Regimental combat team


A regimental combat team is a provisional major infantry unit of the United States Marine Corps to the present day and of the United States Army during World War II and the Korean War. It is formed by augmenting a regular infantry regiment with smaller tank, artillery, combat engineer, mechanized, cavalry, reconnaissance, signal corps, air defense, quartermaster, military police, medical, and other support units to enable it to be a self-supporting organization in the combat field.

World War II

World War II RCTs were generally of two types:
  1. Temporary organizations configured for the accomplishment of a specific mission or series of missions,
  2. Semi-permanent organizations designed to be deployed as a unit throughout a combat theater of operations.
An example of the former was the habitual organization of the 337th Regimental Combat Team of the 85th Infantry Division:
Examples of the latter were the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, 370th Regimental Combat Team, 158th Infantry Regimental Combat Team, and the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team.
Regimental combat teams combined the high cohesion of traditional regimental organization with the flexibility of tailored reinforcements to accomplish any given mission.

Korean War

The 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team consisted of the following units by General Order 34 Headquarters 11th Airborne Division:
The following units were added on 23 August 1950 by General Order 41, 11th Airborne Division dated 22 August 1950:
The following units were attached on 26 August 1950 per General Order 42, Headquarters 11th Airborne Division dated 25 August 1950:

U.S. Army

Believing that future battlefields would be dominated by tactical nuclear weapons, the U.S. Army broke up its infantry regiments in the mid-1950s and formed Battle Groups, four or five of which composed a pentomic infantry division. Although the pentomic structure was deemed to be a failure, reorganizations during the 1960s replaced the infantry regimental combat teams with brigades that were modeled after the World War II combat commands employed by American armored divisions. As a consequence, infantry battalions that were formerly grouped into regiments were scattered among the new brigades.

U.S. Marine Corps

The U.S. Marine Corps has retained the regiment as a basic unit smaller than a division but larger than a battalion, and it continues to employ reinforced regiments as RCTs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Under current US Marine Corps doctrine, a Marine Division typically contains three organic Marine infantry regiments. Whenever a Marine Expeditionary Brigade is formed within its parent Marine Expeditionary Force, one of the division's infantry regiments is designated as the base of the regimental combat team and serves as the ground combat element of the MEB.
The regiment, commanded by a colonel, consists of a Headquarters Company and three identical Marine infantry battalions. The regiment is then heavily reinforced by other division assets to form the RCT.
These reinforcements typically include:
Therefore, the RCT is roughly the same size and has generally the same number of battalions as a US Army brigade combat team. However, the RCT as the ground combat element of a MEB, is combined with a regimental equivalent Marine aircraft group as the air combat element, a battalion-sized command element, and the aforementioned combat logistics regiment as the to complete the organizational structure of the MEB.