I'm going to ignore the tail and concentrait on the teeth of this unit-
To my mind, a Brigade is half a Division, an independant fighting unit trimmed down for mobility, therefore it should have five combat Battalions.
By "smallish", I am thinking Romania, Poland or maybe even Italy or Spain. Since equipment varies widely, I will not go into specific items, and 700m Euros is not a whole lot of equipment. I would leave the Generals to fill in the blanks as they saw fit... since they usualy do anyway.
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Also, air-deployment was not emphasised.
This information is what colors my answer to this thread-
I would build 5 nearly identical Battalions, all of whom can act independantly and can be shipped overseas as units capapble of carrying out their share of the mission.
There will be no Artillery battalion. Each of the five battalions will have a battery of MRLS and one of standard tube artillery. Self-proppeled weapons would be preferable, but must not exceed mission parameters. More about this later.
Each battalion would have an armored Company with (about) 9 tanks and 12-14 APCs or IVCs, and one battery of AAA mounted on a chassis that is the same as either the tanks or the APCs.
Since these are the only Armored vehicles in the battalion, it means that only one of your two infantry companies will be transported in them at a time. Here is why;
One of your infantry Companies will be "heavy", with training and equipment for serous defense or assault on diffucult targets. They should have mortars and a squad or two of engineers.
The other company will be Light Fighters, and here is where my notion of "mostly identical" comes in. In three of these Battalions, this will be a company trained for Airborne operations (how few is a "few" cargo aircraft, anyway?). In the other two, they will be recon troops, with small, fast, soft-skinned vehicles and perhaps a few helocopters.
So here you have a collection of combined arms Battalions that can be mixed and matched to build custom task-forces. If you are mainly interested in low-intensity conflicts, you know how a unit the size of a Brigade can get scattered all over the place. The commander of 1,000 men will be much more likely to act in a timely, aggresive manner if he knows he does not have to borrow equipment from other units to balance his forces out.
You will need good officers, and every company commander in the Brigade should know all the rest. The task-force concept looks good on paper, but you need first-class leadership to make it work.
I would accept second-class equipment if that was what it took to build the funds for serious training, at all levels of command.
I strongly suggest that all items of equipment be standard with the rest of the Army. Those high-intensity wars still happen, even if they are a distant third in your planning priority.
Was this a radical enough idea for you?
