While I am aware of the brigade organisations provided by armedforces.co.uk, afaik they actually have nothing to do with the real organisations of the army brigades.

I instead worked from the information about what battalions are actually present in each brigade. Now admittedly this info is from Wikipedia and I can only personally confirm about 3/4 (the other ~ 1/4 battalions I couldn’t find any evidence they were attached to a brigade, usually because they are or were recently deployed to Afghanistan) of the listings given, but the presence of a FRR and a Light role in each brigade can be confirmed more often than the presence of armoured regiments and armoured infantry brigades.

On TA FRR
The The Queen’s Own Yeomanry is a FRR
The Royal Yeomanry is CBRN rece in support of the joint CBRN squadron
The Royal Yeomanry and The Royal Wessex Yeomanry are Challenger 2 MBT crew replacements.

Light role, I don’t think we had disagreements, I was just providing a complete listing of roles and numbers.

Air assault. In addition to 2 and 3 PARA, The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 5th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland and the 1st battalion, the Royal Irish Regiment are both air assault trained (don’t know if that means walk of a heli or throw yourself out of a plane though) and permanent components of 16 Air Assault Brigade.

Lastly, my experience with armedforces.co.uk over the past few years is that while it is still updated regularly, it is not necessarily kept up to date in all areas. This is primarily because the organisation section of the website is provided as background information to it’s main purpose as a news and defence supplier directory.

1. I based my orbat on http://www.armedforces.co.uk – it seems to be kept up to date.

2. Force Recce – I left out the 5 Formation Recconaisance Regiments, in hind sight this was an oversight, but although ‘on paper’ there is one for each of the 5 divisions (2 readiness, 3 regenerative) in reality they are attached where ever HQ LAND see’s fit. Ashley as far as I know there is no TA FRR, there are 4 x Yeomanry regiments, which are recce units. They used to be on Fox armoured cars, these days I think its all Wolf WMIK.

3. Light role battalions – I think we are both right, I think I stated the ‘peace time’ orbat, which is enhanced with an additional light role infantry battalion as required from the ‘pool’ of the regenerative divisions as required for operations / general mobilization. But I could be wrong…

4. Air Assault Infantry battalions – only 2 not 4, 2 bttn’s of the Parachute Regiment are ‘permanently’ assigned to 16 Air Asslt Brig. in this role, 2 other light role infantry battalions are added as required.

All in all, I could be wrong on all of this but I don’t think it makes any difference to my suggested outcomes, but thanks for reading and noticing :-)

In addition 52 Bde is disbanding with 2 Bn’s going to 4X and 2 Bns to 3XX (1 to 1Mech & 1 to 19 Light)

7th and 20th armoured and 4th mechanised all have a force rece regiment and a light role battalion in addition to what you stated.

1st and 12th mechanised only have 1 mechanised battalion and an additional force rece and light role as with the armoured brigades and 4th mechanised.

Also 19th light brigade has 4 light role battalions.

On numbers 1st Royal Tank Regiment supplies two squadrons to the CBRN regiment permanently and the rest is permanently a training establishment, this there are only 5 MBT Regiments.

Also while one armoured infantry regiment is deployed as the Land Warfare Training Battalion, this is only a deployment and is rotated through three battalions (who’s names I can’t find at the moment) and thus there are 8 Warrior Batallions.

Thus Armoured and infantry numbers are

Challenger 2 MBT – 5 regiments
Force Rece – 5 regiments
Armoured infantry – 8 battalions
Mechanised infantry – 3 battalions
light role – 20 battalions
air assault – 4 battalions
Commando infantry – 1 battalion

There are also 14 territorial infantry batallions of their own unique company centred organisation (on which I may write a piece), 2 Challenger 2 replacement regiments (afaik, crews only, no tanks) and a Force Rece Regiment.

I shall comment on the rest of your piece later once I’ve had a chance to analyse it in detail.