From: Allan Goodall <agoodall@a...>
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2002 15:32:21 -0500
Subject: [SG2] Fire Team Casualties Question, for the Experts
I'm working on a set of fire team rules for SG2. I have a question about casualties. When a platoon in a modern army using fire teams, such as the US army, takes casualties, how is the platoon restructured after the battle? Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there were 10% or fewer casualties. Do the fire teams maintain their original personnel? Or are fire teams/squads that took casualties "cannibalized" to bring up the strength of other fire teams/squads that have been reduced by casualties? If a "standard" fire team has 4 soldiers, what is the lowest number of soldiers needed to make a "viable" fire team? The reason I'm asking is that the SG2 rule book includes rules for calculating the size of units as if they had taken casualties. (See "Under-Strength Units", page 10). It's possible that a squad of 9 soldiers could be reduced to, say, 6. I'm curious how they would be organized. Would the emphasis be to balance the fire teams evenly? Or would they operate as one over-sized fire team of 5 plus a squad leader? Would the fire teams receive transfers from another squad to build up a fire team to 4 men each, if possible? On one hand, I can see drills requiring a certain number of troops and certain types of equipment in each fire team. On the other, I can see wanting to maintain fire team integrity as soldiers live and train with the same people in their squads. My guess would be that if a platoon of 4 squads, 9 per squad (ignoring command and support elements) were reduced from 36 to 32 soldiers, the tendancy would be to organize them as 3 squads of 9 (1 SL, 2 fire teams of 2), and the other 5 would form a squad of one SL and one fire team. I would also guess that if they were to drop to 28 soldiers, they would form 2 squads of 9 and one squad of 10. But, this is just a guess, which is why I'm asking.