Redundancy in small unit organization

[Presley Cannady]

Thanks Steve, Wilf. I understand searching for an optimal squad organization for all seasons is most likely fruitless. What I'm looking for is literature on the small unit modeling process. I doubted it exists, and Wilf's pretty much confirmed my suspicions. What I do have is a lot lit on various time tested principles (Wilf calls them opinions), a set of three objective considerations for designing combat organizations (lethality, sustainability [I call this redundancy], flexibility [I call this mobility and modality]) and countless constraints imposed by targets, appropriate mixes of weapons, terrain, the available body of knowledge on manuever, etc. It's pretty overwhelming for uninitiated folk like myself and it'd be nice to if there were a family of model frameworks to handle all these inputs. Absent that, I lack the experience to understand why an 11-man squad is more optimal than one with 9 or 13 men (if that's true).