Rifle squad composition

[Norfolk]

I wrote an article for Military Review (with a retired Sergeant Major of the Army and a former CSM of Ops Grp) on the subject of small units. We started at the company and went down to squad.

We argued for a larger squad built on 3's and providing a maneuver, support, and a breach element. We wanted to make the squad as much a combined arms element as we could and we also sought to make it more self-sustaining. I advocated 3 man versus buddy teams; 3s provide greater duration and depth.

My argument also looked at tests run by GEN DePuy as the 1st TRADOC commander. DePuy tested everything; in this case, he tested the various combinations of support and maneuver ; by a clear margin the best ratio of support to maneuver was 2 to 1. A balanced squad cannot do that as it is organized; it must reorganize and/or be reinforced.

Gen. DePuy's tests were certainly rigorous, and as shown in Gen. Gorman's book as well as Gen. DePuy's own papers those tests arrived at what were considered surprising, even shocking results at the time. It's too bad that some of DePuy's innovations were either stillborn or faded out over the years.

The 3-man team, as Tom Odom said, offers greater depth than the traditional buddy team. If one man goes down in a firefight, there still two more to carry one, rather than a lone rifleman left stuck looking for someone to watch his back. And it's a lot easier to construct, man, fight, and maintain a battle trench/foxhole with three guys than just two. The PLA, the PAVN/NVA, and the VC amongst others all insisted on the 3-man cell as the ideal building block of the infantry squad (squad leader and 3 cells). Besides providing either a full crew for a machine gun or rocket launcher, or an assault team for breaking into trenches or clearing rooms, it provides moral (and morale) support in a way that you just can't get with a buddy team. As the saying goes, 'Three's Company". Less isolation and loneliness and more hands to do the work. Except during battle or on patrol, one guy on the parapet, one guy cooking, cleaning, or working, and one guy sleeping.

Of course, there are some issues to deal with. As the Marines found in 1944 after converting to the 10-man squad with three 3-man fire teams, battle losses compelled them to add a fourth man to each team. Gen. DePuy remarked at least a few times that a squad would often routinely operate with only 4, 5, or 6 guys (out of what was in his TRADOC days an 11-man squad). That adds up to two 3 man teams at most; a 13-man Marine squad might make 6 men more or less consistently under conditions of heavy battle attrition. I see Tom Odom's article recommends a 14-man squad for most battle functions.

You've also got to have enough men, for enough teams, to avoid having to constantly reorganize the squad for each task that come up, even after suffering battle losses. Frequent reorganization disrupts and even breaks down working relationships between individuals, and this loss of cohesion is felt afterwards until everyone settles down and gets to know how each person works. And of course, battle attrition lends itself to the need for frequent enough reorganization as it is.

But DePuy (as both Gen. Gorman and Col. Odom point out) had an answer (actually two) to this battle attrition problem, the "One Up, Two Back" formation in the attack, and the PARFOX in the defence. DePuy himself of course tested this using the squads in the platoon, and when platoons used one squad to first make contact while keeping the other two in reserve, then suppressing the enemy with two squads and assaulting with the third, something like 88% of these "One Up, Two Back" platoon attacks were successful. Attacker losses were reduced by something like half if I remember correctly. None of the other platoon attack tactical formations even come close (even the one with attached AT team). Now, given that the squads themselves just had two fire teams each, it's not necessarily proven, but certainly logical that the same tactics would work for a squad with 3 fire teams if it was detached on an independent mission. And in the defence, the innovative Parapet Foxhole (mind you, with 2 guys in the hole) also reduced losses by about half compared to the ordinary foxhole, and led to a much greater rate of success in the defence.

A counter-argument to this might be that, well, the squad is just a fire unit and it's the platoon that is the basic manoeuvre unit, so it's not necessary for the squad to have more than two teams; it just has to alternate fire and movement between teams until one is close enough to assault, and that the other squads in the platoon can provide suppression throughout. Well, suppose that's so. With apologies to the late Gen. DePuy, how are any of those squads supposed to maintain at least 6 men (in two 3 man teams) in order to keep fighting out of just a 9 man squad (which was forced upon DePuy and his successors due to manning restrictions)? And this is assuming a full-strength 9-man squad to begin with, quite an assumption to make. And of course, a two-team squad renders it incapable of using the "One-Up, Two-Back" attack formation that is so crucial to both a successful attack and cutting you losses by up to half compared to other tactics.

I think that when all is said and done, the 13-man USMC rifle squad, for most conventional infantry operations, is the best bet overall (notwithstanding the Marine's 15-man CAP squads in Vietnam, mind you, but that was still unconventional warfare): leadership and supervision (4 NCOs per squad - ideally); tactical flexibility (3 teams and a squad leader free to move where he needs to go, and not have to fight a team of his own); staying power (4 man teams to absorb losses); firepower (3 LMGs, 3 underslung grenade launchers); and enough straight rifleman (6) to clear trenches and rooms while sustaining losses.

As for Col. Odom's making a permanent distinction between breach squads and assault squads, I have to say that each rifle squad should be trained to make the breach even if one squad is already designated as and kitted out for, that task in say, a deliberate attack. Something might happen to that squad or it may become so depleted by losses that another squad may have to make the breach instead. Granted, I'm coming from a Commonwealth Army background, and circumstances in the US Army (or USMC for that matter) may be substantially different, but we certainly trained to make the breach, and doctrinally we were to have an assault pioneer platoon (from battalion) and possibly a field engineer troop (from brigade) in support of an infantry battalion for that purpose. But we weren't allowed to think for a moment that we weren't expected to do that ourselves, with or without the help of the pioneers or the engineers. We had the training and the equipment, all of us in the rifle platoon.

I'd feel a lot better though, if having to do that for real, I had a 13-man squad, and not an 8-man section to do the job.