I came across my home state’s (NJ) Army National Guard Wiki page, and noticed something very peculiar: there’s one battalion per regiment. Then I looked at others, including active duty units such as the 4th ID and saw the same thing.
Is this typical? It seems overy bureaucratic to stand up a Regimental staff (even in name only) for only one Battalion. I could see the Battalion Staff assuming those Regimental Staff’s functions, but why not just do away with the whole “Regiment” business and have Battalions report to their respective BCTs?
Is it in some sort of preparation, as if we’d had a draft and could then field several hundred battalions and integrate them into the existing structure? Basically, why the middleman?
I’m fairly certain you’re misreading that slightly. To take the 4thID example, the 1st BCT doesn’t have the only battalion of the 22nd Infantry Regiment and of the 66th Armor Regiment. Each Regiment has two battalions, only one of which is attached to the 4th Infantry. The 22nd IR and 66th AR both have two battalions, each battalion attached to a separate larger unit.
Furthermore, regiments in the Army are not real organizations. They are parent units that perpetuate honors and history, but there is no Regimental staff. I believe the only active duty regiment that retains an actual organization, staff, and subordinate units is the 75th Ranger Regiment. The battalions in a separate brigade or division report to their BCT staff, almost exactly what you suggest.
Your service doesn’t have any equivalent to regiments, really. The system of numbered air forces, wings, groups and squadrons has not gone through major restructuring since WWII. The Army, however, switched from a regimental system to a brigade one and they aren’t really compatible. Hence regiments were reduced to lineages and don’t have any operational function.
pbw, thanks for the help! You’re right–I’m trying to put things in terms of Air Force hierarchy (ain’t working too well). So, if I understand you correctly, I can think of a “Regiment” along the lines of our Air Expeditionary Wings: something subordinate (standalone) squadrons can get attached to. It’s just that the Regiments were the stateside, garrison units I could compare to an “Air Wing”.
Am I closer to the mark, then?
Tripler
Oh, what a tangled, historical web we weave.
Also, prior to the conversion to Brigade Combat Teams, the 2nd and 11th ACRs were also “combat” regiments. That said, a cavalry BCT is pretty similar to what a regiment would look like.
In addition, until the recent BCT reorganizations, U.S. airborne units still fought as unified regiments. Technically, they still do, since the airborne BCTs are still called regiments, although the structure is different.
The current US Regimental system follows the British Regimental system, more or less, and for the same reasons: to promote an attachment to a unit’s history. Briefly, and talking about British infantry battalions and regiments (it gets much more complex with what a regiment is for armor, cavalry, artillery, the history of how the system was set up, etc), a regiment is an administrative organization, not a combat organization. For example, the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) was a territorial administrative organization from which 25 battalions were raised in WW1, which were then assigned to brigades assigned to divisions. The brigades and divisions were the combat formations. The current US Regimental system doesn’t have any territorial aspect to it, but is still intended to promote an esprit de corps and attachment to a regiment’s history.
This differs from what regiments were in the US back in say WW2. At that time a regiment was a combat formation with (usually) 3 numbered battalions under it, so back then the 22nd Infantry Regiment for example was entirely a combat formation consisting of 1(battalion)/22(regiment), 2/22 and 3/22 along with regimental assets and was permanently assigned as one of 3 regiments to the 4th Infantry Division. What was a regiment back then as a combat formation has been replaced with the Brigade. The are still usually 3 brigades per division, and each brigade consists of about 3 battalions, but the battalions now come from different regiments, as the regiment is just an administrative organization. For example, the 27th Brigade (Infantry)/42nd Division (National Guard) is a combat formation consisting of 2/101 Cav Rgt, 1/69 Inf, 2/108 Inf, and 1/258 Artillery. As they now stand, the 101st Cavalry, 69th and 108th Infantry and 258th Field Artillery regiments are purely administrative organizations from which battalions are raised and then assigned to brigades.
As a side note, due to the downsizing of military needs/budgets, the British regimental system has been imploding a bit, since there’s no need for an (administrative) regiment to raise more than a single battalion.
That’s almost backwards. As Dissonance says, battalions are sort of taken[sup][/sup] from the theoretical regiments and assigned to brigades. In the AF, squadrons are taken from groups or from being independant and assigned to AEW’s.
[sup][/sup]“Sort of taken” because the regiments never really exist in the concrete sense. The battalions never reported to a regimental command staff the way a sqadron assigned to an AEW previously reported to its Group command staff.
paperbackwriter has it right. The 1st battalion/ 9th infantry regiment ( a unit I just made up) is a battalion in a BCT, it could just as well be called the 19th infantry battalion. The whole purpose of the regiment is to give the unit a history.
Also davekhps, I am currently in the 11th ACR and while we are a “Heavy BCT” we are still organized as a regiment in every meaningful way. Looking at the 3rd ACR organization from wiki ours is identical except we have no air assets (3rd ACR’s 4th Squadron, and we only have 2 ground squadrons. We also still use all of the cavalry regiment designations (regiment, squadron, troop; instead of brigade, battalion, company.)
I think you and I are on the same page, but my poor wording threw things off.
So, “Brigades” are the new ‘self-contained fighting unit’ that individual specialty battalions* are attached to then? Why the change from Regiment to Brigade?
But yes, our AEWs are deployed units, with composite skills and squadrons pulled from those in garrison.
Tripler
Or, like I was, reported directly to CENTAF/CC through his A7. (Thank you RED HORSE!)
*Note: I mean Infantry, Artillery, Engineer, Armor, Supply Battalions, etc.