This Washington Monthly article by Nick Confessore is pretty good at pointing out the problems with the way our military is organized. In particular, he notes that units don’t have cohesion because they are mixed & matched constantly, and therefore are an assemblage of strangers. But I found this part interesting:
Macgregor’s book, Breaking the Phalanx, recommends replacing divisions and brigades with 5,000-man formations designed to deploy quickly and fight as a module. Instead of today’s branch-pure units, which must be assembled, like Legos, into a given formation, you’d have a range of set formations designed and trained to field certain capabilities rather than specific troop types.
A Roman legion had about 5,000 troops, about 5 cohorts of a thousand each. They developed group solidarity by fighting under their own Eagle Standard and revered their decades long history and expected to serve out their time in that unit [1]. Funny how history repeats itself.
[1] Periods of the Roman Empire were dominated by a few geographically clustered groups of legions. For instance, early in the Empire the legions of the Rhine were very important, partially because of their connection to members of the Julio-Claudian family (Drusus, his son Germanicus). Later, the legions of Syria conquered the Empire for Septimius Severus. But finally, the legions of the Danubian era helped throw up the emperors that bridged the classical and dark age world….
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