Knitting Brigades

Armies have been organized in many ways through the millennia, from the early Sumerian’s first well-organized spear phalanxes formed from household troops and city-state militias not long after 3000 BC to today’s Brigade Combat Teams. In between were Greek Phalanxes, Roman Legions and Regiments of the British Empire.

The Brigade was invented as a tactical unit by the Swedish king and conqueror Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years' War. Today, Divisions remain in the Army’s Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE), as do Battalions and Regiments, though in most cases the latter exist only on paper and as conduit for preserving the combat history of the United States Army. The Brigade Combat Team is a recently devised structure to meet modern requirements for a deployable combined arms team. Even today’s BCT is an interim step toward the Future Unit of Action, a future combat systems organization designed to be strategically and operationally responsive, rapidly deployable, able to change patterns of operations faster than the enemy can respond, and adjust to enemy changes of operations faster than he can exploit them.

Whatever they are, whatever they can do, and whatever they are called, there aren’t enough of them.

The United States Army can currently count 48 active and 34 National Guard Brigade Combat Team equivalents. Foreign deployments of BCTs – in whole or part – include Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, and Germany. Though those deployments are very much in dispute, there has been one area of general agreement. They aren’t enough to meet the nation’s obligations. Some put an adequate number of BCT equivalents at 99, seventeen more than are now available. Constant deployment and redeployment is seriously stressing the Army, particularly the National Guard, and will have significant impact on its readiness and sustainability for years, perhaps decades. Yet neither the Congress nor the Administration has had the political will to create that much needed additional force. For all the breast-beating about the nascent Iraqi government, our own just as readily goes off on vacation without tending to its knitting.