Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!military From: wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Unit designations Message-ID: <9938@cbnews.ATT.COM> Date: 5 Oct 89 02:14:10 GMT Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM Lines: 64 Approved: military@att.att.com From: Will Martin First off, thanks to all who responded to my "Future of the Military" posting; it appears the consensus of opinion is to not be too trusting just yet... Also thanks for the pointer to WINDING DOWN; I checked it out of the St. Louis Public Library. (In case anyone else is interested in this book, here is the data on it: WINDING DOWN - The Price of Defense, by The Boston Study Group, 1979. Originally published by Times Books; reprinted by W. H. Freeman & Co, 1982, with a new preface. ISBN 0-7167-1498-1, 359 pages.) When reading thru it, I ran across something that reminded me of a subject I had wondered about in the past and never did track down an answer to. That concerns the numeric designations for units of the US Army. It is sort of ironic that I work for the Army, and have for many years, and still don't know this. It is largely due to the fact that there are just about no uniformed personnel at the civilian agencies I've worked at, and the civilian side seems to know very little about this sort of esoteric detail regarding military units. My question is: what determines the numeric unit desgnators for Army units, and how are they chosen? I've looked in a couple books I have of '50's vintage -- The Officers Guide and The Army Almanac -- and they don't explicitly answer the query. The Almanac does have some tables of units that appear to begin to address the subject, though. For example, Winding Down mentions units like the "172nd Infantry Brigade," the "193rd Infantry Brigade," and the "197th Infantry Brigade." It also mentions units like the "1st Armored Division" and the "9th Infantry Division." What I wondered about is where the numbers like "172", "193", and "197" came from, and why they are still in use, and how come it was those particular units that still exist. What happened to unit #171 and 173, 192 and 194, and so forth, that they disappeared while these others still exist? Low-numbered units (the "1st This" or the "3rd That") are fairly straightforward, but the higher numbers are confusing. The tables in the Army Almanac seem to (as well as I can interpret them) list a lot of these unit designators that were set up around World War I and have been maintained since then. At first it appeared to me that the whole point of this was to have unique and distinct unit designators that were never repeated -- that is, one unit is 193 and another is 194, and no other unit will ever get those numbers, even if those units are disbanded and eliminated. The numbers appeared to be initially assigned in sequence, without much correllation between unit type and the form of the number -- that is, a supply unit could be 181 and an infantry unit could be 182, though some categories had all their units in the "300" series, and so forth. However, this breaks down when you look at current units. There is a "2nd Armored Division" AND a "2nd Infantry Division". So the number "2" is used on both of these. There went the "unique" designators! Can anyone post a summary explanation of all this? What does determine that this unit is the "3rd Whatsit Division" and that unit is the "404th Something Brigade"? And, if these numbers are all from some arrangement that has been set up for 70+ years, what has determined, during all the build-ups and wind-downs in the intervening years, that this particular unit has continued and still exists today, while these others have been eliminated and no longer exist? Regards, Will Martin