Multinational corps and formations

[Fuchs]

River crossings demand a lot of planning, especially opposed ones, and you may march 50km in a few hours, but 50km opposed advanced will take about 24 hours or more, based on all the analysis I know of.

Read the book that I told you about today. ;-)

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.

How many vehicles in a Brigade? Brigades cannot just break contact and skoot off somewhere. You need to draw back to assembly areas, plan routes, de-conflict convoys on the MSR etc etc etc.

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.

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.

[William F. Owen]

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.

[Red Rat]

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.

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+.

In Europe, that true, but stand-off fires and a contested air environment may well make this very challenging.

Concur with all the above. Even in NW Europe with its infrastructure, trying to find routes capable of taking main battle tanks can be challenging. Good staffwork (especially in coordinating instructions) is about identifying the exceptions that will derail the plan.

Of course much of the problems involved are not insurmountable, but because they are not practiced we have introduced a greater degree of friction again. IMHO part of the reason the UK army has got so bureacratic is not because things are necessarily more complex (I am with Jim Storr on this one) but because in the old days we would have said 'SOP' and everyone would have known what to do. Now we say 'SOP' (standard operating procedures), and everyone has to look it up and discuss it. This is particularly true for formation level manoeuvre.

By the way, the UK army no longer conducts field training above battlegroup level.

[William F. Owen]

By the way, the UK army no longer conducts field training above battlegroup level.

I guess we'll just have to hope that all our potential enemies feel the same way. - Sometime this year I might visit a "Brigade Live Firing" exercise. Clearly not the UK Army!!