Infantry vs Armor? Man that is a can of worms. It would depend on what the basic concept of your force organization is. Are you orienting more towards offensive operations or defensive operations. Available manpower vs available trained/educated manpower. Even tech level and industrial base all factor into this.
A more offensive orientation requires a higher percentage of armor and mechanization. A more defensive orientation deosn't require anywhere nearly the percentage of armor and can have more light infantry.
If you look towards the US example you will find all sorts of contradictions and problems. You can't just look at the names of the units. For example through the 80s into the 90s the First Infantry Division had one of its combat brigades posted forward in Germany and the rest of the division was at Ft. Riley, KS. Now a typical US division has 3 combat brigades. An Infantry Division should have two infantry brigades and one armor brigade (each Brigade having two batalions of one type and one of the other type. Ie. Two infantry Batalions and one Armor Batalion makes up an Infantry Brigade.) First Infantry Division had one Infantry Brigade in Germany and Two Armor Brigades in Kansas.
BTW The Big Red One's mission was to be ready with 48 hours notice to move to Germany, and conduct a counter offensive against overwhelming numbers of Soviet armored and Mechanized forces that had broken through friendly lines within 9 days of receiving the notice. So it was set up as an armor division. the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 8th, and 24th infantry divisions were all set up as two Infantry brigades and one armor brigade, though the 2nd ID was (and still is) heavily reinforced and I am not sure of their mix. The 7th, 10th and 25th were all light infantry divisions and had little or no armor. The 9th was light motorized infantry and their organization changed almost constantly. The 82nd and 101st divisions were for the most part equipped even lighter than the light divisions. With the 82nd Airborne having some light tanks but very few other vehicles. The 101st Airborne (Air Assault) having virtually no ground transport or vehicles but more than makes up for it in helicopters. The Armor Divisions, (The 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 1st Cav) were organized like the 1st Infantry Division. Then there were the Calvary Regiments, Totally different organizations. Generally with two ground squadrons (The equivalent of batalions) each with almost as many tanks as a tank batalion and as many bradleys as an infantry batalion, and an air squadron with as much attack capability as the aircraft of a ground division. And of course the 6th Cav Brigade (Air Combat) with the equivalent of 3 air squadrons from an Armored Cav Regiment. That was the nuts and bolts of the US Army during the end of the Cold war. I may have missed a division or two, I know I left out a pair of independent Brigades and a Parachute regiment. All the Corps level assets and other toys but generally that was the mix.
The Soviet Army was set up on a 1 tank unit per 3 infantry units organization. (Plus a few independent tank units thrown in just to keep things interesting.) That organization held true all the way up to the Front level. Where you usually had 3 Combined Arms Armies and one Tank Army.(CAA had three Motorized Rifile Divisions and one Tank Division. Tank Army was the reverse.)
For purposes of your question as to percentages, for offensive operations the Infantry needs to be Mechanized and the Soviet Model is probably best. (It is how I tended to organize Merc units in Traveller.) The Soviet model also includes one Artillery unit in the mix. So a MR Division would have 3 MR Regiments, a Tank Regiment and an Artillery Regiment. (And that percentage is from BN level all the way to Front level.) Again with an occasional independent Artillery unit thrown in to keep things interesting.
On the other hand if your Battledress troops are also equipped with grav belts or equivalent. (And I truly believe that in this aspect T20 has it right, Battledress is a vehicle and can be armored to the same standards as a tank.) There is little need for more than a few tanks/anti-tank systems on the battlefield as support of the infantry. Or even Light Fighters instead of tanks.
At what tech level does the difference between tank and Aircraft and spacecraft disappear? The Harrier, The A10, the Joint Strike Fighter, the Apache and the Havoc show that the day is quickly approaching.The next generation tank might yet be a helicopter.There already is no light tank in the US inventory.
None of this really answers the question but hopefully puts you in the right direction to asking the right questions so you can get the right force mix for the job at hand.
Originally posted by Hal:
Question? At my website, I included the GDP for each world in TL 12 (Traveller Tech 15) levels. Would it help to include other data as well? In other words, what kind of data would people like to see that might be helpful for their own thinking?
For example - Ground Forces indicates just how many Battalion equivalents there are available for each world. It also gives rules on building up the Military for each of those worlds based on Tech levels, populations, etc. If I were to include the Battalion equivents for the worlds - would that be helpful?
In general, if I do that - what would people consider to be a reasonable ratio of Infantry to Armored?
Just thinking aloud
), I will need to know what kinds and how many. Having a budget at all at least gets things rolling.
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