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- This article is about a military unit. For alternate meanings see Corps (disambiguation).
A corps (a word that immigrated from the French language, but originating in the Latin "corps, corporis" meaning body) is a large military unit.
In the United States and other armies, it refers to a unit of approximately 30,000 troops, composed of two or more divisions, and typically commanded by a lieutenant general.
As of 2003, the United States Army has four corps. The structure of a corps is not permanent; many of the units that it commands are allocated to it as needed on an ad hoc basis. On the battlefield, the corps is the highest level of the forces that is concerned with actually fighting and winning the war. (Higher levels of command are concerned with administration rather than fighting, at least in current doctrine.) The corps provides operational direction for the forces under its command. Corps are designated by consecutive Roman numerals. The present active corps in the US Army are I Corps ("eye core"), III Corps, V Corps, and XVIII Airborne Corps; their numbers derive from four of the 30-odd corps that were formed during WWII. During the WWII Soviet, German, and Allied multiple corps were combined into army groups because of the large scale of fighting.
In the British Army, a corps tends to be a grouping by common function (eg, the Infantry corps, the Royal Logistics Corps, Royal Corps of Signals). There is still a corps headquarters for operational control of forces. I Corps of the British Army of the Rhine was redesignated the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in 1994. It is no longer a purely British formation, although the UK is the 'framework nation' and provides most of the staff for the headquarters. A purely national corps headquarters could be quickly reconstituted if necessary. It was last deployed as the headquarters commanding land forces during the Kosovo War in 1999 and also saw service in Bosnia, commanding the initial stages of the IFOR deployment prior to that in 1996. Otherwise, the only time a British corps headquarters has been operationally deployed since 1945 was II Corps during the Suez Crisis.
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