Talk:Division (military)

Armored divisions

The development of the tank near the end of World War I prompted some nations to experiment with forming them into division-size units. Many did this the same way as they did cavalry, by merely replacing infantry with tank units and giving motorization to the support units. This proved unwieldy in combat, as the units had many tanks but few infantry units. Instead, a more balanced approach of balancing the number of tank, infantry, and artillery units within the division took place.

By the end of World War II, in most cases armored division referred to divisions with significant tank battalions and motorization for its infantry, artillery, and support units. Infantry division referred to divisions with a majority of infantry units.

Since the end of the war, most armored and infantry divisions have had significant numbers of both tank and infantry units within them. The difference has usually been in the mix of battalions assigned. Additionally, in some militaries, armored divisions would be equipped with the most advanced or powerful tanks - such as the M1A2 Abrams in the United States.

--86.136.79.241 12:26, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Division (military) vs. Division (army) + Division (navy) + Division (air force)

This article disambiguates as the sole authority on all military uses of "division". It does not, however, deal with naval or air force divisions. I'm not part of the Wikipedia Military History Project so I think I'd do more harm than good trying to fix things: whether a quick paragraph at the top of this article could adequately deal with the naval and air uses of division or whether articles are needed for ground, naval, and air uses of the term--I don't know.

Reference: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/data/d/01750.html If that link goes bad, use: http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 4.232.126.235 (talk) 00:31, 21 December 2006 (UTC).

Added short blurb to the effect that divisions are subsets of departments in the US and other navies. Not much, but at least a mention. Haoleguy30 01:03, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

Reading article about Chester W. Nimitz one can see he commanded submarine, cruiser, battleship divisions. While it is not a contemporary Navy unit it is worth mentioning in the article. --Tigga en 10:23, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Naval division

What about the subunit of a fleet, task force, squadron or flotilla which is a number of ships? That doesn't match the description provided about the division of a ship. 70.29.213.241 (talk) 15:56, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Cavalry vs. Armored

So what's the difference between an armored division & a cavalry division? The article isn't exactly clear on the difference between them.

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Citations

This Article seems well written and what I read of it didn't clash with my own understanding but it BADLY needs citation work, especially in the case of specific and authoritative statements like 1750 being "the first time a General had thought of" subdividing an army into combined arms groups. FusionTorch (talk) 12:30, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

Should it be "infantry division" or "Infantry Division"?

This article currently uses division-type terms in the form "Armored Infantry division", that is, with the type capitalized ("Armored Infantry", "Cavalry", "Air Mobile", "Infantry", etc.) but "division" lower-case. This is inconsistent; as a single noun-phrase subject/object, all words in these should have the same capitalization. Proper nouns are capitalized, and common nouns aren't. So, for us to fix this inconsistency requires determining if these terms are proper nouns or common nouns.

One can argue that "Armored Infantry Division" is a proper noun; it refers to any or all such specifically-named divisions in various national armies: the "US 1st Armored Infantry Division", the "German Armored Infantry Divisions", or "the Armored Infantry Divisions in the Western Front".

Alternatively, one could argue that "armored infantry division" is a common noun because "armored infantry" is just an adjective describing "division". (If so, a further question: shouldn't such compound adjectives be hyphenated, e.g. "armored-infantry division"?)

(I hope no one wants to argue that "Armored Infantry" by itself is somehow a proper noun, and that "division" is an adjective of that.)

(Also, for now, let's leave out types derived from foreign languages from this discussion, such as Panzergrenadier division; German capitalizes all nouns, so it's unclear by their use if it's a proper noun or not. We'd have to decide if Panzergenadier is a loan-word from German that's now part of English, or still a German Language word/phrase -- a whole different discussion.)

Comments? --A D Monroe III^(talk) 18:36, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

These are all common nouns and I'm going through the article to change them. Actual units should have their names capitalized. I'm also getting rid of the italics around a lot of these terms, adding quotation marks if appropriate.

As for foreign words, even though you don't want to get into it: "Panzergrenadier" is not an English loan-word; it's a foreign one. It should be in italics and capitalized. "Panzer", on the other hand, has become a fairly common English word, though it's still generally used mostly in the context of German armor. I'm happy enough to neither italicize nor capitalize it. WP Ludicer (talk) 04:50, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Okay, I think I got most of them. There are some borderline cases in there—for those, I mostly decapitalized them, but for others, I stayed my hand. For example, I felt like the South Korean "Homeland Infantry Divisions" and "Reserve Infantry Divisions" referred to rather specific things. Maybe it was the translations into the original language that convinced me they should remain capitalized in English—I find myself questioning whether that should really be the case, though. I also let a few instances of "Marine" stand as well since, to me, "Marine" refers in this case not to a type of troop but to the specific branch of that military (e.g., U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army—a "Marine division", an "Army battalion").

If anyone would like to revert the borderline cases, I won't oppose, but I'd ask that they resist the temptation to simply revert my edits—most of them are squarely aligned with MOS guidelines.

I also removed a few redlinks, primarily to articles on Soviet military concepts that don't strike me as likely to be created any time soon. WP Ludicer (talk) 05:33, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

I agree with these changes. I also agree that there may be a few gray areas left, since English grammar is such a happy amalgamation of absolute-rules-that-have-more-exceptions-than-corporate-tax-laws. But at least the article now more consistent. Thanks. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 20:30, 27 May 2019 (UTC)