It's probably also not entirely a coincidence that a lot of military fiction seems to focus on a company or a company-sized unit.
> Professional armies have a basic unit of about 150 men: This was as true of the Roman Army (both before and after the reforms of 104 BC) as of modern armies since the sixteenth century.
And I'm actively against the statement that number 150 is relevant because of all-to-all communication pattern. In army (as well as emergency responders like firefighters) all-to-all communication is actively forbidden, and only possible for groups of 3-6 people of similar ranks/positions. All other communications must go either up or down the authority chain.
150 is part of an "hierarchy" of sorts of numbers.
Roman army example:
The basic infantry fighting unit was a group with 120 men, that during formation-based battles (not all battles were like that) organized themselves in 40 columns and 3 rows. This was called a "maniple" and was led by a "Centurion" (cent of centurion means one hundred).
Inside that group it was normal to have smaller groups of various sizes (having subleaders for 60 men was common for example, and sometimes for 30 too), and informally thre was one guy leading each group of 6 or so people.
With cavalry stuff was similar ,but more formal, the centurions led "decurions", each "decurion" had 10 men under him. the Decurions were a formal position, but elected, chosen by their own men. Then 3 decurions were chosen to work in a group, one of them was the leader, and 2 of them auxiliaries, during battles the leader could lead all 30 men, or if needed the trio could split into 3 groups of 10.
Thing is, all that still matches Dunbar's calculations more or less, and this is mentioned in the article, for example the reason humans limit all-to-all to 3-6 people is because that is how far you can get your voice in a noisy environment.
Do you have company and battalion mixed up here? Why wouldn't a battalion, which consists of companies, be capable of independent operation if the individual companies are?