centric Army

[Infanteer]

The time of the division has passed away. it has actually passed away back in the 50's when NATO planned to defend a 1,000 km front-line in Central Europe with basically only 26 divisions instead of having 100-400 divisions on a 1,000 km front-line as Europe experienced it a few years earlier. The wide frontages required a mobility and agility which simply didn't fit into the division corset.

For all your bold pronouncments on the invalidity of the Division, the relative incompetence of the US Army, etc, etc there is nothing I can see that backs up your theories of an all singing, all dancing Corps that can handle such a large span of command.

The fact that all armies use a Division (a grouping of small formations), have used the division since Napoleon, and continue to use the Division as a organizational construct either means every professional military out there is crazy or perhaps you have to present a better case. I'm not being argumentative here - I am honestly asking you to present a comprehensive case as you've merely hinted at things with your posts.

LCol (ret) Jim Storr puts for a convincing argument of Divisional command in his book. He cites some operational analysis (on your favorite war, not the "punching bag" wars) of over 200 battles that concludes that the practical span of command for commanders is actually quite low - 1.7 subordinates committed on average to combat. This suggests that, historically, Division commanders have put forth at most 8 companies during a majority of their actions. Employment in DS and OIF seems to validate this observation.

The "so what" out of this is that bigger formations are unwieldy, despite the notions of "combat power" we like to ascribe to them. Combat power is nice, but only if the organization is one that can be properly utilized by a human commander.

Having a Corps Commander with 20-40 subordinates seems to fly in the face of this and unless you are going to take humans out of the equation, I don't know how you are going to get around it. What we probably need is smaller Bdes, Divs, and Corps served by smaller staffs.

Yet, if OIF was of interest; the British 1 Armoured Division wasn't an effective HQ in that operation. It issued few orders, and those came often very late. The brigades pulled their weight.

The article Command of British Forces in Iraq (attached somewhere in these threads) indicates otherwise. Brigades in general suffer from the same problems that Divisions do in that the C2 is clunky and focused on output rather than outcome. The most famous example was the British Bde that issued orders to its battalions to take Basrah - 24 hours after those battalions had already entered the city.

I'd also challenge that command is a human thing, not a technical one, and that observing divisions in Iraq in 2003 is just as valid as France in 1940 as the essential human dynamic is unchanged.