A doubt about Engineers / Sappers

[cavtroop]

Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b

I can't give you a reference off the top of my head, but I dimly remember a lesson in ROTC where MSG Chinn told us the "teeth to tail" ratio in the US Army is about 1-to-10. (That was in 1983, however.) Which is disturbing in my mind...

That same subject is also brought up in The Forever War. The main character, William Mandella, also makes the comment that as an army gets older, the ratio of officers to enlisted men and NCOs tends to go up. Joe Haldeman is a vet and a student of military history, so he has a good idea of what he's talking about.

According to this paper:

http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/downlo...grath_op23.pdf

"The Long War Occasional Series Paper 23, The Other End of the Spear: The Tooth-to-Tail Ratio (T3R) in Modern Military Operations"

The T3R ratio in Iraq in 2005 is 1 : 2.5 - MUCH less than I thought. Numbers could be misleading though, as it doesn't seem to take into account non-theater forces, most of which are non-combat arms, I'd imagine. This is a fascinating topic to me, perhaps we should split this off to a separate thread?

EDIT: 1 :4 ratio, when you include in-theater contractors....