Talk:Wing (military unit)

Tri-Deputy and Objective Wing organizations

It doesn't seem that there ia any mention of the two systems of organization that play/played a large part in causing major re-organizations of the USAF through the years. The Tri-Deputy system from the early 1950's and the Objective Wing concept from the early 1990's. It would improve the article to include explanations of the systems, pro's and con's, results, etc. I haven't found any references to the two organizational types on Wiki, except in passing.--TGC55 (talk) 01:17, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Refactored by Buckshot06 (talk) 16:11, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Restructuring

Cooee Cobbers, I'm suggesting a restructuring of the page. The general outline would look something like this:

• History
• Instances in Countries

In addition the commonwealth section would be split to their respective countries (even currently it is a mess, with countries not even in the commonwealth being mentioned). And we really need to add a infobox like the one in the land unit pages. IronBattalion (talk) 00:46, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

New "Size Group" column in table

User:CdnMCG just added a new first column labeled "Size Group" to the Organisational pattern table, with values of 3 to 8. Forgive my ignorance/stupidity, but what is this? What does "Size 5" indicate to me (other than that I should cut down on the doughnuts)? There's a reference cited but it's apparently a book to which I have no immediate access. Can anybody explain what this is? — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 07:08, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Specifically Group 5 is "A unit designed to be self-administering and self-accounting and capable of operating independently. It is composed of two or more group 4 units and is commanded by an OF-3 or 4." Most armies would call it a battalion, but that word is not in the definition. The numbering scheme was invented so that NATO had a baseline to make comparisons across multiple national appendices in a specific book. I would have left the previous "smallest" to "largest" spectrum that was there, but that spectrum no longer fit when adding rows for Canada and Germany (which are the only nations that included air force flying units in their appendices). The important information from the reference is in the final rank column, so I would be content to see the first column converted to something more layman's terms. CdnMCG (talk) 16:02, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

CdnMCG, I've stolen some of your text to use in an explanatory footnote for that first table. If it's not correct, please feel free to adjust it. I've also done some other stuff, including tweaking the tables for accessibility and trying to reuse the one NATO ref for multiple cited pages. I also ran over to Template:Air force units and refined it some, which led to the thing being shorter, with the happy side-effect that it's less inclined to crowd our first table here. Comments welcome. — JohnFromPinckney (talk) 23:00, 4 May 2021 (UTC)