The Arms Plot System

[Hoplite1963]

Hi Jason

In response to your question about weather units moving in and out of the BOAR kept their equipment or exchanged it with the unit replacing them in the brigade / division. The answer here is largely that they handed over any role specific items when they changed postings to the unit moving in to replace them. Until after the end of the Cold War British Infantry & Armoured units (and to some extent artillery ones as well) used what was called the “Arms Plot” system whereby units would serve some of their time at one location (say in this case BOAR) in one role (say mechanised infantry in this case) with the associated TOAE and then for the next posting move to a another location (say Cyprus) to take on another role (say the a leg infantry light role) and then go through the necessary change in TOAE that this required.

The same applied to Royal Armoured Corps units that would move between Tank and armoured reconnaissance roles as they changed postings. One side effect of this was that the British Army never had dedicated Mechanised infantry units and according to the Defence analyst, wargamer, and ex British Army Infantry Officer Jim Storr, (writing in his book “Battlegroup, the lessons of the unfought battles of the cold war” this led to all the different battalions operating the Warrier MICV developing different operating procedures. Likewise when your working your way through the rotational changes of BOAR this is why you will see units of the Royal Tank Regiment taking their turn as reconnaissance units while units of light cavalry i.e. Lancers and Hussars would also take their turn at being Tank Regiments.

Hope this helps

Kind regards
Ian

[Jason Petho]

That's extremely useful to know! How interesting.

That being the case, one could assume the various battalions were good at everything, but not exceptional at one thing?

That moves onto the next question is how often the equipment in the depots were updated for said rotations as new equipment would come into the fray. Rifles, vehicles, anti-tank weapons, etc. I presume BAOR depots would get priority on the new equipment, but I'm not sure.

What a fascinating discussion! Thank you!!

[Hoplite1963]

Hi Jason
No problem yes that is pretty much it. All I would say further is that a whole lot of units had to take their turn in the internal security (infantry type) role in Northam Ireland including I think artillery ones. While at the squad / platoon level there may have been some positive learning from this I think the general effect of "The Troubles" on military efficiency was negative particularly for Armoured and artillery units. Also I suspect that units recently arrived in BOAR from other places would be less good than those that had been there for a while.

My guess is that the SAS were the exception that proved the rule here as they here one of the weapons of choice to conduct ambushes set up on the basis of intelligence and agents working inside the IRA. Also I suspect that the Northam Ireland Troubles are too small in scale and still too raw to cover in the Cold War Title.

Kind regards
Ian

[Jason Petho]

Thank you for that, it is an interesting discussion indeed.

I will be having quite detailed OOB's for the army, which means they will include the various structures that participated in Northern Ireland. I won't detail the order of battles to the 4 month rotations (or whatever they were for the various units) as I am doing just yearly changes (where a particular regiment/battalion spent "most" of said year) for the Cold War 1.00 release. That's for a couple of reasons, besides the insane amount of time to detail, there is actually a limit on the number of organization ID's that are available and I'm afraid if I do the structures on a monthly basis, I'll run out of organization ID's before I finish the 60's. *laughs*

I did not plan on developing any scenarios for that though, at least not in the short term. As you noted, I think the actions are far too small for the Campaign Series. That being said, the organizations will be there for those that wish to.