Naming of military units

Factual Questions
1

My questions are generally naïve, because I don’t know the way to google them, so bear with me.

With all the news about Ukraine and Russia, something confuses me.

Let’s say, hypothetically, an army has “the 52nd armoured division”

Does this mean there are (at least) another 51 armoured divisions?

The thread, “Confederate Battle Streamers” suggests units can change names and numbers at will, at least in the USA.

Again, the infamous “Charge of the Light Brigade” had, according to wikipedia

The charge was made by the Light Brigade of the British cavalry, which consisted of the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons, the 17th Lancers, and the 8th and 11th Hussars

Does that imply a large number of Hussars, Lancers, and Light Dragoons units existed?

2

Yes, military unit numbering is a nightmare. In the case of the British cavalry regiment they were numbered series of regiments, although with gaps as units combined, and changing their tactical role at times (Light Dragoon to Hussar).

However, unless you know a specific country’s practices at a particular time (and say a century beforehand, because there will be a lot of legacy numbering floating about), you don’t know if 52nd Armoured Division is called that because:

  • there are already 51 other armoured divisions in the army
  • it grew out of the 51st Armoured regiment, and they were a bit sentimental
  • they were part of Russian 52 Div left after the split, so yes there might be 51 others
  • someone has decreed armoured division numbering begins at 50+
  • something wondrous happened in 1952, or 1852, or 1752 so they are really named after a date
  • and so on.

Maybe it has some benefit in confusing an enemy trying to figure out orders of battle, but I bet it must just create a diabolical logistics nightmare.

3

Yes it says exactly that there were X number of units of hussars, dragoons, grenadiers or what have you.

Unit designations is a complex subject, in the US Army anyway. It reflects past organisational structure combined with current organisational structure, and possibly reflects a little bit of future organisation maybe.

The US Army used to be organised as a regimental army, thus you have Units with names like 1/3 ADA, which is 1st Battalion, 3rd Air Defense Artillery Regiment.
3rd ADA had a long continuous service lineage going clear back to pre-civil war coastal artillery in Georgia, thus making it one of the oldest continuously active units in the Army before it was deactivated in the early 2000s.

Names don’t change at will, they are changed as unit mission and tables of organisation are changed.

That’s it in a very compact nutshell.

Here is a link to an article giving a (little) bit more explanation.

This is a link to US DOD website that explains army units from the most basic, team, clear up to Army Region

4

Missed the edit window(weird, I know)
One last link to an article that seems pretty thorough an explanation on how the US Army got its unit names and organisation today.

5

And sometimes the unit is numbered after another unit that was used to form it.
For example 52nd Armored Div may have been created from the 52nd Infantry Div by adding tanks and APC.
Sometimes it may have the number of an ancient (Napoleonic era for example) unit.
52nd Armored Div could have been named after the 52nd Hussards, or Cuirassiers that changed from horses to wheels.

6

No. It doesn’t even imply that there were 51 units with the same designation scheme in existence, ever. For example, the German 101st SS Heavy Tank Battalion ( Schwere SS-Panzerabteilung 101) was numbered 101 because the Germans started numbering their heavy tank battalions from 101. To make it even more confusing, it was renumbered the 501st SS Heavy Tank Battalion in September 1944 because the Germans decided to change their numbering scheme.

There’s a list of German infantry divisions raised during WWII on wiki here. They weren’t raised in numbered order, and duplication of numbers and missing numbers are evident quite early. There is no 202nd division in any form, for example, and there is a 14th Infantry Division as well as a 14th Luftwaffe Infantry Division which was originally the 14th Luftwaffe Field Division before it was renamed. There’s also a 15th Infantry Division and a 15th Panzergrenadier Division, which are unrelated to each other even though infantry and panzergrenadier divisions in theory shared the same numbering scheme. The 15th Panzergrenadier Division was formed from the 33rd Infantry Division and the 15th Panzer Division. The 700-series divisions were originally used for static infantry divisions in the German army, but notably the numbering didn’t start at 700, or even 701 but with the 702nd Static Infantry Division.

This wasn’t limited to the Germany, for another quick example here is a list of US independent tank battalions raised in WWII. The closest thing to ‘sense’ that it might make is that numbering started at the 700s, but that wouldn’t explain the ‘missing’ units in the 700-series (703, 704, 705, etc.) nor the existence of units that don’t follow this scheme in the first place (28th, 44th, 70th, 191st, etc.).

I’m sorry but this is simply untrue.

7

Another thing that occurred to me to note is the practice of deliberately avoiding certain numbers. Here is the structure of the Republic of Korea Army. Notice anything odd about it? There is no unit of any kind numbered 4. No IV Corps, no 4th Division, no 4th Brigade. The reason is Tetraphobia:

Tetraphobia (from Ancient Greek τετράς (tetrás) ‘four’, and Ancient Greek φόβος (phóbos) ‘fear’) is the practice of avoiding instances of the digit 4. It is a superstition most common in East Asian nations. It represents or can be translated as death or to die.

The Chinese word for “four” (四, pinyin: sì, jyutping: sei3), sounds quite similar to the word for “death” (死, pinyin: sǐ, jyutping: sei2), in many varieties of Chinese.[2][3] Similarly, the Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese words for “four”, shi (し, Japanese) and sa (사, Korean), sound similar or identical to “death” in each language (see Korean numerals, Japanese numerals, Vietnamese numerals). Tetraphobia is known to occur in Korea and Japan since the two words sound identical, but not at all in Vietnam because they carry different tones (in the case of the word for “four”, whether it is the Sino-Vietnamese reading tứ or the more common non-Sino-Vietnamese reading tư, neither sounds like the word for “death” which is tử) and Vietnamese does not use Sino-Vietnamese numerals as often in the first place.

Tetraphobia far surpasses triskaidekaphobia (Western superstitions around the number 13). It even permeates the business world in these regions of Asia.

8

It would’ve been nice for the Germans if Patton thought there were 500 tank battalions in addition to the 501st.

9

I think the short answer is the naming of military units is often the results of a long and possibly convoluted history, reorgs, renaming, renumbering, and restructuring.

Further complicating things is that some units are “administrative” units while others are actual combat formations.

For example, a “division”, like the US 10th Mountain Division, consists of roughly 10,000 to 20,000 personal and all their equipment and vehicles.

There aren’t 9 other “Mountain Divisions”. It was originally formed as a “light infantry” division and at some point renamed to signify it’s special mission fighting in areas of rough terrain.

The division is organized into 3 “Brigade Combat Teams” (several thousand soldiers) along with a headquarters, aviation brigade, artillery, and a support brigade.

Each brigade has a bunch of battalions.

If you notice, each battalion has a name like “1st battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment”.. In the US Army, regiments are administrative units, not combat formations. That means the regiment’s three battalions (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th (@Dissonance - You’re right…no 4th/14th Infantry) share a same history, unit insignia and whatnot, but each battalion might be assigned to a completely different division.

You might also notice that the 14th Infantry Regiment was created during the civil war, but was subsequently reorganized and often reconstituted as different size units (ie battalion instead of a regiment).

As I understand it, the main reason for doing this is to create a sort of shared history and esprit de corps at the unit level for similar combat arms (ie “armor”, “infantry”, “artillery”, etc). But in practice, actual combat formations consist of “combined arms” of tanks, infantry, helicopters, and whatnot all working together. Like they don’t send a whole brigade of nothing but tanks into battle. The army deploys a more flexible “Brigade Combat Team” consisting of maybe a tank battalion, several mechanized infantry battalions, and other supporting units.

10

Some units were formed early on and were either never deactivated, or were reactivated for military needs. At present there are six active Seabee battalions, MCB (Mobile Construction Battalion) 1, 3, 4, 5, 11 and 133. When I was serving, I was with both MCB 5 and the now decommissioned MCB 40. MCB 10 was also operating at that time. It’s my assumption that the SecNav, with the assistance of the Chief of Naval Operations and others, makes the decisions as to what units stay active. At full force in WWII, there were over 130 active units.

11

FWIW, USAF is a total mess. And like the other US services the designation of anything at any point in time owes a lot to history. Being the junior service (at least until the recent creation of … wait for it … Space Command!!) the Air Force has always been big on instant tradition. And since the biggest it ever was by far was as the Army Air Force in WW-II, it’s been all shrinkage and renumbering and combining since then. WHile trying to preserve as much instant tradition as possible.

All the type-of-mission names have changed several times in the ~75 years USAF has existed. Pursuit, Fighter, Tactical Fighter, Attack, Bombardment, Bombardment (Heavy), Bomber, Transport, Strategic Transport, Tactical Transport, Composite, Combined, Expeditionary, etc., etc., Everything gets a new type-of-mission designation every 20 years or so just for fun.

The scale-of-organization designators are mostly consistent for the operational units, but are all over the map for the administrative ones. Flight < Squadron < Group < Wing < Air Division (mostly obsolete) < Air Force.

The numbers may or may not mean anything. The existence of a 10th Whatever does not suggest there are or ever were the 1st Whatever through the 9th Whatever.

The Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve generally ape the actives, but with their own idiosyncrasies. And their own instant history to revere.

12

Interesting, the priorities the Germans had post D-Day… You’d think that there are better times to change up your numbering scheme as you’re losing a war. I’m sure there’s a story there.

13

And there’s a similar degree of complication for designations of equipment models. The M1 isn’t the first tank the US ever had, and it’s not remotely related to the M16. Fighter jets when I was growing up consisted of the F14, F15, and F16, but there were much higher numbers in WWII, and since then, there’s been an F18, but also an F-35 and an F-117. The B-52 and the B-17 are much older than the B-1 or the B-2, and so on.

14

But surely its main armament is an upscaled version of the M1 Garand (as contrasted against the shortened M1 carbine)?

To make matters worse, the F-117 isn’t even a fighter aircraft. IIRC, there is a story to the decision to give it a fighter designation, but I can’t remember what it is.

15

As an aside, SEAL Team Six (of Osama bin Laden killing fame) got its name specifically to deceive Soviet intelligence as to how many SEAL teams the US had, as there were only two at the time.

16

I think either you misunderstood me, or I’m being whooshed and taking it literally when you’re making a joke, but in case it’s the former: Avoiding the number 4 in unit naming is exclusively an East Asian thing, as 4 is an ‘unlucky’ number akin to how 13 is an unlucky number in the West, only much more so. This is because the word for ‘4’ in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese is a homonym for the word meaning “death” or “to die”. Thirteen being an ‘unlucky’ number in the West isn’t enough to prevent using the number in for example, the US 13th Airborne Division. Four being an ‘unlucky’ number because it’s a homonym for “death” or “to die” is enough for South Korea to avoid using it in unit designations, being part of the “to die” division isn’t exactly morale inspiring. This is why even though South Korea has four army corps, they are numbered I, II, III, and V.

17

Fighter jets when I was growing up were numbered in the low hundreds: F-100 through F-105. I even had a set of little models of the 5 (they skipped F-103) aircraft on a stand.

18

The so-called “Century Series” of fighters from the 1950s. After them, the U.S. went back to low numbers with the (much more successful) F-4 Phantom.

19

No, I just happened to see your post and noticed that 14th Infantry Regiment didn’t have a “4th battalion”.

The US Army also skips IV corps as well:

It might just be a coincidence. Or maybe the DoD had some people who were from East Asia on the naming board and decided to skip over it much in the same way building’s often skip the 13th floor.

20

Since the 14th infantry regiment was formed in the Civil War, I kinda doubt it