How Unrealistic is Starfleet's Chain of Command?

Cafe Society
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I hope this is the right forum… it concerns Trek but I’m asking a factual question. So I wasn’t sure.

Anyway… are there any Trekkers out there that have been in the military or are familiar enough with it to give me an idea of how (un)realistic the chain of command is?

The main reason I am asking is that I’ve always been confused by Chief O’Brien on DS9 being the Chief of Engineering despite being an enlisted man. Shouldn’t that go to an officer instead? Also… Ensign Kim’s inclusion on Voyager’s senior staff always confused me. Shouldn’t that have went to a more experienced officer and not a raw ensign?

2

The rank structre on Star Trek is pretty shaky, mainly because Gene Roddenberry in his later years was getting pretty shaky. You can see some realistic “navy” aspects in the original series, like a guy standing beside the turoblift door to the bridge who snapped to attention when anyone came in or left (from “The Cage”) and Kirk telling everyone to stand to attention in “Shore Leave”.

The most militarily realistic movie was the second, featuring Admiral Kirk inspecting the Enterprise and Spock saying “Company… dismissed.” David Marcus even describes Starfleet as being “the military” (who’s been waiting to get their hands on the Genesis Project). Roddenberry reportedly didn’t like this movie as being “too militaristic” and started exerting greater influence on the upcoming “Next Generation” TV series, basically shredding any hint of plausibility.

As for O’Brien, he was the helm officer in the “Encounter at Farpoint” series premiere, and I don’t think they ever got a handle on what his job was supposed to be, except as the intermittently-appearing supporting character.

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Ensign Kim’s inclusion on the senior staff could be explained by Voyager’s being in the Delta quadrant and having no idea if or when they would ever reach home. Add to that the fact that a number of senior crew members died in the first episode, it seems plausible. What’s really strange is that for 7 years he never received a field promotion, which makes you wonder exactly how valuable he was to the crew.

The website Television Without Pity has a forum dedicated to Enterprise, and numerous threads in it cover all aspects of Star Trek info. It’s a good place to start for Star Trek info, since most of the posters there can point you to the right places. There’s a lot more to Star Trek than just what happens on the shows and in the movies, and there is considerable debate about whether the novels count as cannon or not.

http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com

4

There’s nothing at all unrealistic about a senior NCO having an important technical job. That’s what senior NCOs are for. It’s well established in the two series that O’Brien is a veteran of at least one war, and has been in Starfleet for many years. If he’s the most technically qualified senior person, it’s not unremarkable for him to be appointed chief engineer.

Kim’s position, of course, seems to be simply a case of there being few other experienced officers on the ship, though to keep with normal behaviour he probably should have been field-promoted to lieutenant.

As Bryan points out, Gene Roddenberry sort of went bananas with respect to the show’s military nature, which confused things a bit. Star Trek was in the weird position of being a show about a military structure wherein the creator of the show has gone into a senility-based denial and convinced himself it WASN’T a military show.

5

I always felt that Star Trek gave short shrift to the enlisted crew. Just who was enlisted, anyway? It always seemed like everyone was an officer (O’Brian being a notable exception). In an hour show I understand that they have to focus on the main characters, and the main characters happen to be the officers. The rank structure of the officers was always clear and copied the navy. But there was never a rank structure for the enlisted members (would they even have been called “enlisted”?). They were called “crewman,” never “sergeant” or “petty officer.” “Chief,” for O’Brian, follows the navy terminology. There was no clear insignia for “enlisted.” We all know the rank insignia for officers, whether it was the braids on the sleeves in TOS or the circles on the collars in TNG. But what was the rank insignia for the enlisted?

Oh, and speaking of chain of command, one of the things I liked about TOS is that they weren’t afraid to have minorities as high ranking officers. In 1967 it was unusual to cast a black commodore (outranks Kirk) (Court Martial).

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IANAT, but the fact that the rank structure didn’t make any sense always kind of made sense to me. Starfleet wasn’t military, or dipomatic, or research and development, or any one particular job. They did all of them. Somebody has to be in charge, so it might as well be the guy who signed for the ship, but if you have a yeoman who happens to be a seriously highbrow xenobiologist then your job, as the Captain, is to know when you need to ask him what to do.

Adhocracy at its finest.

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Stephen Whitfield writes in The Making of Star Trek (1973), about producing the original series, that Gene Roddenberry envisioned the crew consisting entirely of officers because they had all qualified for the “astronaut” program. Evidently serving aboard a spaceship was still not sufficiently commonplace by the 23rd century that Starfleet would abandon the only-officers-as-astronauts rule from the 1960s.

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while Colm Meany played this character, I don’t believe there’s any reference whatsoever to him being O’brien…i think they just decided to keep the actor on when they wanted a transporter operator to play a “regular” character

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Since this is primarily about a television series, I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

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Dated march 11th, 1964, was a 16 page booklet wherein Gene detailed some of his ideas and intructions for developing the series.

He included the orders to Captain Robert T. April.

An excerpt:

Of course, by TNG, Gene had switched to the “technology unchained” train of thought, believing that advances in technology would make many social problems (drug addiction, predjudice, war, crime) obsolete. You can see a development of this in certain TOS shows.

Hope this helps.

11

Oh! So Starfleet did have commodores besides Matt Decker! I was going to post about how they invoked this virtually never-used rank in The Doomsday Machine solely as a plot device to allow Decker to outrank Kirk and thus create a command crisis. Any other Trek episodes that mention commodores?

P.S. Technically, shouldn’t a commodore be in command of a group of ships? Or was/is it commonly used as the rank of a base’s C.O.?

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A commodore is the Naval equivalent to a Brigader General, and, as a result, would do all actions (both in combat and not) that would belong to a Brigader General in the Army.

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** Lumpy, **

Haven't I heard of the term being used for the head of a yacht club? Maybe the Starbase has a small group of support ships, tenders, etc., so the base commander does have a group.

Also, in the ep * The Menagerie *, wasn’t the general order rescinded by a commodore? Seem to remember Uhura reading the order and saying it funny…commoDORE, maybe?

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Not anymore (at least in the U.S. Navy). The old rank of commodore was reinstated in 1982-83, and dropped in 1985. The rank for an O-7 in the Navy is now again "Rear Admiral (lower half).

I suspect it was because the O-7’s wanted to be some type of “admiral.”

The term “commodore” is now used solely for a temporary job title, usually reserved for an officer in command of a squadron of ships or submarines. The actual rank of a commodore is usually that of Captain (O-6).

[To add further confusion, the commanding officer (CO) of a ship or submarine is often addressed as “Captain,” regardless of the officer’s actual rank. The rank of a CO of a vessel is usually that of Commander (O-5) or Captain (O-6). In other words, not all “Captains” (job title for a commanding officer) are really Captains (rank). Things get even more confused if other services are involved, with their much lower-ranking “captains” (O-3).]

Cites:
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/ranks/officers/o-rank.html
http://users.sisna.com/justinb/cop.html

With respect to “Chief” O’Brien, no enlisted man would ever be in charge of the Engineering Department on a major “capital” vessel. In the U.S. Navy, the rank of Chief Engineer is held by an officer with ranks ranging from Lt. Commander (O-4) to Captain (O-6), depending on the size of the vessel in question. (The former for a small vessel such as a submarine or a destroyer; the latter for an aircraft carrier.)

BTW, I thought Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge was the chief engineer on TNG. If that was the case, the officer in charge of the transporter division would probably be an Ensign (O-1), Lieutenant (j.g.) (O-2), or Lieutenant (O-3), with a Chief Petty Officer (E-7) under them.

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I think also in TOS they had the insignia kind of confused - Kirk was a Captain, wasn’t he, I believe that means four full stripes.
But I think he was missing a half or even one and a half stripes on his sleeve. Or was he following the tradition of Robert E. Lee, who supposedly wore a colonel’s unifrom throughout the Civil War.

Kirk was a captain (in rank, not just name) in charge of a star ship with 300 crewmen, Picard a captain in charge of what - a thousand or more - and Janeway a captain in charge of 150. Maybe Kirk should have been a commander, Picard a captain, and Janeway a lieutenant or at best, a lieutenant commander. Or they should have had Janeway in command of two ships. Or maybe they had no place to put these endlessly talkative captains.

Yeoman Rand would have been a member of the enlisted crew, as would have been the original transporter chief named Kyle, I think.

TNG did show enlisted ranks by buttons on the collar - I belive the commissioned officers wore them on the right collar, the enlisted on their left.

I haven’t noticed any enlisted ranks in Enterprise, but the never seen Chef is possibly one - but not definitely. Apparantly, the Captain on any Star Trek ship gave almost all of the orders directly to the individual crew members, very seldom through his officers. (a tradition started by Shatner stealing every line maybe?) At least in TNG Riker occassionally gave orders without asking Picard first.

All the captains seem to report to Star Fleet Command through a single person, which would make sense, although they all seem very very free to interpet their instructions. But it seems that, except for Enterprise, the officer they reported to changed with almost each individual show.

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posted by Bryan Ekers: “As for O’Brien, he was the helm officer in the “Encounter at Farpoint” series premiere…”

posted by Tal: “while Colm Meany played this character, I don’t believe there’s any reference whatsoever to him being O’brien.”

When they revisit the Farpoint mission in the “All Good Things” finale, we see red-shirted Colm Meany again. This time, he receives more screen time, because we now know him as Our Pal Miles O’Brien. He even gets a juicy engineering assignment, since there was no chief engineer on the show at that point.

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That may be, but we aren’t discussing a major capital vessel. We’re discussing a dilapidated old space station with what appears to be a pretty limited official crew.

Yes. Read the OP.

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IIRC they had a system -
[ul]
[li]3 stripes, center one broken - Captain.[/li][li] 2 solid stripes - commander[/li][li] 1 solid stripe, 1 broken - Lt Commander[/li][li] 1 solid stripe - lieutenant[/li][/ul]
Don’t recall ensign or yeoman. Note Spock’s uniform did change - he was promoted from Lt. Cmndr to Commander during the run.

Maybe the time had something to do with it. Kirk was, what, 80 years before Picard? The Enterprise was the flagship. Her commander was going to be a captain. They didn’t have ships the size of Picard’s then. Present day commanders probably command ships the size that captains did in WWI.

Janeway? The series sucked. Forget anything that happened in it.

19

I think the expalnation for this is that an ensign had no braid on his sleeve.

Ensign: no braid
Lt (JG): one broken braid
Lt: one solid braid
Lt Commander: one solid braid plus one broken braid
Commander: two solid braids
Captain: two solid braids plus one broken braid

That’s not to say that the above was violated from time to time due to costumers getting the rank wrong or the script getting the rank wrong.

I see lurkernomore beat me to it but I am stll going to post this for my ensign=no braid theory

However, lurkernomore, I’m not so sure about Spock being promoted. I think he was always a Commander, but at least one early script (again, * Court Martial*) incorrectly (in my judgment) referred to him as a Lt. Commander. Finney was also referred to as a Lt. Commander, yet * they both wore two solid braids on their sleeves*. Of course, If Spock was called a Lt. Commander in the pilots (and I don’t recall offhand), well everybody’s uniform insignia changed after that. (remember Kirk having two solid braids?)

As to TNG:

Ensign: one black circle
Lt (JG): one silver circle
Lt: two silver circles
Lt Commander: two silver cirlces and one black cirlce
Commander: three silver circles
Captain: four silver circles

20

Essentially the various Trek chains-of-command are “whatever will fit this story”, military tradition and sound personnel management practices be damned, and had the same internal consistency as everything else on the shows.

TNG kinda worked ad-hoc with the enlisted ranks, starting with the invisibility of TOS and eventually mentioning “crewmen 2d class” and stuff like that. In TOS you had the “everyone an officer” gimmick, yet there were Yeoman Rand and Chief Kyle… who wore uniforms indistinguishable from an “ensign”, as did those expendable red-shirts that would at times be addressed as “crewman” – as would the ocassional guy in a work smock. Apparently, anyone who wasn’t actually in the staff or line officer career track would just wear a plain uniform and so would the ensigns.

O’Brien did not get distinct CPO collar devices until DS9.

YPOD: In TOS, ensigns wore no emblem of rank, and there were no LTJG’s ever portrayed. Thus Kirk’s CAPT insignia during the TV run was, indeed, two-and-a-half braids. (in the pilot episode/s, it was even less detailed: the captain wore two braids, division officers wore one, everyone else was slick-sleeve) There was a mention once of a “fleet captain” but we never saw the braid for that. And there were only two flag ranks, commodore and “admiral” with no distinction of rear-, vice-, or fleet-. All that was to come later, with ST-2. Anyway, depending on the size/complexity of Starfleet – and remember, at the beginning of TOS it’s still not THAT huge an outfit, numerically – it could have started with a lean rank structure.

Which brings me to an observation I made: in Starfleet there seems to be no “up-or-out” policy (where you can’t just park yourself at a billet you like, if you’re not moving on to bigger, better things within X time you’re forced into mandatory early retirement or transfer to Reserves.) I can see how this would work in the TOS universe, where you had five-year deployments in out-of-the-way space. However in TNG, where it seems you’re back to Earth every 2 months and have higher-ups dropping in on you every Tuesday? TNG’s Riker declines promotion or command of his own or both, over and over and over and gets away with it. It does, however, explain in a way the expansion of rank titles from TOS to TNG: if you happen to be stuck for a whole decade on the same post (because someone up above in the ladder is welded to HIS chair) more frequent opportunities for rating or rank promotion, if you want it, are a way to keep up morale.