Talk:Combat engineer/Archives/2020

Merge discussion

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

No merge on the grounds of no consensus for any action despite more than a year of discussion, which is now stale. Klbrain (talk) 10:55, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

---

I propose that this article be merged with sapper and pioneer (military). All three articles acknowledge that these terms mean the same thing. The only reason for them to be separate is due to historical distinctions, however that can easily be addressed in a single article. I choose this one to be the target article, because it is not a specific term, but an article about combat engineers in general. Puzzledvegetable (talk) 03:20, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

• Support Per reason stated above. Puzzledvegetable (talk) 03:20, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Comment If the consensus ends up being to retain all three articles, I believe the opening sentences on all of them would need to be changed to reflect the fact that these are not the same concept going by a different name.

Combat engineer begins with A combat engineer (also called field engineer, pioneer or sapper in many armies, except the U.S. Army) is a soldier who performs a variety of construction and demolition tasks under combat conditions.

Sapper opens with A sapper, also called pioneer or combat engineer, is a combatant or soldier who performs a variety of military engineering duties...

Lastly, pioneer begins with A pioneer (/ˌpaɪ.əˈnɪər/) is a soldier employed to perform engineering and construction tasks. The term is in principle similar to sapper.

It was these sentences that first led me to consider merging. If we decide that these pages don't need to be merged, then these sentences as well as other content in the articles need to be changed. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 19:26, 8 August 2019 (UTC)

I agree, but I know of no way to word the distinctions, since they are varied, local in both time and space, and inconsistent. Anyone who opposes this merge must be able to supply the wording of the distinctions that eliminate most of the overlap between these terms. If not, then one article best covers this, and the exceptions can be noted. That's an improvement over the confusing status quo. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 20:47, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

Furthermore, most if not all of the distinctions cited by those that !voted oppose are already noted in the terminology section. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 16:09, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose I think that the historic distinction is a substantial one. For example the Indian pioneer regiments of the British Raj were a distinctive class of frontier infantry who combined fighting and road building roles, and who had little resemblance to modern combat engineers. Equally the British Army pioneers of the two world wars were enduring but relatively low status pick and shovel units with few of the professional skills expected of the Royal Engineers and U.S. combat engineers. Sappers were the private soldiers of the RE. In short we would be merging several quite different military categories into a single entity. Expanded cross referencing might be a better solution. Buistr (talk) 07:10, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
• Support. Yes, there are distinctions, but not consistent distinctions. Some armies in some times used some of these terms for some distinctions, but others didn't. If there is some distinction we can make between the three names that is 90+% accurate across all armies in modern times, they could get separate articles (still may not need separate articles). Lacking that, having three articles cover pretty much the same information is poor, besides leaving readers confused about which is which. If there is a reliable distinction between the three, I'd like to see that; I'll change my !vote then. --A D Monroe III^(talk) 00:48, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose In the British army at least they were (and maybe still are) laborers, not combat engineers. The real problem is that pioneer does not mean the same thing in all armies, and thus (for once) forking (and a disambig may be in order.Slatersteven (talk) 18:05, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose the merging of such very different things. Some pioneers having been laborers that were also used as line infantry, and later being laborers that were not used as line infantry, makes them utterly distinct from combat engineers (and sappers). MPS1992 (talk) 19:07, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
• Support but will have to have a specific section noting what 'pioneer' means in the British Commonwealth military tradition, as per the objections above. Buckshot06 (talk) 18:13, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose I thought we'd been through this before. The two are different things. In the British Army, pioneers belonged to the Royal Pioneer Corps; since 1993 they are part of the Royal Logistics Corps. Sappers are part of the Royal Engineers, but not all sappers are combat engineers. In the Australian Army, pioneer battalions existed in World War I and II but there was no separate pioneer corps, and they were part of the infantry. The pioneer battalions were organised as infantry battalions, but without the heavy weapons company, and were occasionally used as such, but had a high proportion of tradesmen. They had additional hand tools but not the mechanical equipment of the engineers. In amphibious assaults they unloaded the landing craft, marked the routes inland and established the supply dumps. Note that the US Marine Corps also had pioneer battalions during World War II, with the same role. Each marine division had an engineer battalion and a pioneer battalion. A reader coming across references to pioneers in reading would be ill-served by a redirect to the combat engineers article. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:27, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

We agree they are not always exactly the same, but how are they fully distinct? And how are all pioneers always the same, and all sappers always the same? Having three separate articles based only on the name used at the time for them is unhelpful, to the point of plain inaccuracy. But, they do have the same general definition and role, and can be helpfully covered by same general description, with the more specific distinctions noted for the Royal Pioneer Corps, Royal Engineers, etc. If need be, we could even create intermediary articles like Pioneer (British Army) and so on, allowing for the fact that the terms pioneer and sapper themselves aren't static. As always, these more specific articles would be noted and linked from this, the most general article. WP as a policy maintains a range of very general articles down to very specific articles. Why is this policy invalid only for this one topic? --A D Monroe III^(talk) 16:05, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.