Why did all the Nike units change designations in 1958-59 ?
From the middle of World War II until 1958, Army antiaircraft artillery, originally part of the coast artillery corps, but later its own branch, was organized into separate battalions. Before that, the coast artillery corps had been organized into regiments with subordinate battalions. In the late 1950s, the Army adopted a new organization called pentatomic. As part of this reorganization, both field artillery and antiaircraft artillery were reorganized into a new “artillery” branch. This branch contained a series of nominal regiments, each containing the lineage, through a convoluted process, of both the former battalions and the previous regiments. Each artillery battalion was redesignated to become a component of one of the regiments. The regiments did not exist as an organizational unit, but only as a component of the unit designation. This system is still in use to the present day. Air Defense Artillery and Field Artillery became separate branches in 1972. In 1958 all the active A
