Ty Krisi - maybe I can flesh my reasons out a touch more - see if there is anything more of use?
DA's emotive quote from the start of this thread:
Quote:The Desert corps. should be small stations of very tight knit companions, people who have gone through hell and back. The should be usualy outnumbered, held tight together in a dune with desert wind kicking up sand, the can see nothing but the sky above them, suddenly a group of bandits close in around them, they switch formation, three lancers move to the outside held to push them back as the archer prepares to fire, the Quote:two swordsman
wait for the combat to start, the khajiit disapear in the sand, a lnacer sees movement and impales him, they all spread out into the sand as the battle rages on, each watching the others back as best they can. Thats how I see it.
What I did was to expand on that taking as many of your later comments into account as I sensibly could, giving the number 10 as a full unit's base. It seemed to me that there would be many casualties, and most units would be alsmost permanently undermanned as recruits and veterans in the desert are hard to find, so the base number would have to be higher to sustain the unit's basic structure.
The idea was to consider how small units could survive in the desert (remember the Foreign Legion used rifles and such?) And how to keep the NCO structure in place in the face of frequent casualties - I assume both lots of small skirmishes and environmental attrition.
Your sensible unease about the magic user was noted, so:
But wait - we have magic... too much you say? In The Legion this would be out of place perhaps, because the regular Legions call on the Imperial Battlemages and such and they are seldom constantly under attack as these guys will be... so our tiny units need some kind of magical support, but not a full Battlemage = so I was thinking there might be the equivalent of a hedgewizard - with a few minor spells, including some healing, scrying, a very minor attack spell - different for each unit.
Well, ok there might be one or two of these guys (old campaigners there to boost the rep of the Corps) who can do a bit more, and that would keep their opponents guessing, but really they're just trying to make everything stretch as far as possible. We have hardly discussed how magic will work for both Legions and Khajiit as yet in the normal way, let alone any ancient magic, and this is a tiny start.
Again I note your positive and negative reactions to the Quartermaster Idea - that came from DA's thought about provisioning posts. But then I considered - such small isolated units could be very quickly overwhelmed unless they are very strong on intelligence - they have to have good scouting and such or they are dead.
Hence the archers start as hunters, and if they hunt they understand the terrain, local resources and then what the local people need to survive, and so how the locals think = scout and then more = Provisioning Agents who go into local tribal centers to buy and sell any excess from the hunter-gatherers = communication skills = the essential spy skill + local knowledge.
Since the man who knows the Hunter/Spies and Provisioning Agents best is the Quartermaster that would be a natural postion for the spymaster, though the spymaster might be anyone in the Corps, including disgiuised as a hedge-mage in a unit at the heart of wherever trouble is brewing.
What are the hunter-gatherers after? Anything that they can consume (they want to eat well and live long) or sell the inedible or unusable (they want to make some money on the side too) = this is the way that veteran units operate, scavenging and scrabbling for every tiny advantage they can get, not only re local resources, but also within the army they are part of... = now that has interesting possibilities for their reputation in different quarters... :]
So now we have given your Desert Corps a basis for a more personal set of interactions.
Here is yet another link to the fun story by Treebiter about some very gritty Legion vets in Lit Dev that seems a natural as a desert corps tale to expand this, and it will fit very sweetly... every army has its misfits, and in time of peace time veterans (who cannot change) know in their waters that in wartime spit and polish is suicide, and get up the nose of the parade-ground polish officers = sent them to the scraggly Desert Corps to get them out the way.
Thinkin that Grot and his pal start out in 'the regular Legions somewhere, and then they go one step too far and (as the natural material for) are transferred to our Desert Corps... at least one of them would be a porter/hunter to start? The dumb one (umm, hard to tell which is dumber eh? great social camoflage
) might be either a swordsman or a spearman.
Feels right to me - it's something different, it's Elsweyr! :yes:
ps the diggers and stuff was thinking about the Roman Legions who would construct a Fort every evening whan they stopped, and also a way to get something more slangy in - like the chat in the corps = once a digger always a digger etc... you will have to come up with stuff for that... hope it helps.
with a Captain over.. 
hrug: