Welcome Logan,

I understand your fascination with organizational details at the tactical level. I like to mull over things like that myself.

There are several long threads here that will doubtless interest you: the one about rifle squad composition, for starters.

One of the things that came out of that thread was the belief (shared by most, anyway) that the current USMC 13-man squad design is probably the most capable of them all.

Something else that was discussed is that the Army will likely never have enough people for that kind of squad: for better or worse they are stuck with the nine-man squad for the foreseeable future. So, if that's the case, one of the ideas tossed around was should the Army give up the fire team sub-division and go with a squad similar in design to the WWII era German gruppe. Paul Melody had an interesting article that came to that same conclusion (more or less).

Somewhere in that long list of posts are links to Paul Melody's article and another about the WWII era German gruppe.

Oh yeah, Wilf is our board rebel on this issue (gotta love him! ). His view is that the focus should be on the platoon, and that the platoon should be made up of what you might think of as several large fire teams.