If you think about it, you’ll realize this statement, especially the first part, is not correct. There are at least two episodes in the original series, The Menagerie and Court Martial, where the Captain faces court martial. So, sure, the Federation is civilian. Starfleet, on the other hand, is military.
In my defense, I had to look up the episode titles.
The Merchant Marine is civilian in peacetime. Do their ships carry weapons?
Wow, that is some great information. Yes, my information was purely about shuttle missions. I do not believe that the positions of Mission Commander, Pilot, and Mission Specialist (definitely not Mission Specialist) had been developed until then.
Total fluke here, I was looking up information about my local Salvation Army Thrift Store so I could go unload some junk of mine on them, and I stumbled upon this:
Did you know these people have actual Generals?
This is great stuff! Sadly I don’t know what all of it means…
What kind of rank is a ‘Department of Defence O-6 grade’? What is the NOAA Corps? I am embarrased to admit I cannot think of a ‘Department of J’.
I hadn’t thought about the ‘Generals’ in Surgeon General and Attorney General before; does this mean They’re supposed to be leading someone? I thought the Attorney General was just the Presidential Cabinet’s On-Staff Legal Counsel? Do M.D.'s in any way whatsoever answer to the Surgeon General?
If my count is right O-6 is equivalent to Army/Marine/AF Colonel, Navy Captain. The enlisted and officer grades and either specialty equivalents are tagged with E-1 through E-9 and O-1 through O-10 (I’m not sure what the top number is in either system, actually). Thus you know that a given rank title is equivalent in rank to the same number in the other services and in the specialist classifications. (Quick, what’s a Corpsman 2nd class, and is he higher or lower in rank than a Staff Sergeant?)
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin. Corps – “weathermen in uniform” so to speak.
The General in Surgeon General and Attorney General is an adjective – he’s the ranking surgeon or the ranking attorney of the government’s staff of surgeons and attorneys, the one with general authority over the entire field of practice. (Interestingly, “General” as a title for top brass military has a similar derivation; they’re “general officers” as opposed to those who serve under them, with specific duties as assigned by the general in charge.)
True - but note that Wikipedia (correctly) states that “The Surgeon General functions under the direction of the Assistant Secretary for Health and holds the rank of Vice Admiral (VADM) and operationally heads the 6,000-member Commissioned Corps of the United States Public Health Service,” and that “The medical services of the United States Navy, United States Army and United States Air Force are each headed by a Surgeon General.” Note further that the U.S. Surgeon General’s grade (VADM in the USPHS Commissioned Corps) entitles him or her to a salute from junior officers and all enlisted personnel in any of the other six services; the Surgeons General of the other services may or may not outrank the U.S. Surgeon General (probably not).
As I understand it, you don’t have to obey orders from outside of your chain of command, even from the same service (though if a general or admiral outside your chain tells you to do something, it might not be a bad idea to do it anyway), and an officer of a different nation is likely to be outside your chain of command. However, you are expected to show some level of respect to foreign officers of various ranks, even in an enemy military (a general in a POW camp might get a cell to himself, and eat better than the grunts, and officers will still be addressed as “sir” by their captors). Just how much respect depends, of course, on how much recognition that nation and their military have, so I don’t think anyone’s likely to salute Rear Admiral Chico, Marietta Minutemen.
Thanks, Chronos; I totally botched that third stage but I think you have a grasp on what I’m wondering. I guess somebody needs to distinguish for me the difference between “That captain outranks me.” and “I’m under that captain’s command.” In the NASA case, it seems obvious that test pilots of various services could be ordered by their respective commanders- whatever the pilot’s and commander’s respective ranks might be- to simply ‘follow this scientist’s instructions’; but somehow that seems too easy. It doesn’t sit right that an organization that resorted to having a CapCom would conduct interservice operations so informally.
Getting people to salute my dog on a technicality wasn’t really the point of the joke; I just needed a hypothetical situation. The Salvation Army issue is a much better example of what I’m talking about; I just can’t get over the idea that ranks are completely arbitrary to the institution that bestows them. And I’m seriously interested in whether NASA maintains what I now realize I should refer to not so much as ‘ranks’ but as a ‘chain-of-command’.
…I just needed a hypothetical absurd situation.
Although there are exceptions. American troops serving in NATO will often have officers from other countries in their chain of command.
Ah, but you see, the various military services do that on some scale every day – that is, attach someone to a specific mission and place him under standing orders to follow the instructions of those in charge of that mission, whether or not they’re from his service. The military officers in the NASA astronaut corps essentially receive orders from their service’s command telling them their current duty is to serve as an astronaut and attaching them to NASA for performance of said duty.
Contrary to earlier mentions, there WERE pre-Apollo flights with different-service officers: the first 2-man US flight, Gemini-3, had Grissom (USAF) teamed with Young (USN); Gemini 5 had Cooper (USAF) with Conrad (USN); and so on…
In a NASA space mission, you’re doing a job for a civilian agency, and your hierarchy and place in the totem pole is due to your own standing in the Astronaut Corps and to requirements specific to the mission: Mission Commander, Pilot, Lead Mission/Payload Specialist, ordinary Mission/Payload Specialist (in Russian flights insert into the list Flight Engineer and (lately) paying tourist); the people in charge of personnel management will seek, when using military personnel, to avoid having those senior in rank occupy a junior billet. In the phrase “Mission Commander”, the second word is NOT the designation of a military or paramilitary grade of rank(), it’s a job description.* It’s the man or woman in charge of doing what it takes on-the-scene to make the mission succeed.
(*TWO American ranks use the word “commander” in the rank name: “Commander” and “Lieutenant Commander”, corresponding to grades O5 and O4 of commissioned officer in the seafaring services: Navy, Coast Guard, USPHS and NOAA. The rank of “Commander” is NOT the same thing as the job, of commander)
The constant use of CapCom/Mission Control in spaceflight is due to the environment having started as, and still being mostly, that of experimental operations/test flight, where it is normal that the performance parameters will be monitored continuously from the ground, you have a programmed routine of what should happen, must get permission to deviate voluntarily so people know what to expect, and you have this extra pool of knowledge to fall back upon if you have the time to ask for assistance. As exemplified earlier, “command” as such is exercised only in extreme situations in that environment; and, since up until today we have worked with extremely small flight crews, it looks more like the “captain” of a bomber than that of a frigate. (On a small vessel such as a PT-boat, you’re likely to see the “captain” doing the steering and navigating hands-on, too). If things ever got to the point where a spacecraft can reliably operate with the ease and autonomy of your average ship or airliner AND with the size of crew you get on a mid-sized ship, you’ll have less need for CapCom to be piped in all the time and the commander will start behaving more like a ship’s skipper.
The actual rank titles and precedences in militaries and paramilitaries are established by the traditions of the various spheres of operation wherein they are used. In militaries (and in paramilitaries that do a lot of work together with the armed services, such as are the USPHS and the NOAA Corps), tradition and the frequent necessity for coordinating meaningful interactions have led to an overall standard understanding of scales and relative positions across countries (between one same country’s services, the equivalencies are most oftenset by law). A squad leader will be something from corporal to staff sergeant; company commander will be somewhere from first lieutenant to major; the officer in charge of a large heavily armed surface warship will be a commander or captain – or rather they will hold such ranks/grades *as are translated into American English according to a customary standard * in those terms.
When you go into civilian entities, things get fuzzier – For instance, airlines borrowed the terms “captain”, “first officer” and “second officer” for the pilot, copilot and flight engineer, and “purser” and “steward(ess)” for the cabin service staff from the preexisting language of shipping, mainly because they made a good match for the tradition of a merchant captain being responsible for the “ship” and all lives aboard it, and needing for it a clear chain of command. Thing is, the “captain” of the 30-seater doing a short-hop to Utica on a local charter carrier and the “captain” crossing the Pacific on a Qantas 747 have similar legal responsibility but different degrees of training.
Police forces vary widely in this – depending on where in the world you are, “Inspector” can be anything from the 2nd-in-command of a major city department to the guy immediately above the street cop. Also, very often you will see county Sherriffs or city Police Chiefs in the USA, who command departments of maybe a couple hundred men, wearing the 4 star insignia that in the US military signifies a full O-10 General. Why? Because in each case they can call and dress themselves as they choose.
(BTW, folks, do not let anyone actually in the Coast Guard hear it be said they’re not military.)
The Surgeon General of the United States is the ranking officer of the Public Health Service’s Commissioned Corps. I don’t recall at the moment if that rank is equivalent to ADM, VADM, RADM (Upper Half), or RADM (Lower Half). I do recall that although the PHS’s Commissioned Corps has their own rank names, it’s quite common to refer to them by their Naval equivalents.
The SGUS is at O-9 grade, and was so already before Koop had the job.
From the Commissioned Officer’s Handbook {Warning: PDF} page 32:
Table 3 on page 33 of the Handbook provides the following rank titles:
The note for O-4 is kind of funny:
I suppose it would be even funnier if Full were all that there is to the title.
Is the Assistant Secretary for Health actually a Uniformed position? I can’t seem to find a site explaining whether it’s a Uniformed position or if that’s merely an equivalent grade assigned for administrative convenience.
Monty, my hunch is that the O-10 position in the Public Health Corps is there to define authority rather than rank. In other words, there are very few people who can give a valid, legitimate order to the Chief of Staff of the Army or Air Force, and they do not include the Assistant Secretary for Financial Management (or whatever the chief service accountant may call himself). If he needs a particular bit of bookkeeping done, he has the choices of requesting it or going to the Secretary to have it made an order.
The Surgeon General, on the other hand, is under the orders of the Asst. Secy. for Health. While he may have a paramilitary structure for operations, it’s a civilian job answerable to legitimate civil authority.
How are inter-departmental or branch orders handled on the spot? If a [fill in the blank] office of [fill in the service] tells some peon to stop what he’s doing and he outranks the person that told the peon to do what he’s doing, but of another service, what happens?
I did an image search on Google and found out that at times the Surgeon General of the US has also concurrently been the Assistant Secretary for Health. Maybe that’s why it’s in the pay scale–in case one of the Commissioned Officers of the PHS is so appointed.
No, the Enterprise was a Constitution class Heavy Cruiser. There were also Frigates, Battleships , and Dreadnaughts . Pretty provacative ship class names for a peaceful civilian agency.
