SW1 wrote: ↑29 Jul 2023, 10:42
This again goes to the heart of the government strategy and its engagement with allies. What was the outcome of the LRRG in Mali? where was the joined up plan for which the military was a part, it was more a look we’re doing something which benefits no one. So while from a military concept of operations it was an interesting and beneficial deployment did it add anything to the government’s long term strategic goal.
Hence my repeated point of very specific priorities of government and explicitly targeted extremely long term engagement with economic, trade and infrastructure supported by security engagement not just we must be everywhere approach. imo I would mainly look to uk oversea territory’s and our very long term allied countries who want us to help.
If we look at future soldier which we are supposedly still following there is 4 brigades in the army that can in theory deploy the 12 and 20 armoured brigades, 7 light brigade and 16 air assault. The rest are simply an administrative collection of supporting, enabling assets as these are insufficient in number to create actual deployable brigade combat teams with the 4 aforementioned brigades and so they become double hatted in administrative support constructs that create new HQs.
The others are something to collect infantry battalions into who couldn’t deploy in any meaningful time frames.
I’ve suggested before how I would reconfigure those 4 brigades so won’t repeat we have the fwd deployed infantry units in Cyprus, Brunei and the falkands I would look and reconfiguring those into something like a form of full battlegroup to better protect those locations while being able to engage with allies in those regions
For me having 4 Brigades in both the 1st and 3rd divisions is the way to go something like so
1st division = Global Response
4th light BCT
11th SFA brigade
16 AA BCT
51st light mech BCT
with the 4th , 16AA & 51st all having 1x Artillery , 1 x Logistics , 1 x Engineer with the 51st also having a REME regt
3rd division = NATO Europe
DRF BCT
7th Mech BCT
12th Armoured BCT
20th Mech BCT
Again with 7th , 12th & 20th all having 1x Artillery , 1 x Logistics , 1 x Engineer , 1 x REME
Plus both divisions having a division support brigade made up of
1 x Logistics plus 3 x Reserve logistics regts
2 x Engineer plus 2 x Reserve engineer regts
this would allow both divisions to have
4 x Logistics regts + 3 x Reserve logistics regts & 6 x Engineer + 2 Reserve engineer regts also the 4th , 7th , 20th & 51st would all have Artillery with the 12th supported by the DRF
As said before the HQ-ARRC would stay as is this could mean if the 3rd was to deploy under HQ-ARRC this UK force would be supported by 9 Logistics regts + 7 Reserve logistics regts