Organizing for COIN at the Company and Platoon Level

[Cavguy]

Well, I see your point, but to be fair, combat engineers are around for more than just conducting breaches - I recall that they got a good workout digging survivability positions, and between their Bradleys, bulldozer/"farm implement" type vehicles, and their secondary mission of "fight as infantry", I would think that engineers would be a very welcome addition to the severely limited combat power of the Heavy BCT (especially considering the anemic cav squadron that they have), even in the COIN environment. While horizontal and vertical construction may not be a combat engineer's forte, I would think that they would adapt to it more rapidly than any other MOS, and that is certainly useful in COIN. Compare this to the growing MOS of Military Intelligence, which while all agree that it would be nice to have good intelligence on the enemy, more personnel in MI does not equate to more intelligence...

So, we went from one engineer brigade to each heavy division - three battalions, plus one battalion per light/abn/air assault division - along with some extra battalions as corps assets, down to... I think only two mobility enhancement brigades, and a weak engineer company for each BCT...

(Someone with better knowledge of engineering can correct me, of course.)

Sabre,

True dat.

Agree it may be a limitation if we have to perform the deliberate defense.

The big losers in modularity were the EN and FA community - both took huge hits.

That said, the FBCT (as opposed to HBCT) is plused up again on "boots on the ground' numbers, but the Cav (RSTA) squadron gets eviscerated to one ground troop plus aviation and UAV's. (heresay!)

The one good thing about the new proposed org is that it does have a much more robust infantry presence than the current BCT's, and back to three maneuver BN's as well.

Below is a slide I pulled from Knox's website. Full brief is here.