Deep dive

Enlisted squads and roles explained

By Nancy Wilson, responsible editor Published 21 September 2026

A squad in Enlisted is not a loadout with a different gun. It is a body of soldiers with a specific job, a specific failure mode, and a specific way of wasting your time if you bring it to the wrong fight. Here is each of them, plainly.

Rifle and infantry squads

The default and usually the largest squad you can field. They carry the standard rifles of their nation and they exist to occupy ground: to stand inside a capture zone long enough for the bar to move, and to still be standing when the counter-attack arrives.

Good at: numbers, holding a point, absorbing the first exchange. Wasted when: you walk the whole squad down an open street into a machine gun, or treat them as a personal escort while you play sniper.

Assault squads

Smaller, faster, and armed for close range. This is the squad you bring when the objective is a building, a trench line or a bunker complex and the fighting will happen at a few metres.

Good at: taking a room, clearing a defended point, close counter-attacks. Wasted when: you fight at distance, where your weapons lose and their rifles win.

Engineer squads: the ones that decide matches

Engineers build. The construction that matters most is the rally point: a forward spawn your squad can use instead of running from the base. They also put up ammunition supplies and defensive structures.

The habit worth building immediately is this: arrive on the front, find cover that is not on the obvious approach lane, and put a rally point there before doing anything else. A rally point in the open lasts seconds. A rally point behind a wall, off the lane, can feed an entire attack.

Good at: shortening every future run to the objective; making a defence expensive to break. Wasted when: nobody on the team builds, and everyone spends the match walking.

Machine gunner squads

A machine gun is a denial weapon. Set up with a field of fire across an approach and you make that approach cost more than it is worth; run around with it in your hands and you will lose most duels you start.

Good at: locking a corridor, a bridge, a street or a stretch of open ground. Wasted when: used as a heavy rifle on the move.

Sniper squads

Enjoyable, occasionally decisive, and the most over-picked squad among new players. A sniper does not capture a point, does not build anything and does not stop an armoured push. One good sniper on a team is an asset; four are a losing scoreboard.

Good at: covering a long sight line, punishing a static defence. Wasted when: the team needs bodies on the objective and you are eight hundred metres away from it.

Anti-tank squads

Armour on a capture point is a problem that infantry rifles cannot solve. Anti-tank squads carry the launchers, mines and anti-tank rifles that can. They are situational by design: you bring them when armour is on the field, and switch away when it is not.

Good at: deleting an unescorted tank; mining an approach armour must use. Wasted when: fielded against an infantry-only push.

Flamethrower squads

Extremely short-ranged, extremely effective in the specific case of a building full of defenders, and almost useless outside it. Treat it as a tool for one job.

Radio operator squads

Radio operators call fire onto a marked position from off the map. Used on a stalled defence or a packed objective they can break a deadlock; used carelessly they achieve very little and give your position away.

Good at: hitting a dug-in defence you cannot reach. Wasted when: called on empty ground, or on a point your own team is about to enter.

Tanker and pilot squads

Vehicles come into the battle as squads rather than as a separate mode. A tanker squad brings a tank; a pilot squad brings an aircraft. Both are strong and both are answerable: a tank without infantry escort is a target for anti-tank squads, and an aircraft is a target for anti-aircraft fire and other pilots. Availability depends on the mode and the battle rating you are playing at.

Building a line-up that works

You do not need a perfect roster. A serviceable one looks like this:

• One engineer squad, always, and use it first.
• One or two rifle squads as your bulk.
• One assault squad for the moment the fight goes indoors.
• One situational slot — anti-tank if armour is active, machine gunner if the map has long approaches.

Then spend squads deliberately. Losing a squad is not losing a life; it is removing a piece from the board for the rest of the match.

Sources and caveats

Written from play and from the publisher's own material. Squad sizes, which squads are available at which battle rating, and the exact build options for engineers all change between updates, so we describe roles and behaviour rather than printing numbers that will quietly go stale.

• enlisted.net — official site and patch notes, Darkflow Software / Gaijin Entertainment
• The in-game client, as played by the editor

Where this page and the publisher differ, the publisher is correct.

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By Nancy Wilson, 21 September 2026. Corrections: info@boricen.online. Diagrams on this page are original SVG work by boricen.online.