Heavy Brigade Combat Team

08:52 Dec 26, 2017 

06:40 Dec 20, 2017 

without knowing or looking for information about the specific term, on which ground would you dismiss these interpretation of the term:

Heavy Brigade Combat Team

= a "heavy team" destined for combating a brigade?

= a "combat team" that is part of/belongs to a "heavy brigade"

yes, there are general rules good enough most of the time / almost always, but from time to time without knowing the specifics you can easily misinterpret the meaning of words combined in one term, so "a rule that is infallible/never leads you off-tangent" is a tall order.

Even your interpretation according to the general rule is slightly off-tangent:

Heavy Brigade Combat Team = group of people that will engage in combat as a brigade while being heavily armored
in fact
Heavy Brigade Combat Team = [self-contained] group of people forming a brigade, some/most of which [excluding the support/admin ..] will engage in combat [most of the time in small units] while being inside an armoured vehicle [they themselves may or may not have some body armour]

so much for: it's easy - just apply the general rule ...

06:42 Dec 19, 2017 

Some English grammar books have some rules for the sequence of adjectives in English. However, this is for encrypting messages but simple logic tells us that if you reverse the sequence you can use that rule to decrypt messages. What do you think about this?

16:16 Dec 17, 2017 

"I am looking for a general method to understand these phrases."

It really isn't a "tall order." Read them from right to left.

Team = group of people
Combat Team = group of people that will engage in combat (or a better explanation: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/combat team )
Brigade Combat Team = group of people that will engage in combat as a brigade (e.g., https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brigade )
Heavy Brigade Combat Team = group of people that will engage in combat as a brigade while being heavily armored

You'll find the same principle applies when trying to decipher some British newspaper headlines only consisting of nouns (at least, they used to; Richard Swan has a few nice examples in his book "Practical English Usage"). Should you ever be interested in learning German, you can use the same method to break down compound nouns.

Best

10:06 Dec 8, 2017 

Sounds like a rather tall order... if any simple and easy method was available, Machine Translation would have consigned by now the vast majority of translators to the trash heap of history ...

18:01 Dec 6, 2017 

...

18:00 Dec 6, 2017 

In fact, I am looking for a general method to understand these phrases. What do you suggest?

17:30 Dec 6, 2017 

if you look at the whole of "Heavy Brigade Combat Team" the mystery is quickly solved - whatever could be the meaning of just two or three of these words combined on their own.

You are right that "Heavy Brigade ..." is no longer used - since 2012 these units of the US Army are called "Armored Brigade Combat Team".

16:00 Dec 6, 2017 

"Heavy Brigade" is not a term I would expect to be used nowadays. In the Crimean War, The British Army had Heavy and Light Brigades of cavalry. The Heavy Brigade wore metal breastplates and other protection, and rode larger and slower horses. It was the Light Brigade that made the famous Charge, the subject of a poem by Lord Tennyson.

15:12 Dec 6, 2017 

Should we have extra-linguistic knowledge about these terms?

Yes, definitely - knowing a thing or two about the subject matter usually helps [as in: would you trust a nun to write a sex encyclopedia?] ... but it's all available on the Web - just a question of asking the right questions in the right way.