It’s interesting to observe that Carlson’s experience with the Communists in China led almost directly to one of the most enduring and successful small unit structures in the US military, the Marine Rifle Squad. 13 men, three fire teams, one leader–And, all based of his experiences in China as an observer with the Communists.

The Marine squad is a structure I have a lot of admiration for–You can run it one up, two back when you’re expecting trouble, and two up, one back when not, and then deal with things as they appear. The four-man fire team is more resilient, has more redundancy, and it gives an experienced senior squad leader a lot of manpower with which to do the job–And, on top of that, it’s much more loss-resistant than the idiotic seven- or nine-man squad of the army, with it’s two team structure.

During one of the downturns that I dealt with, we had to mothball one of our squads in our platoon, due to a shortage of good NCOs. We wound up going to two squads with three fire teams each, and it was amazing to me how much more I could get done than with two, out in the field.

The Army’s essential inability to grasp that manpower down at the lowest level is as critical as it is remains a subject of much befuddlement to me. It seems as though they never really thought a lot of these things through, or tested them. There was a thing called the Engineer Restructuring Initiative back in the 90s, which put an Engineer battalion out in every maneuver brigade–Which was fine, if you were worried about staffing for officers. Actual worker bees, out doing stuff? LOL… I counted noses, when I was an Observer/Controller at the NTC, once: The Second Lieutenant running an ERI platoon actually had fewer dismounts capable of doing work than I had as a Corporal running a squad during the mid-1980s, once you subtracted all the vehicle drivers and other impedimential manpower losses. That poor kid was lucky to have two-three dismounts per APC to do the work of emplacing or removing obstacles. Back in the day, when my truck pulled up to lay a minefield, there were 9 guys in the back of my truck to do things with, and that was if I had someone detached to be doing KP. Effectively, all that ERI really did was vastly increase the overhead, and slots for the commissioned folk. Which, come to think of it, may have been the point…

Oh, and for a comparison…? Circa 1986, during an exercise up around Fulda, my squad got something like 600 mines laid in one night. Ideal conditions, mostly in one minefield, and using the simplified procedures for row mining. That’s emplaced, properly recorded, and turned over to the overwatching unit. One night.

I never saw an entire platoon, inclusive of three squad leaders, a platoon sergeant, and a second lieutenant, manage more than maybe 200-300 over the course of an entire National Training Center rotation, which lasts three weeks. These were post-ERI units, which theoretically bumped up the Engineer support to the maneuver units from the old “one company per brigade” to the “one battalion to brigade”. While there were, on paper, bigger units, the actual number of men down at the coal face actually went down…

Which may be an indicator for what went wrong with the Army during the Clinton years. The theory was, we were going to replace the manpower with all this high-tech (comparatively…) equipment, but that equipment never actually got procured, let alone issued to the units. But, the cuts to the manpower happened almost instantaneously.

There are reasons I hold the contemptuous view that I do for most of the “geniuses” we had running things then, and now.

Strangely he did know about San Marco which were more obscure, the only operation of note even that with other axis forces was contributing to the failure of operation “Agreement”.

I have been wondering how many, even in the far flung US forces (farther flung in greater numbers than the British) served so widely. I suppose more than I think.

There were probably *dozens* of American soldiers who knew more. And maybe that many reports filed in obscure places in DC and various military academies.

Even if a book like “Italian Special Forces of WWII” existed in 1948, for Dunlap to even know about it would have been more or less a fluke.

The Italians had men who knew how to fight and had serious skills.

Seems Dunlap does not know much about the subject.
Italian started the naval special operations in WW1 and followed in WW2 in what an American can call the first SEALs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decima_Flottiglia_MAS

Marines could not RESIST to take the dare.

But nobody could ever have foreseen it was going to be that bad.