Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/130th Engineer Brigade (United States)

130th Engineer Brigade (United States) edit

The article is on the list for WP:GAN, shouldn't have a problem passing. After that I'm looking to move it up to A-class pretty quickly. Just wanting to know if there's anything major that is problematic on the article. -Ed!^(talk)_{(Hall of Fame)} 20:31, 11 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nick-D edit

This is a very good article which doesn't need much work. My suggestions are:

What kind of engineer brigade is this? - is it a standard field engineer brigade, or does it have a specialisation?

As I understand it, the brigade specializes in bridging operations, which is stated in the article a few times. It doesn't have any kind of special design ("Topographic", "Prime Power," etc.) most US Army Brigades don't have one. But I've added the bridgin detail to the lead. -Ed!^(talk)_{(Hall of Fame)} 20:31, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm a bit confused about the 1303rd Regt being "re-designated as Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 130th Engineer Aviation Brigade" but not activated until September. Could you please explain what happened here? (was the Regt's HQ redesignated but not assigned any subordinate units until September?)

When an inactive army unit is redesignated as something else, that's a sort of starting point to building it; after it is redesignated, they start putting the pieces of the brigade (men, equipment, etc) together from scratch. It was "redesignated" when they started building the brigade and it was "activated" when they were finished. -Ed!^(talk)_{(Hall of Fame)} 20:31, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

"The soldiers of the brigade chose to create these with images..." - did the brigade's soldiers really pick their own unit insignia using those fairly complex critera, or was it designed for them?

Fixed

I'm a bit surprised that the brigade's 25 years of service in Europe only warrants a single para given that extensive coverage is provided to what appear to be fairly routine operations in Europe from the mid-1990s onwards

Well, keep in mind that it was the Cold War era. As far as I've found out, most of the V Corps units and formations did some exercises around Europe, but they weren't deployed anywhere because their presence was supposed to be a deterrent for the Soviet Union. The brigade may have participated in a few exercises but as far as historical significance is concerned, they essentially sat on their hands and stared down the Russians for 25 years. -Ed!^(talk)_{(Hall of Fame)} 20:31, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

In that case I think that you should reduce the size of the 'Operation Joint Endeavour' section given that most of the training exercises it describes appear to be no different from what the brigade was probably doing during the previous 25 years. Nick-D (talk) 08:07, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

An order of battle for the brigade during Operation Iraqi Freedom would be valuable given that it was the largest (Coalition? - or were there no larger Iraqi units as well) engineer force in the theatre and grew in size after the first phase of the war

Done

It seems odd that the article states that the 502nd Engineer Company was providing support to USAREUR in September 2003 given that the company was deployed to Iraq at the time - I think that I understand what you mean (eg, that the company was home-based in Europe), but this is potentially confusing.

Fixed

"the headquarters supported up to 15,000 engineers" - 'commanded' might be a better word.

Fixed

Nick-D (talk) 08:09, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]