The Universal Infantry

Abstract

This article suggests that the ADF should seek to adopt a standard organisation for infantry battalions, based on manpower and organisation, rather than conditions dictated by manning equipment.

The aim of this article is to propose one type of infantry battalion for the Australian Defence Force. One type of infantry battalion would greatly simplify organisation, manning, and refocus thinking toward the fact that infantry are human beings to whom the army gives equipment, and are not simply there to operate that equipment.

The need to implement this ‘one type of infantry battalion’ is not predicated by any trend or supposed altering to the nature of war or warfare. It is based in the thinking that the current variety of infantry battalion organisations no longer represent a sound basis for progressing ideas, and the reason that so many diverse and inefficient organisations exist is because of an historic failure of thought. Let us be clear. This is not proposed because of the imagined challenges of the future. This is proposed because this is how it should have always been had someone thought clearly about the problem. That being said, this work states the opinion that it will be very relevant to future operations, in whatever form they may be.

Why Organise?

Military organisation is primarily a function of command. It resides in the conceptual realm of combat, but is expressed both morally and physically. It could well be opined that the basics model of Roman infantry organisation remained valid well into the nineteenth century, purely because of the basics of close order battle. While differing in detail, basic organisations remained largely the same. The purpose was to generate decisive mass, be that fire or blade, at the point of application. In general terms, infantry equipment held little or no sway over organisation.

The introduction of the rifle forced dispersion and thus considerably shrank the span of command that could be effectively exercised over troops in combat, because soldiers had to both disperse and use cover to manoeuvre. However, almost all infantry soldiers had the same basic equipment. The aim was to equip the man. Today this is no longer the case. No longer is the utility of infantry about giving the best men the right equipment. Today we see infantry battalions of differing types manning differing forms of equipment. To a critical eye this may appear to verge on sophistry. Hopefully what follow will demonstrate otherwise.

Most armies have debated and quarrelled over the ‘size of the section’, including the infamous question posed by a former UK Director of Infantry: ‘how many men should the 8-man section have?’ No one has ever reached any firm conclusions; contrary to popular belief, there is very little authoritative work in this area, and certainly very little based on sound research. There are, however, many pages of opinion mostly lacking rigor. Simply put, there is no ideal section size. There is no ideal platoon size either. The better or worse for every given solution largely depends on training, mission, tactics and the quality of the officers and NCOs. Yes, there has to be a default, and that default has to be predicated on a number, but that does not have to be the ideal. It merely has to set conditions for effective organisation.

Alterations in the size and organisation of the section have nearly always been predicated on equipment capabilities. New equipment leads to new organisation. For example, the United Kingdom’s 1980 decision to make the 8-man section into two 4-man fire teams was based purely around plans for a new small arms family. A great many of the supposed advantages cited subsequently were after-the-fact rationalisations. With the introduction of the Warrior MICV, the question explicitly became ‘how do we man this equipment?’, because the vehicle required ten men, not eight.

An alternative view to this accepted wisdom is to merely state that the platoon will be X number of men. What X signifies is not important, but let us use thirty men for the sake of example. The exact number is not the point; the point is that the question then becomes ‘how do I equip and organise thirty men?’, not ‘how do I man four vehicles?’ This is not as banal and obvious as some may wish to imply. In terms of a useful discussion, a great deal more can be gained from asking ‘how do I best organise and equip X number of men?’, rather than trying to ascertain and justify the size of the platoon/section and its equipment, based on no real constraints and a history of opinions usually ill-informed by operational reality. Additionally, the platoon still has to function in the face of casualties and in differing terrains against differing enemies, so what has to be ascertained is general principles of organisation, not absolutist declarations about the 4-man fire team or the 8-man section.

However, it is the act of defining the number of men from which all else will usefully follow. The number of those men—officers and NCOs—will have a significant impact on costs, training and flexibility. Purely for debate, let us assume that conditions dictate: one officer, one sergeant, two corporals and two lance corporals for twenty-four other ranks. We have now added another condition from which to usefully debate and discuss organisation. No one has yet mentioned equipment.

Thesis

The organisation presented here is simple. A battalion consists of a headquarters with three or four identical companies. The companies comprise a headquarters and three or four identical platoons. That is it. Depending on the number and size of the platoons the battalion will be approximately somewhere between 430 and 680 all ranks.

Ideally the battalion headquarters should not exceed the size of a platoon, and company headquarters should be not more than ten. Both these numbers allow for spare manpower to meet a great variety of conditions. BG TAC and Main rarely if ever require more than sixteen to eighteen men in total for both, and effective company headquarters can be as small as two or three men.

In garrison and during field training, there is an attached increment of support staff, which is not deployable and need not even be infantry trained. Who they are and of what they may comprise falls outside this discussion.

Points to note are:

1. The entire organisation is designed to fight dismounted. It is not equipped with any weapon or system, plus a useful ammunition load that cannot be transported on foot and/or across a rope bridge.
2. Likewise, the default setting for resupply and evacuation is helicopters, boats and/or vehicles.
3. If the battalion needs to march or move a long distance it is uplifted by an armoured personnel carrier (APC) from an assembly point, along a planned route, to a dismount point, similar to the method used by support helicopter or landing craft.
4. When deployed on operations, a thirty to forty-man Formation Echelon Platoon of non-infantry manpower directly supports the battalion from the formation level of command. It holds all the battalion’s stores and equipment, on wheels, in 8-10 x 20’ ISO containers. This would include the battalion’s ‘3rd line’ personal equipment held in kit bags or holdalls. It also configures all resupply loads for the battalion, swaps out defective equipment for repair and recharges batteries.
5. Should armoured battle groups need infantry to dismount from MICVs, the companies or platoons detach from the battalion for that purpose. The MICVs have dedicated crews.

These are just the broad-brush outline of the thesis in general. Essentially there are nine to sixteen identical platoons that can be given any equipment, providing they get suitable training. It’s a blank canvas against which training and equipment can be applied. The real value is the 500-600 determined, fit and well-trained men that it comprises.

Exactly how the companies and platoons will be equipped and organised depends on the mission, terrain and threat. This is a solution that fits expeditionary armies because they will never be able to predict where they will fight or against whom, and for what purpose. Again, the platoons must be equipped. The platoons do not merely man the equipment!

On some operations it may be both useful and necessary to permanently group the APCs and MICVs with either a battalion or company. That is not to say that the battalion becomes trained and organised as a ‘Mech Battalion’. It could just as soon dismount and begin operations in the airmobile role.

Training

The primary objection to this concept (and it is neither new or original) is always couched in terms of training. The question has to be asked: what platoon training could not be achieved given six weeks and the necessary resources? In most cases, two to three weeks is sufficient. The default setting for all platoons would be ‘rifle’, so training would focus on dismounted close combat, patrolling, close reconnaissance and covert observation posts. The basics would reside around jungle and urban operations (as it currently is), with a balance between combat and security operations against both regular and irregular enemies.

Given good basics, those thirty men can be turned into a ‘guided weapons platoon’ or have guided weapons issued to them. If ten to thirty Javelin operators cannot be trained in five working days, then something is wrong with the trainer or the system. The platoon’s basic rifle skills have covered sighting a dismounted observation posts, so the nuances of sighting an AT post within a defensive position, and as part of an integrated anti-armour plan, is pretty easy in comparison. Training a mortar platoon may take slightly longer, but once the process is proven and understood, it should not present a challenge.

The battalion default setting should allow for specialist platoons, so that expertise in an equipment or role area can exist. Specialist platoons will have the same manpower and rank structure as every other platoon, so they can ‘instantaneously’ revert to being rifle platoons if required. Promotion and transfer will distribute those skills at some level throughout the organisation, assuming men remain within the unit or within the infantry. For example, it probably makes sense to have a sniper platoon so that sniper skills are maintained and subject matter experts exist to train snipers for other companies and platoons. The constraint on the total number of snipers within a battalion is the equipment and training budget, but ten sets of equipment can train thirty or more snipers. The debate is actually far more about time and money to achieve the standards required, than how many snipers a battalion should have. The snipers need to understand that their job is to be a good sniper, and to select and train other snipers when required. Problems do occur when ‘sniping’ becomes an image and not a fire support skill. This is a liability for any specialist platoon, not just snipers. The antidote is coherent command and doctrine.

It should also be possible to equip some or all platoons with a simple armoured vehicle if the mission demanded it. The vehicle would be something like that envisaged by Project Overlander Land 121 Phase 4. Logistic support can be raised from battalion manpower with specialist service support and maintenance attached. Only experimentation and experience can really validate these ideas, combined with the realisation that it may not be the perfect answer, but it may be better than the current organisation, given the requirements of current operations.

To implement this there would have to be ongoing experimentation with actual platoons. This would be the best way to equip and train X number of men, with Y or Z type of equipment for A or B type roles, which could build into a logical and coherent body of corporate knowledge. The challenge here comes from the novelty, and not any actual complexity stemming from the supposed black art of operating a mortar.

Some traditional platoons would cease to exist. The skills of the signals platoon would become absorbed into company and battalion headquarters. Additionally, battalion and company headquarters may have to operate small unmanned aerial vehicles. New types of platoon may be brought into existence.

How Did We Stray?

Assuming some see merit in this, it is perfectly fair to ask, why is this not the norm? Why is this idea actually not done by anyone? The answer lies in the evolution of combined arms from the dawn of proto-modern warfare to the present day. From 1914 onwards, completely new infantry weapons were rapidly introduced into service. For the United Kingdom—and almost everyone else—their introduction far outstripped doctrine and an understanding of their application. Weapons such as mortars and Vickers ‘heavy’ machine guns obviously required specialist training, and needed to be grouped together for control and administration. Add to this the introduction of ‘carrier platoons’ and ‘anti-tank batteries/ platoons’ and it is easy to see where the equipment-defined organisation began to grow from. It must be recognised that there was nothing inherently wrong with this, as long as all infantry battalions were the same, because then the solutions to adapting to other roles remained the same for everyone. This remained largely the case until the early 1960s and the introduction of the APC. By the 1980s there were four to five distinctly different infantry organisations, all of which were based on manning the equipment. This was purely a product of evolution. The problem was that very significant proportions of manpower were no longer in rifle platoons, and the best way to maintain any form of coherency was to leave battalions with their equipment. The claim that the army equips the man only remains true for the sections not in the armoured infantry role. The problem is that the focus on the section ‘as a platform’ has left the soldier overloaded. This is in sharp contrast to the 1918–36 model that made the platoon the smallest independent element capable of manoeuvre in attack and defence.

Better or Worse?

The aim of this article has been to propose one type of infantry battalion for the ADF. Hopefully it will provoke debate. Hopefully that debate will occur in a rational form that enables useful conclusions to be drawn about the issues raised. While equipment is important, the quality of men and their training is much more important. Therefore there are really two separate issues to be considered.

The first is: does having one model of infantry battalion create benefit, and should that battalion be based on the rope-bridge principle of dismounted operation and the need to equip the men, not merely man the equipment?

The second then is: what are the limitations to training and education inherent to the average ADF infantry platoon? They will not all be snipers, but can 90% assemble and operate a 60mm mortar, both single handed and as part of crew? Can the other 10% be found from other platoons? Can 90% of that mortar platoon revert to being a rifle platoon or retrained as a guided weapons platoon, given three weeks’ notice, or one week of in-theatre emergency training? Without being needlessly provocative, if this cannot be done, what does it tell us about any concept predicated on the need to adapt?

This article would not have been written had the author not believed that these things were possible and beneficial, but it is only with rigorous trailing, experimentation and examination of that belief that it will yield something useful.

About the Author

William F Owen is a military writer, critic and defence technology journalist, living and working in Israel. He joined the British Army in 1980 and served in both regular and territorial infantry battalions, as well as the Intelligence Corps, until 1993. He has since worked on defence projects in the Middle and Far East, as well as West Africa. He is currently pursuing a Masters Degree by Research at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom.