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East Africa 1930: An ORBAT Quest

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I think there is an issue with the conscription math in the leading plans. If people serve for two years and are going to be in the infantry school for one year, then if we want units fully staffed, we will need to double that conscription rate and have 20,000 men in each year's cohort.

I think one year's training is quite long for a contemporary army, so if we can cut the general training to basics and split the other part between NCO training in-unit training it would be good but I don't know if we have that capability right now.
 
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Dessard said:
I think there is an issue with the conscription math in the leading plans. If people serve for two years and are going to be in the infantry school for one year, then if we want units fully staffed, we will need to double that conscription rate and have 20,000 men in each year's cohort.

I think one year's training is quite long for a contemporary army, so if we can cut the general training to basics and split the other part between NCO training in-unit training it would be good but I don't know if we have that capability right now.
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I was assuming the people in training count towards the government's target. If not, then yeah, we need to double it.
 
Id note that after the first 5 months it sounds like companies will be formed, and probably the battalions around it aswell for administrative purposes. At that point in an emergency theyre there and organized, even if theyre not trained in full, you just plop the battalions into the regiments and call it a day. In addition everyone not in the infantry will at most do basic training before joining the non-infantry formations for further training and integration.

10k conscripts + whatever professionals we keep should be enough to more or less fully staff a 'high readiness' brigade I think. We could have the still training troops partially fill out some mobilisation brigades, with the rest of it being filled out by the reservists during wartime.
 
I think we should be more specific with how we want to organize our new army, especially with regards to mobilization, so here I have two writeups styled after what @C_Z wrote, one where we have the high readiness vs low readiness split at the brigade level, and one where it is at the regimental level.

High/low brigades
--[] The enlarged force is structured into brigades of three regiments (one active service, the other two reservists). Each regiment is structued after the current organization of the 2nd 'Kismayo' Regiment, except the AT/AA battery is moved to the battalion level (as in the 1st 'Reewiin Guards' Regiment) and a headquarters unit is provided to each battalion once sufficient officers are available. The aim is to have one (1) high readiness brigade containing the infantry battalions that have gone through the full 1 year training regime of the infantry school, as well as three (3) low readiness 'mobilisation' brigade that are a mix of an officer and NCO cadre as well as the infantry battalions with troops still going through the second half of training, ready to be filled up with reservists or even troops still going through basics in an emergency.

High/low regiments
--[] The enlarged force is structured into brigades of three regiments (one active service, the other two reservists). Each regiment is structued after the current organization of the 2nd 'Kismayo' Regiment, except the AT/AA battery is moved to the battalion level (as in the 1st 'Reewiin Guards' Regiment) and a headquarters unit is provided to each battalion once sufficient officers are available. The aim is to have four (4) brigades, each with one (1) high readiness regiment containing the infantry battalions that have gone through the full 1 year training regime of the infantry school, as well as two (2) low readiness 'mobilisation' regiments that are a mix of an officer and NCO cadre as well as the infantry battalions with troops still going through the second half of training, ready to be filled up with reservists or even troops still going through basics in an emergency.
 
Yeah... @FrangibleCover, some questions:
  1. Do the Carabinieri count towards the government's request of 30,000 active duty soldiers?
  2. Do troops in training count towards the same?
  3. How many people, at max, can we conscript per 6-month period?
 
I'd rather start slow with conscription and then ramp it up as we work out the bugs in training.

I am a fan of the high/low regiment but we may want to go high/low brigade to get more experience in actually administering and working a full / complete one.

Should we include the detailed ORBAT in the plan as well?
 
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Okay, time for a reaction/analysis post.

Marksmanship training: Solid work overall, and we've uncovered the very critical issue of ammunition practically speaking always being in short supply. Its very good we discovered this now, its pretty much the latest point we could react and avoid an ammunition crisis from our training + mobilisation I imagine.

Infantry School: A comprehensive 1 year training plan, im impressed. If we can get our men to follow this training regime they will be the pride of the continent for sure. We should run two parallel training... sessions(?) though as to not overwork the infantry school, so two conscription cycles each year at 6 month intervals. Thats already included in the currently winning plan though.

Chaco war: The river warfare stuff is definitely of high interest, although not really something we can focus on right now. Paraguay buying the difficult to manufacture parts for trucks and finishing them with domestic designs is super duper interesting and absolutely something we should take note of. The grenades are also interesting but just a bit too, ahem, interesting for my taste. If we can get a less 'interesting' fuse there's definitely something there, but I dont think I'd be willing to copy the grenade completely unless things got very dire and we haven't found a more proper grenade to manufacture yet.

Train: Train! Huzzah!

As for conscription, the one comment Id make is that we want to make sure the formations are already there to be filled out so we reach 60k when the reservists fill all the holes. Creating new formations from scratch takes significantly more time than filling out a 'skeleton' formation.
 
I mean Railways are a massively useful tool in Military Mobilization and such. And we did plan a Rail Line in the early turns, so I figured it was worth asking.
 
I do think we should cottage industry our grenades when we get a chance so we at least have some kind of grenade for our boys to use.
 
Acc. No. 1409 said:
I mean Railways are a massively useful tool in Military Mobilization and such. And we did plan a Rail Line in the early turns, so I figured it was worth asking.
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Yeah, you got to plan a railway that was partially paid for out of the defence budget during the early turns because one of your focuses for the first long term plan was logistics and supply. This go around you won't get to do another one because you're focusing on the army expansion goals, next go around if you elect to focus on logistics again you can have another go at building a railway. This is not to say that this is the only way railways and other infrastructure get built in Reewiin, if it's sufficiently in someone's commercial interests you might see another, like the original single track narrow-gauge up to Marsabit that was built by the Japanese before the start of the quest.
 
Rat King said:
I do think we should cottage industry our grenades when we get a chance so we at least have some kind of grenade for our boys to use.
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I'd be concerned about duds, grenades which instantly explode when struck, and accidents in the manufacturing process. Ideally, we'd have things like fuzes being produced in a way where we can do QC on them. I'm also not a fan of "remove safety, light fuze, throw grenade" systems because it's one more step to do in a high-stress environment and my modern engineering human factors knowledge is screaming at me to accept a slightly more complex grenade in exchange for simplifying down to "remove safety, throw". Also, I don't think the external match is reliable in the kinds of wet conditions we might encounter during parts of the year; if we're manufacturing our own ammo, I don't see why you couldn't use a mercury fulminate crush cap to set it it off (and then, if you're doing that, adding a spring-loaded striker is another small step away...).

That said, I'd be interested in looking at what kinds of grenades were being assembled in places like China or by various resistance groups.
 
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