Sipping a little EH Taylor and Googled some numbers. I’ve always heard that the “tail” was usually about a 7:1 ratio to shooters. The Army has ~ 10-15% Infantry MOS and the Marines have ~ 15%. That is in keeping with the almost 7:1 ratio. Neither counts armor (for the USMC a moot point), artillery, or aviation, nor do I think it counts SpecOps folks. Interesting how much support the grunts require. Wonder if the ratio was the same during WWII?
All the non-infantry people are the ones that enable the projection of power that separates us. Its not cool, but there is an absolute insane amount of work that goes into that type of stuff. Some of them don’t like to admit it but SOF just enable the conventional fighting force too.
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Well, just looking at it, it totally depends on when you start the count. Do you count those brave Guys who brought the goods on unarmed or underarmed Ships from America to Europe or do you only count the US Naval Forces used to escort all of those Victory Boats?
I was in Armor my entire career, a Tank Company is about 1/3 or less the size of an Mech Infantry Company. So we would mix an Armor Platoons in with Infantry Platoons in what is Called Task Organization. An Infantry Company Minus One Platoon gets a Tank Platoon and someone gets to be the “Fireman” with two Tank Platoons and one Infantry Platoon.
The idea is the Infantry advance with Tank Support. The Tail end of this Combined Amrs Team is all of the Support and later the Service and Support Guys and they are a massive amount of People.
Imagine for every Tank Company there are Mechanics, Fuelers, Ammo Trucks, Medics (Lots of Medics both forward and rear) Cooks, Truck Drivers etc. etc. All those MF’ers are behind you in a Giant Tail and God Bless them because they have next to Zero Armor on their Vehicles and they are lightly (Comparatively) armed to defend themselves.
So Seven to one in that example might be correct, but again just like WWII it depends when you start the count and who you count.
A lot of Service/Service Support jobs have been farmed out to civilians.
As a former grunt, gotta say I may have given those guys some grief at the time but we need every one of them. Grunts win fights, logistics wins wars. It’s all about moving the freight.
A grunt with no ammo, no food, and no support can’t win jack.
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SOF developed a very high opinion of themselves after 20 years of fighting sand people who didn’t have peer or near peer ability to do things like:
1.) Effectively contest air space denying on demand air support and rotary wing insertion, exfil, and casualty evacuation.
2.) Field consistently well trained professional ground combat units that could utilize combined arms, and were equipped with modern night vision and thermal capabilities.
3.) Field lots of artillery.
4.) Lots more stuff I’m not even scratching the surface on.
I’m not taking away from the skill, dedication, bravery, and talent of our SOF servicemen but take away owning night time ops, and being able to move at will via rotary wing aircraft with minimal losses in the air and the effectiveness goes way way down.