The 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade's lineage goes back more than a century and the organization of Company M, 2nd Infantry Regiment in the South Carolina State Troops in 1903. Its lineage is extremely complicated; the descendant units of Company M were redesignated no fewer than eleven times, but there are also seven annexes in its history where other units were merged with it to create new units—and those "grafted in" units were themselves the subject of nearly twenty redesignations. Today's Brigade is credited with participation in three World War I campaigns and a half-dozen campaigns in the Second World War; its campaign credits in the War on Terrorism are yet to be determined.
Today’s Brigade was created as a result of the consolidation on 1 March 2009 of Detachment 1, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 218th Infantry Brigade and Headquarters and Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade; the latter having been created through the conversion and redesignation of Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, 105th Signal Battalion on 1 September 2008.
The 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade Headquarters and Headquarters Company was relocated to Charleston, South Carolina in 2009 as Army National Guard under state control. It was ordered into Federal service on 12 July 2012, and in September nearly 400 of its members were deployed to Kosovo as part of a peacekeeping force known Kosovo Force 16, or KFOR16, headed by its Chief of Staff Lt. Col. Rob Stillwell. After a successful deployment, the 218th handed command of the Multinational Battle Group-East to the 525th Battlefield Surveillance Brigade.
Another notable achievement for the Brigade, whose motto is “Steadfast of Purpose,” was the smooth and efficient operations it helped coordinate as the Command and controll center of the Southern Conglomerate of South Carolina during storms associated with Hurricane Irma in September 2017. It provided high-water rescue vehicles as needed by the Emergency Operations Center, whose requests were processed a Joint Operations Center in Columbia. At one point, the Brigade was called upon to transport nearly 40 nurses flooded downtown Charleston in order to deliver them to Roper Hospital where they were badly needed, an essential mission carried out perfectly.
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