Ok this question might seem a bit vague, but I don’t know much about military rankings. How high up relativly speaking is a Army Captain? (is it a fairly high up position with much authority?) and is it an officer or enlisted rank?
A captain is the third officer rank, above both first and second lieutenant. He commands a company of a hundred and something soldiers. (Or more likely he has a staff job.)
He reached that rank five or six year out of college.
Anything else?
Do you mean four years in college, and then 5-6 years in the military, or being in the military while in college and then an additional 5-6 years after graduating?
After having served for five-six years if he/she came in with a degree.
Enlisted ranks for all services
Officer rank for all services, including Warrant Officers
Note that in the Officer ranks the only difference is with the Navy, and of course the Air Force has no Warrants and the Marines have no 5-star rank. For Enlisted, however, it is a big mess. In my humble opinion, the Air Force is easiest followed by the Navy, Army, and the Mrines bringing up the rear. For us, if they stripes are attached to the star you’re an Airman, if you have a rocker you’re an NCO, and if you have chevrons on top you’re a Senior NCO, and since all NCOs can be called Sergeant it’s gravy.
A Captain is an officer, but not a very important one.
Officer grades are divided into three groups: company grade officers, lieutenants and captains, who are normally assigned at company level; field grade officers, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels, who are normally assigned from battalion to brigade/division level; and general officers, all generals.
There is a distinct difference in ‘importance’ between company grade and field grade officers. Company grade are ‘junior executives’, field grade are ‘middle managers’, and generals are ‘C-level’ officers, to put it in civilian terms.
One begins to be ‘important’ when one is promoted to Major. One begins to be ‘godlike’ when one is promoted to Brigadier (one star) General.
Airman (or is it SSgt now?)- I have never understood what warrant officers are. I assume they are not products of the service adademies. Say you have a sergeant, a warrant officer, and a lieutenant. Who salutes who? Can NCOs aspire to be WOs, or are WOs more of a specialty niche in the military?
A warrant officer is a specialty officer, so to speak. They have a very specific job track and they stick to it (for instance, the helicopter pilot Warrants out of Fort Rucker in the Army). They are later commissioned, but they remain Warrant Officers. It gets confusing, but the bottom line is that yes, they are specialty niches in the services. A Warrant Officer gets his warrant by going to Warrant Officer school. A Commissioned Officer gets his commission by graduating a service academy, a regular university ROTC program, or Officer Training School, but in all cases a degree is required (Bachelor’s or better). A NCO, under the right circumstances, can become either a Warrant or a Commissioned officer. The only limit is meeting the requirements, getting approval from your chain of command, and filling a necessary slot in the service. If the service is trying to pare down the number of officers they likely will not allow you to get your warrant or commission.
An enlisted man salutes both Warrant Officers and Commissioned Officers and a Warrant Officer salutes Commissioned Officers.
I was under the impression that only the Navy’s Warrant Officers were commissioned as Warrant Officers and that all the other Services that have Warrant Officers considered them as Warranted, not Commissioned.
No warrant officers are commissioned. Congress authorizes the number of comissioned officers for each service but the services can control the number of warrant officers as well as the requirements for becoming one.
I was under the impression that some Warrant Officers later become commissioned, and when I looked it up I came up with this
If it’s wrong you may want to correct it.
Thanks, Doors! That’s why I was under that impression. The Navy doesn’t have Warrant Officer (W1) anymore. All of the Navy’s Warrants are Chief Warrant Officers, thus Commissioned.
FWIW, the Navy finally did follow on and actually promote some CW4 to CW5.
I guess a better way of saying it is that there’s two concepts going on: warranting vs commissiong, and paygrade.
For paygrade, all the officers in pagrades W1, W2, W3, W4, and W5 are Warrant Officers. For commissioning, all the officers in the ranks of CW2, CW3, CW4, and CW5 are Commissioned Officers, as are those officers who outrank them.
And what is a warrant vs a commission?
Traditionally, a commissioned officer is an officer of the state, nominated by the president and confirmed by Congress. A commission is issued by the head of state and may be revoked only by Congress.
A warrant, however, is issued merely upon the authority of the head of the military – the secretary of defense. A warrant officer is not an officer of the state, but merely someone appointed by the Pentagon.
Calling a captain “not very important” is slightly misleading - to the men under his command, he’s very important. In fact, I’d say that captains are the highest ranking officers most (but not all) enlisted troops have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Is that true for the Army? In the Air Force, promotion to Captain is pretty much automatic after 4 years. It’s the last automatic-type promotion for officers, with promotion to Major taking place over a wide range of times in service.
Promotion to 1st Lt. is the same way, happening after 2 years. The only cases I’ve ever heard of as exception to this are ones of gross incompetence and underperformance. Those are rare.
So is it different in the Army or Navy? I doubt that the services would differ much in that respect. Why join the Army and make O-3 in six years, when the USAF will give it to you in four? The pay jump is significant.
In the Navy, one reaches O-3 (LT) in four years. As mentioned, it’s pretty much automatic, unless you screw up.
Yeah, Captains are basically junior officers with enough experience to lead other officers. A typical Company (the size of unit a Captain would command in he field) is around 180 people, made up of three or four platoons (each one of those commanded by either a Second Lieutenant or a First Lieutenant). In a major battle fought between Battalion sized forces or larger, a Captain would tend to be the “man on the scene” so to speak, as far as making immediate decisions during a fight, and for smaller scale situations, the Captain may be the overall decision maker as far as most things are concerned.
Of course, the relative importance of any officer’s rank varies depending on where he is and what he does. In an infantry Battalion, he’s basically middle-management, with most of the enlistedmen never having to deal with anyone above him (as Alessan just said), while in a Fighter squadron, where all the planes are flown by officers, a Captain might seem relatively less important (in that case, he’s kinda like that slightly older more experienced guy we all hung out with in college).
By asking what the various ranks a colloquially known as?
I only ask because I worked with a guy who was briefly in the army as a Lieutentant in the Queen’s Regiment and was forever going about it. I happened to mention this to one of our techies who was also an ex-squaddie. He responded instantly “so xxxx was a Rupert in the Queersmen? That figures.”
So apparently to the British army a Second Rupert is a Second Lieutentant straight out of Sandhurst. What are they called in the US?