whitelancer wrote:16 Air Assault Brigade should form the basis of a Light Division, primarily for out of area operations. Designed to be delivered by air, their are plenty of units in 1st Division that would be suitable
On the "should" side of things, we are totally
agreed about that.No wonder one of the two Gurkha bns is assigned; they come as close to mountain troops as we have (the RM has only a Mountain Cadre, which is to preserve the expertise of the instructors)... the other one is near one of the two Jungle Schools we have. And these two bns rotate, so lets count: air assault (despite the punch they pack, I am sure a helicopter can take one more of them as compared to bods from any regular army bn
; jungle, as in acclimatised theatre reserve... and mountains (in the end, they were all borne in the mountains).
OK, enough of waxing lyrical , next:
whitelancer wrote:
1st Aviation Brigade is two things, an administrative home for most of the AAC, and a deployable Brigade HQ. What its not is a Brigade and doesn't become a Brigade until it has some units allocated to it
While I totally agree, I actually don't know that. Do you have a source?
whitelancer wrote:What about its role, will it primarily be involved in providing logistic support, perhaps it will be engaged in air assault missions
Well, one thing is clearly said: the Bde brings army combat aviation under one roof. Support helicopters are a clearly defined category... except when they are doing air assault (an Americanism, anyway. A lot of army units were doing air assault - at times - in A-stan. But 99% of the the time they couldn't... no equipment. Even 16 Air Assault Bde did not have its own helicopters for this; I believe when its predecessor was tasked with filling anti-tank gaps by moving ATGW teams quickly into position things were better. But that's defence - not assault.
So, we have borrowed an Americanism (will it live on?) while this is a totally British affair, modelled on:
Each man that’s in the side that’s in the field goes out and when he’s out comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out.
When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in.
When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.
Sometimes there are men still in and not out.
Without making the post too long, all kinds of transitions have preceded the current state of affairs:
- first the army fixed wing aviation was put under JHF (' a new home'); So were the Watchkeepers (err, fixed wings
)
- in no time at all the manned fixed-wing a/c went on, to the RAF (' a new home'); anyone know where the Watckeepers are now (they started their life as an asset of the RA)?
As we started with 16X, half of its Apache strength (definitely ' combat aviation' - in fact one of the only three combat arms of the Army) is designated to our quick reaction formations... would go nicely with the out-of-area Ops thinking being primary
- the other half, though, has been designated to support the deployable division
... if all of this - with the ins and outs - hasn't changed again