RE: Orders of Battle (was cheese)

--- Beth Fulton <beth.fulton@marine.csiro.au> wrote:

> What about at the lowest scales though. Its been a
> long time since I did  > any Roman history, but
weren't they based around > units of multiples of 10 

Generally 10 squads of 8 men each.  The century wasn't
100 men since the early Republic.  Two centuries made
a maniple, 3 maniples is a cohort.  10 cohorts is a
legion.  1st Cohort is 5 double-sized centuries.  That
holds true from Marius to about the 4th century AD. 
Gets complicated from there.

> or something? I haven't had a chance to look up my
> Achaemenid Persian stuff > but I had a feeling they
broke the "laws" of modern > warfare too. OK maybe 
> modern gizmos produce the ratios we see in use
> today, or maybe its just the > way things are done
now. For instance things were> very different back in 
> the Napoleonic period.

Right.	During Roman warfare, or Napoleonic, or any
time before the Franco-Prussian War, all warfare was
about lining up shoulder-to-shoulder where an entire
army could be seen from the top of a hill.

Once you get into dispersed warfare, where a platoon
leader is lucky to be able to see most of his men,
then command and control issues really arise.  There
are no decisions for anyone under the rank of colonel
if companies are administrative units only and butt
against their neighbors with a meter of seperation. 
Of note, by the time you get up to the level where
decisions must be made (brigade, division, corps)
there are rarely more than 5 subdivisions.

John

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