Soviet Naval Infantry Platoon

The internet is a wonderful thing! :-) Back in my formative days of gaming it was very hard (and often rather costly) to find out TO&E's of the likes of the Soviet Union, however in this day and age a few clicks of a button and Google can often provide you with what you need.

In this case I had been pondering between whether to paint the Esci Soviet Paratroops up as paras or something else. The obvious 'something else' are naval infantry who also sport the natty beret the Esci figures are sculpted in (albeit a black rather than blue one). A bit of Google-fu led me to find a PDF of the US Army Field Manual 100-2-3, over four hundred pages of the kind of information I would have sold my soul for in the late eighties as I tried to work out unit structures for my GHQ micro-armour.

Having compared the equipment requirements of both the airborne and naval infantry companies I have decided to go with the naval infantry purely on the basis I prefer the look of the BTR-80 over the BMD as the APC of choice.

US Mechanized Infantry Platoon (Bradley)

US Military TO&E's are a moving feast and consequently it can be quite hard to get something that is accurate for the late eighties/early nineties as it has been superseded by new organisations reflecting the experiences of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortunately I discovered a link to the US Field Manual 7-7J Mechanized Infantry Platoon and Squad issued in May 1993 (this replaces the February 1986 version which I haven't tracked down yet).

A comprehensive document it does detail the organisation of a Mechanized Infantry Platoon and what each infantryman carries/does although it is somewhat unclear as to the composition of the nine man dismount section (this is a lot clearer in the 2002 chart shown below).

The amount of M249's required means that I've had to purchase a box of the Revell Modern US Infantry to go with my Esci boxes as the latter doesn't contain any M249's, whereas Revell include a respectable ten.