My mercenaries operate like special forces, so I can keep that. The bulk of the forces are NCOs, however. I can also play the angle that American military forces are stretched to their breaking point. They're involved in a long war that's absolutely hammered the shit out of their numbers, which is why mercenaries are helping the National Guard.
Please don't, it just doesn't work that way. Just because they're special ops doesn't make them all officers, and if your military is stretched to the breaking point, you don't end up with forty-four officers making up a rifle platoon, you end up with someone who was a staff sergeant last week as an acting company commander. To go back to basics, a Marine rifle company has six officers in it: The CO, the XO, and four platoon commanders. The CO is most likely a captain (never heard of a major commanding a company, but apparently it's possible.) and the other officers are first or second lieutenants. That's out of a total of a hundred and eighty-odd people. Fire team (4 members) leaders are probably corporals, but might even be lance corporals. Think of it this way: officers are management. They're in charge of allocating resources and telling people what to do. They're almost certainly not as good as their subordinates at actually doing. That's not bashing them, their time is better spent on other things than spending all afternoon learning how to kick down a door and clear a room.
Thank you for the input, @Iain Aschendale. I'm obviously completely ignorant of these things. Perhaps I'm confused about what an "NCO" is. I thought "non-commissioned officer" simply referred to anyone enlisted (an E-#, as opposed to an O-#). I can see now that's not the case. I'll be sticking my foot in my mouth for that mistake. I take it this is correct: E-1 to E-3: Enlisted E-4 to E-5: Non-comissioned Officers E-6 to E-9: Senior Non-commissioned Officers I get completely lost about how many fire teams make up the next structural tier and so on. Edited to Add: I'm slightly less lost than I was. It helps that The Pantheon Group doesn't have a lot of the roles you'd find in the military. Their initial mission is, essentially, the covert elimination of about 300,000 infected and non-infected civilians. They observe, document, and eliminate, while "encouraging" encounters between the two target groups. Keeping in mind The Pantheon Group is not the Marine Corps, I think I can get away with: Fire Teams: E-1 to E-4s. Rifle Squads: E-5s over Fire Teams. Rifle Platoons: O-1s and O-2s over Rifle Squads. Rifle Companies: O-3s and O-2s over Rifle Platoons. Infantry Battalions: O-5s and O-4s over Rifle Companies. Infantry Regiments: O-6s and O-5s over Infantry Battalions. Divisions: O-8s and O-7s over Infantry Regiments. There would need to be those specializing in communications, medical, issuing and maintaining equipment, mechanics, possibly cooking, etc., probably mostly in the E-3 to E-4 range, possibly with some variation when it comes to medical expertise. Does that seem at least a step in the right direction? Your E-4s and under would do the bulk of the shooting, the maintenance, etc., while the rest would organize the chaos, strategize on the next moves, and make sure those beneath them could operate smoothly.
What I was refering to was in command and control in vietnam, team ranks were based on experience in service not your actual rank , so you could have an E5 as one zero (team leader) if he'd run more missions, and Lt as his one one (second in command) ... you didnt often get ranks higher than Lt in the fighting positions
two or three fire teams to a squad (depending how many men are left) , 4 squads to platoon (A, B, C, and Guns plus also 2 RTOs, 2 medics, and the Lt in command)
Speaking from experience, you salute anyone who outranks you. I once got jacked up in a parking lot bc I (an Army E-4) failed to salute a Marine LT. I assume it would be the same across the board.
Whoops, somehow the updates slipped past me on this one, but yeah, @big soft moose is right (although US Marines have three 13 man squads vs the Army's four 8 man squads [I think] to a platoon). You're still topheavy on your ranks though. A squad doesn't get an officer, a platoon (40-odd people) is the smallest unit that does. Captain (O-3) for a company (150-ish), Major or Lt Col (o4/05) for a battalion, and so forth. NCO is Non-commissioned officer= corporal and all flavors of sergeant (Marines: Sergeant E5, Staff Sergeant e6, Gunnery Sergeant E7, Master Sergeant (stays in his specialty) / First Sergeant (specializes in command) E8, Master Gunnery Sergeant (again, still in his specialty) / Sergeant Major (in command) E9). You don't salute them, and you refer to them by their ranks. "Aye aye, staff sergeant!" A company gets a gunny and a master sergeant to assist the captain (o3) and his executive officer (XO,O2 probably). A battalion gets a sergeant major. Officers get saluted, all branches, all allied and friendly nations. @Wreybies and I spent our formative years on joint service bases, the first one run by the Army, the second by the Air Force, so we had to learn to recognize and salute everything. On the Air Force base, there was a policy requesting foreign officers to wear their US rank equivalent insignia on their pocket flap, but at DLI, it was just better safe than sorry. All officers are addressed simply as "Sir" or "Ma'am" (in groups "Gentlemen." I never saw a group of female officers, if I had, I probably would have shit myself trying to remember what to say).
I think its just "ladies" On the saluting thing I remember getting a serious bollocking on a joint forces exercise from a US army captain who thought we were being disrespectful giving the British army salute (which is palm out rather than palm down). He explained at great length that "we weren't in the boy scouts now".
We had an Australian officer attached to our company for, well, I don't know why, but we loved saluting that dude. "Good morning, sir!" <salutes> "G'day, Marines!" <palm out salute>
I bet you were one of those guys who loved saluting officers when they have their hands full .... as an Lt I didn't really expect to get saluted by other ranks unless they were in my platoon, (formal occasions excepted) but leave the battalion CP with an armful of binders and I could guarantee about thirty privates, corporals, and sergeants would salute between the operations office and the vehicle
When I was in the ATC, we had a summer camp at a base that trained FAA as well as RAF; we were instructed to salute any officer. And then we'd spread ourselves out, about twenty yards apart, so he'd have just enough time to drop his arm from responding to one salute before he had to respond to the next...
I have a feeling my mercenaries aren't going to salute, under the idea that "you're in combat all the time." They could see saluting as a "sniper check." I appreciate the responses, anecdotes, and humor. Thank y'all very much. I'll give some more thought to the rank structure, but for all intents and purposes, Pantheon is just a lot of teams operating a bit like wannabe Special Forces, Raiders, SEALs, etc. I originally wanted a way for them to wall in the city, but I don't see how anyone could wall in 195 square miles in enough time to contain a threat. That would require engineers, a hell of a lot of materials, equipment...I don't think it'd be possible for them.
Yeah, as others have said, an O-6 would never do this himself unless he was a major tool with a power trip. Think of your officers as your initial planners and brains for the bigger picture. The NCO's are the brains on the battlefield. They make the split second decisions when the Officer's plan inevitably goes to shit.
We had one area on Ft. Sill where there were several barracks buildings all in a row. My battery occupied several of them, and a neighboring one was for all the new LTs going through BOLC. (Basic Officer Leader Course or some such). At chow time, it got to the point where we would just walk through the area with our hand up in a salute the whole way through since there were so many baby LTs wandering around.
road blocks on the roads leaving the city (2 deuce and a halfs parked sideways will stop most things, with a rifle squad behind them,) and a roving patrol of riflemen between each road block around the perimeter with order to shoot on sight .... or a mine field and/or coils of razor wire .... you don't need a physical wall to have a barrier
I can block the roads no problem. The roving patrols would have to have enough firepower to overwhelm thousands of potentially armed, angry civilians who are so desperate to get out, they'll risk anything. I don't think even a razor wire fence would do it. A mine field might. How quickly could you set that up?
Mine fields can deploy pretty quickly if you aren't too fussed about collateral damage .... there's even systems that deploy mines from artillery or aircraft In terms of the roving pstrol repelling civilians, most civies have never been on the receiving end of gunfire , however hard, desperate, or well armed they might be they are going to break and run when soldiers start shooting at them
I might have to have a small vehicle division for something like the Shielder Minelayer, then. Maybe modified to drag some kind of fencing behind it. They'd want to follow up with a solid wall, though. There's also 300,000 Zed who don't care about gunfire. You'd have to have a hell of a lot of firepower just to take them down. Never mind they can run, climb, jump, etc. with some limited ability. It'd be a meat grinder when they hit the blockades. I've been debating just how many Pantheon Hellions to put into the mix. You've got 300,000 Zed, and about 700,000 civilians to start with. The Zed numbers increase and civilian numbers decrease over time. I don't envy the people who have to plan containment or evacuation procedures. It's a pain in the ass.
If you have any technical questions related to the Chem/Bio/Rad/Nuclear side of things I can provide a decent bit of unclassified material/ feel of a chemical unit.
The army has units full of soldiers prepared for response to a variety of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear events. These units are called chemical companies, because that is the CBRN hazard most commonly dealt with and that the most time is spent training for. I was Stryker reconnaissance and used a variety of detection equipment for radiation, chemicals, and biological agents. I also have a pretty good understanding of field decontamination as well as mass casualty decontamination involving a large civilian population.
OT - is it true that on a stryker the spare ammunition boxes for the 50 cal are kept outside the vehicle on the roof (as Colby Buzzell claims in 'My War' ) ?
Well, there is a spot on the roof where ammunition can be strapped but extra ammo can be inside. However if you need to do a load in a combat situation it is useful having spare ammo cans strapped to the roof. The crows system makes firing the weapon a lot like playing a video game though since it is joystick controlled. Depends on Stryker variant as well. You can mount other weapons and there is even an artillery version which is quite beautiful.
What kind of gear would a soldier have if he knew he was going to go into a biologically contaminated area? Assume it's like mad cow as contagious as a cold, and everybody has whooping cough/rabies.
