Quote Originally Posted by Rifleman View Post
All things considered, maybe the best thing for the Army to do would be to keep the two team squad but go back to larger fire teams.

What am I not seeing clearly?
I don't think you're seeing any less clearly than most of the rest of us Rifleman. As is, we're bothing coming from the same worm's eye-view: you were a fire team leader, and I was an acting section 2i/c (and therefore automatically commander of one of my section's two 4-man assault groups as well). And this, IMO, is not necessarily a disadvantage, especially given that a lot of infantry officers (curiously) tend to be less than well-aware of, and properly-trained in, squad/section-level tactics and conditions. The whole business of minor infantry units and tactics is ambiguous at times. Hey, if even General DePuy himself, a master tactician, found himself having to settle for a two-team squad (as much out of manpower limitations as anything else), then clarity just isn't going to come easy.

Putting a pair of MG teams at platoon as US army and British Army does detract somewhat from their effectiveness; attaching one out to two of the three squads/sections, can considerably reduce their overall effectiveness, even if the particular squad/section they're attached to isn't exactly complaining. The USMC holds those same MGs at company level, where their fires can be massed and controlled for maximum suppression of the company objective. They only detach MGs out to platoons (and sometimes thence to squads) when cover or terrain makes massing and coordination of fires at company level practically impossible or not worth the effort. In WWII, the Germans were famous for their ability to win the firefight quickly through the use of an MG platoon either attached or organic to each rifle company that suppressed the company objective with the massed fires of 4 MG-34s or MG-42s.

Also, I think someone earlier on this thread mentioned that the USMC found that removing one of the 3 LMGs from each rifle squad could not be compensated for in practice even with MMGs at higher levels. An LMG can is easier to keep supplied with ammo under fire (no-one has to get up and run off to a vehicle or to company HQ to get more MMG ammo in the midst of a squad/section fire-fight, not unless the entire squad is running out,and then elements behind should be bringing that ammo up), and an LMG is rather easier to handle in an assault than an MMG. If one of your fire teams is wiped out, the MG Team may be hard pressed to provide suppressive fire and ammo resupply and its own local security while the other goes into the assault.

Then there's the squad detached out on an independent mission. With only two fire teams, it'll need one of the platoons's MG teams. That leaves the platoon commander with only two squads and an MG team to handle the enemy should contact occurr. Not a good position to be in to begin with, even worse when half your MG's are gone. USMC rifle squad can handle this task without reinforcement, and leaves all MMG teams intact.

In short, the USMC rifle squad can pretty much cover all its own bases (with occasional exceptions) organically, and leaves the MMGs most of the time up at company, where they can have the most effect, most of the time.

Larger fire teams, admittedly, would let a fire team continue to clear trenches and rooms, etc., after losing a rifleman; the 4-man fire team/assault group has something of a weakness in that regard, although for room-clearing the squad reorganizes anyway and this is less of a problem.

Once a squad gets much over a dozen men though, you start to have second thoughts. And this is where it really starts to get murky for me. The USMC 13-man rifle squad is based on the Chinese 10-man rifle squad, that Evans Carlson personally observed in the 8th Route Army's operations against the Japanese in northern China during 1937. The Chinese organized the squad with three 3-man "Cells" and a squad leader. Their tactics (based upon suppresion provided by a single LMG) so impressed Carlson, that when he formed the 1st Raider Battalion in WWII, he used the same organization. After the Raiders were disbanded, the USMC as a whole adopted the same rifle squad organization in early 1944; in late 1944, a fourth man was added to each Fire Team to allow it to sustain the level of losses that came with frontal attacks on Japanese positions.

There is an argument to be made that if "1 Up, 2 Back" type suppression-heavy/assault-light attack formations were used for squad-level offesnive operations, that perhaps the 4-man fire team could be reduced back to 3, returning to the 10-man squad. But with both the LMG and the M203 in each fire team, that would leave only one rifleman per fire team to clear trenches, rooms, etc. The four-man fire team has to stand for the time being.

Yep, things are still kind of murky.