Field force
military term with various meanings by country
A field force in British, Indian Army and Tanzanian military parlance is a combined arms land force operating under actual or assumed combat circumstances, usually for the length of a specific military campaign. It is used by other nations, but can have a different meaning.
United Kingdom
A field force would be created from the various units in an area of military operations and be named for the geographical area. Examples are:
Kurram Field Force, 1878
Peshawar Valley Field Force, 1878
Kabul Field Force, 1879–1880
Kabul-Kandahar Field Force, 1880
Natal Field Force, 1881
Zhob Field Force, 1890
Mashonaland Field Force, 1896
Malakand Field Force, 1896
Tirah Field Force, 1897
West African Frontier Force, 1900
Australian
In Australia, a field force comprises the units required to meet operational commitments.
Canadian
The Canadian Expeditionary Force was considered as a field force created to participate in World War I.
Other Canadian field forces in history include:
Alberta Field Force, 1885
Northwest Field Force, 1885
Yukon Field Force, 1898–1900
United States
In the United States, during the Vietnam War the term came to stand for a corps-sized organization with other functions and responsibilities. To avoid confusion with the corps designations used by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and to allow for a flexible organization, MACV and General William Westmoreland developed the "field force" such as I Field Force and II Field Force. Unlike an Army corps, which had a size and structure fixed by Army doctrine, the field force could expand as needed and had other functions such as liaison with South Vietnamese and civil affairs functions and was flexible enough to have many subordinate units assigned to it.
Police field forces
In counterinsurgency type campaigns, select and specially trained units of police armed and equipped as light infantry have been designated as police field forces who perform paramilitary type patrols and ambushes whilst retaining their police powers in areas that were highly dangerous.
The public source identifies “Field force” as military term with various meanings by country. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Field, force and military.
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This entry incorporates text from “Field force” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.