From: Christopher Downes-Ward <Christopher_Downes-Ward@a...>
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 09:00:09 +0100
Subject: RE: Orders of Battle (was cheese)
> -----Original Message----- I did a "compare and contrast" between the organization of a Roman Legion and a 1980's US Light Infantry Division. The US division has more "artillery" and 3 times as much "cavalry/recon" but there are some similarities. Most of the differences where troops doing jobs that didn't exist 2000 years ago (EW, Chemical Defense...)
From: Beth Fulton <beth.fulton@m...>
Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 11:28:08 +1000
Subject: RE: Orders of Battle (was cheese)
G'day Chris, > I did a "compare and contrast" between What about at the lowest scales though. Its been a long time since I did any Roman history, but weren't they based around units of multiples of 10 or something? I haven't had a chance to look up my Achaemenid Persian stuff but I had a feeling they broke the "laws" of modern warfare too. OK maybe modern gizmos produce the ratios we see in use today, or maybe its just the way things are done now. For instance things were very different back in the Napoleonic period. Just another thought Beth
From: John Atkinson <johnmatkinson@y...>
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2001 18:47:19 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: RE: Orders of Battle (was cheese)
> --- Beth Fulton <beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au> wrote: > What about at the lowest scales though. Its been a Generally 10 squads of 8 men each. The century wasn't 100 men since the early Republic. Two centuries made a maniple, 3 maniples is a cohort. 10 cohorts is a legion. 1st Cohort is 5 double-sized centuries. That holds true from Marius to about the 4th century AD. Gets complicated from there. > or something? I haven't had a chance to look up my Right. During Roman warfare, or Napoleonic, or any time before the Franco-Prussian War, all warfare was about lining up shoulder-to-shoulder where an entire army could be seen from the top of a hill. Once you get into dispersed warfare, where a platoon leader is lucky to be able to see most of his men, then command and control issues really arise. There are no decisions for anyone under the rank of colonel if companies are administrative units only and butt against their neighbors with a meter of seperation. Of note, by the time you get up to the level where decisions must be made (brigade, division, corps) there are rarely more than 5 subdivisions.