a little off topic, but I have a peeve to complain about:
Why do military reporters always tell us about companies, battalions, divisions, etc?
Why can’t they report the numbers? 200 men, 50 tanks, or 500 vehicles, etc?
I have no idea how many foot soldiers or how many tanks make up a company in the Ukrainian army, or the Russian. A platoon may be 10 men, or 20 or 30. A company may be 4 platoons, or 10 platoons. A battalion may be, what?–4 companies? 10 companies?
Do the math and the battalion might consist of 160men , or three thousand men.
( 4 companies of 4 platoons of 10 men 4x4x10=160.
10 companies of 10 platoons of 30 men=3000 )
So which is it? 160 or 3000?
And why not tell us poor, ignorant readers?
Fight my ignorance, please.
Because the author of the article doesn’t know either and has no way to find out. That’s why. They transcribe the few fact-bits they’ve been given and leave it at that.
If they wanted to pad the article they could include a sentence or parenthetical like “(a Ukrainian platoon is usually 23 men, but could be anywhere from 10 to 30 in combat conditions)”. Good bet any editor would cut that sentence as useless fluff.
Because it’s complicated. An armored battalion does not have the same number of soldiers as a mechanized battalion or an infantry battalion. Then when you start throwing in specialists like engineers the numbers variation gets even wider. Then there’s the factor of when a war has been going on for a while a battalion may well be under-strength. Finally the Russian’s idea of a proper battalion is not the same as Ukraine’s is not the same as the US’ etc.
And more complicated, different units may be mixed together for a single offensive, so if it is 8 tanks, 300 infantry, 30 artillery and 12 sappers, plus some drone flyers, spotters, scouts, medicals, mechanics, logistics,…Well, let’s call it a battalion sized attack.
Because there seem to be a lot of people these days who have the attention span of a gnat. They don’t want details; they want clickbait headlines. And editors are under pressure to make the articles move along briskly.
This just emphasizes why using such terms is pretty useless. Telling us there’s 10 battalions of Ukrainians vs 7 battalions of Russians gives us no real, useful information. But tell us it’s 5000 Ukrainians vs 3500 Russians, and we immediately get a sense of who is likely to prevail.
Using such terms is not at all useless, for a variety of reasons:
First of all, soldiers do not fight as individuals. Individual solders are about as effective as an unorganized mob, that is, not at all. Instead, soldiers are trained to fight within organized groups that support each other, which is how you get squads, platoons, companies, battalions, etc. It is therefore much more useful to know how many of these groups are involved.
Secondly, at the higher levels, that’s how the officers in charge keep track of what forces they have to employ, by groups, not individual soldiers. A commander knows how many battalions they have to employ. They likely have a much dimmer understanding of total troop strength, except as an approximation. Add to that the complication of personnel rotating in and out, casualties, etc. And if they do happen to know their exact numbers of troops on the battlefield, they are not likely to share that number with reporters.
We’re talking about using them in the news, to convey (allegedly) useful information to civilians. Experts will always use their jargon amongst themselves, and being experts, are expected to understand it.
Sure, but the thing is, the reporters are probably being told what units are doing what, but not the numbers of men/vehicles in each one.
Why? Most likely for reasons of operational security. It’s probably not terribly secret to the other side what units might be facing them, but what they don’t know is how many men are in that unit. It could be a severely understrength one, one with their TOE full, or one somewhere in between.
So when the reporter hears that the 2nd battalion of the 6th regiment is part of the attack, he doesn’t know if that means a full strength infantry battalion (~650 men) or a severely depleted one that’s maybe 60% that, or if it’s something else like a infantry battalion with a cross-attached armored company. (sort of a hybrid).
And if you do know how some of this works, knowing that you’ve got 3 infantry and one armored battalion in the assault tells you a lot more than 1800 men and 55 tanks. It implies what level of additional support might be available- certainly brigade, if not division in that case. But if it’s the same number of men and they just list “3rd Brigade”, then you’ve definitely got divisional assets as well as probably corps level stuff helping out.
Very likely, in most cases, this. The correspondent or embedded reporter has been told what local command decides s/he Needs-To-Know and no more.
Plus as LSLGuy and Chefguy indicate, speculations as to what the ranges of numbers or specific capabilities may be will often be edited out in a general-audience article as too confusing to Jane and Joe Eyeballs.
For usual news reports, that would be correct, but the article that was quoted comes from ISW, the Institute for the Study of War. This literally is what they do.
If anyone can have information at their fingertips, it should be ISW.
Perhaps I am blind but I find no quoted article, ISW or otherwise, in this thread.
I agree I’d expect a source like ISW to write better articles than e.g. CNN or USA Today. But better as in better-sourced and more insightful. At the same time, to the degree they’re writing for a sophisticated audience, they’d leave those details out as being well-known to their audience. But with perhaps some backgrounders elsewhere on their site to act as primers for folks who aren’t up on the jargon and the particulars.