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The sprues include both options, mostly the gun (sleeved and not), and you can mix M60 with M1s, if you pick two different formations.
Stripes is a must-have either way.

I'd say the rulebook, though you might already have a couple from the starters. The respective army books, british and russian would be good too, though you should be able to get by with just the unit cards for a bit as well.

NewTruthNeomaxim wrote:
I assume you mean multiple formations on that last point?

Thanks for the great explanation. I feel awful being a wargaming veteran, and yet asking to be explained to as a child, but the Battlefront games really do feel like reverse-40k in a lot of ways (what is YOUR to-be-hit-on stat?) which makes me feel like i'm slow on the pick-up.

Do the boxes product is sold in tend to meet minimum battalion sizes, etc?

If anything, V4/TY is quite simpler, once you get past the initial surprise
First, with V4/TY, they went with a universal nomenclature for things, with 4 levels of organization :
The smallest game piece is a "team". It can be an infantry base, a gun base, or a vehicle, they all count as "team".
Teams are grouped in "units", lead by a "unit leader".
Units themselves are grouped in a "formation", lead by a formation HQ.
The important bit there being that, depending on army, units and formations have different actual names. Your formation could be a squadron, a company, a battalion, etc... For rules purposes, they're all a "formation". Makes things a lot simpler when your US company is facing a URSS batallion that fields whole companies as units...
Lastly, your formations and support units make up your "Force", which is what people would call an "army" in most wargames.

Anyway. You start with picking a Force (so far, in TY, there's a single Force for each country), and that tells you what formations and support units you can field. You must field at least one formation.
That's the Iron Maiden Force chart :

So you must field at least one of the 4 formations listed, and as many additional formations as you want. (Yeah, there's a limit of how many times you can field the same formation, shown by the amount of boxes stacked, but that's not going to matter in most games). For "what's in a formation, Templar's post is spot-on.

Finally, the boxes sold on BF are "unit boxes", and usually make up for a legal unit by themselves, though rarely at full strength, and sometimes enough for a min-sized formation. The T-64 box includes 5 tanks, while T-64s come in units of 3-10. A box of 5 Chieftain tanks is enough for an HQ tank, and 2 units of two, which is a legal (and terrible) formation by itself.