Word: tails
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Unlike the conventional triangular division, with its top-heavy headquarters units and its sizable "land-tail" (heavy weapon units, regimental tank companies, etc.), all of the new division and its specially designed, lightweight equipment can be airlifted. At its heart will be five self-supporting battle groups, each 1,580 men strong, and each containing a 155-man 105-millimeter mortar group and a small (220) headquarters outfit. The groups, broken down into five battle companies each, will be backed up in combat by an atom-armed 140-man Honest John rocket detachment, by a 500-man 105-howitzer group...
Power Problem. The AEC did not say how feasible nuclear rockets look. Most scientific judgments about them have been pessimistic. Rocket motors develop their thrust by burning fuel with an oxidizer and expelling the products of combustion at high speed through a tail pipe. The energy of combustion is necessary to make the gases move fast, but the mass (weight) of the gases is also necessary. No mass, no thrust...
...tons of coal. A modest amount of U-235 could, so far as energy is concerned, propel a commodious space cruiser to the moon and back. But energy is not enough. A uranium-burning rocket motor would have no products of combustion to shoot out of its tail pipe, and without some massive material to jettison, the motor would have no thrust...
There are ways of getting around this failing of nuclear rockets. The most obvious is to take along a stock of material that can be gasified by the nuclear heat and shot out the tail at great speed. The trouble with this solution, of course, is that the weight of the material may make the nuclear rocket hardly more efficient than a chemically fueled one. In addition, a heavy shield must be carried to protect the crew from nuclear radiation...
...elaborate ways of using nuclear fuel in rockets have been dreamed up by the imaginative engineers who plan for space travel. One of their proposals is a nuclear reactor running a conventional electrical generator. The current from it ionizes atoms of some convenient element and expels them from the tail pipe. An "ionic motor" of this sort can run, theoretically, almost forever on a cupful of uranium...