Stormtroopers

[Webstral]

While I was seeing a man about a wallaby earlier today, I was leafing through my well-worn copy of Gulf War Factbook. The authors mention that the Iraqis form special forces companies within their infantry divisions as a means of milking some offensive action out of divisions that are, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq War, not in great shape due to the transfer of skilled personnel and equipment to the Republican Guard and other mobile formations. I’m sure we all know that this practice can be related to the German practice of creating units of stormtroopers towards the end of WW1 to give the weary infantry some punch. It occurred to me that this probably would happen in many armies by 2000.

We see an example of this practice in the TO&E of 10th Guards Tank Division in The Ruins of Warsaw. The Security Group represents a pretty small fraction of the division’s manpower. The Recce Group is an even smaller slice of the pie. It stands to reason that combat formations with lots of re-tasked REMFs and recent inductees would see the need to create stormtrooper units that would have the best of what was left. These units might have a high percentage of the remaining AFV under their control.