Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
And btw, who opposed an advance for 50 km in a row? Such a depth of defence is admirable and something I'd really encourage (even more, but that's a long story), but you're unlikely to face it unless you're in pursuit and do it wrongly.
Good point, but the 2-km/h number comes from a great many sources on overall campaign rates of advance, the exception being desert operations. Even the Soviets only planned on 70-80 km per day - which they admitted was very optimistic.
We shouldn't think of brigades as one piece. They're more like a mobile cloud of units.
Their TO&E is furthermore not cast in stone. The byzantine vehicle inventories of modern units are stupid and need to (and can) be changed.
Again concur, but organisation to enable that is pretty critical. Even a slimmed down BG is 70+ vehicles. Most slimmed down formations will be 500+.
Today's road network density and off-road capability of modern vehicles allows for a great deal of agility & quickness on part of brigades.
The problem are men who haven't been trained to exploit this potential because neither Cold War nor post-Cold War armies have made it a priority.
In Europe, that true, but stand-off fires and a contested air environment may well make this very challenging.