Page:John Banks Wilson - Maneuver and Firepower (1998).djvu/9

 This volume examines the evolution of divisions and separate brigades in the U.S. Army as it searched for the most effective way to fuse combat arms, combat support, and service units into combined arms teams. The Army has used divisions and brigades since the colonial era, but the national leadership did not provide for their permanency in the force until the twentieth century. When divisions became a part of the standing force, experiences on American battlefields in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as European military practices, shaped their organization. The permanent divisions and brigades that the Army organized, however, were uniquely American.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century armies had no permanent tactical subdivisions. Administrative organizations called "regiments" were primarily designed to bring armed men to the battlefield. Upon arriving at the battle site, the men were usually grouped into battalions or squadrons, tactical organizations. King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden established brigades during the Thirty Years War as tactical organizations, assigning several battalions to them for the duration of a campaign, an arrangement that minimized the necessity for regrouping or retraining his army before going into battle. Shortly thereafter, other nations adopted the Swedish example.

The size of armies increased by the early eighteenth century, and Frederick the Great of Prussia began dividing his army into columns, which marched as wings or lines that fell into a prearranged order on the battlefield. Such maneuvers required discipline and well-drilled troops. To overcome the Prussians, Marshal Maurice de Saxe of France reintroduced the cadence step, which had fallen into disuse, and stressed discipline to control an army on the march and in combat. By marching troops at a measured step, Maurice could judge the time required to move his army to engage an enemy. With the ability to calculate marching time, Marshal Victor E Broglie in the mid-1700s began dividing the French Army into several permanent columns or divisions of infantry and artillery for a campaign. These divisions made an army easier to maneuver and occasionally permitted him to use part of it as an independent force. Almost two hundred years later Basil Liddell Hart described that process as making a limbless army grow arms that could grip an enemy at different points while others struck him.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries European military theorists incorporated the doctrine for organizing divisions and brigades into their publications,