In the U.S. military, all four services have the same number of officer ranks (see Ranks ). However, they all (exept the Air Force) developed independently.
Did they always have the same number of ranks or was there a standardization program at some point? If so, did some services have to add or delete ranks in order to meet the standard?
(And why doesn’t the Air Force have Warrant Officers?)
Pay ranks…e-1… e-2 et al are the same throughout the military.
As for the warrant noffices I have no idea.
Damn…takes me longer to correct my errors than type my post.
John Barleycorn must die. Just not till I’m done with him.
I suspect they have the same number of ranks to allow equal pay.
It was all homogenized as part of the Dense act of 1947 which created the DoD out of the former Departments of War (army, USAAC/USAAF) and the Department of the Navy.
I donit know off the top of my head the details of the former rank structures. I suspect the Army officer & enlisted ranks and the USAAF-becoming-USAF officer ranks didn’t change at all.
Although pay was equalized, there was a hassel over the rank of Rear Admiral. For example, a Navy Captain and and Army Colonel had the same rank. However, when each got a promotion the Captain became a two-star Rear Admiral while the Colonel became a one-star Brigadier General. Their pay was the same but two-stars are better than one.
So finally, after a lot of thrashing around the rank of Rear Admiral was divided into Rear Admiral (Lower Half) with one star (O7) and Rear Admiral (Upper Half) with two stars (O8).
Actually the two halves of the Rear Admiral existed before that, but they were considered the same rank and both wore two stars. The upper half rear admiral was paid slightly more. They were divided into two separate ranks to coincide with Brigadier and Major Generals some time after the Navy eliminated the rank of Commodore.
The AF used to have them. I remember seeing one or two back in the 60s when I was a dependent.
As I understand it, the idea was that the E-8 and E-9 ranks were supposed to replace the warrant officers. The AF followed through with this idea but the Army (and Navy?) welshed on their part of the bargain.
At the end of the 1930s, the USAAC had a few “flying sergeants” (I don’t know the whole story behind that). As the newly renamed USAAF ramped up for WWII, it decided that only commissioned officers ought to drive airplanes. When the USAF was split off from the US Army, they were able to drive a deal where all fixed wing tactical aircraft stayed with them, leaving the Army with nothing but small liaison (later observation) aircraft and (the new, untested) helicopters. The tradition that one needed to have more rank than a top sergeant to drive an aircraft remained in place with the Army, so when they began developing choppers as primary tactical weapons, they were faced with the prospect of flooding the service with thousands of 2d liuetenants. Instead, they hung onto the the “pilot=officer” tradition, but reworked the guidelines so that warrant officers qualified as pilots, while non-commissioned officers remained excluded.
I’m not sure why the Navy held onto the warrant ranks. I can remember, pre-Vietnam, reading that the Army was about to eliminate the warrant category, just as the Air Force and Navy had announced. Then matters changed when they began issuing warrants for lots of guys to be pilots.
IIRC, Tom, the AAF did have WO pilot-officers during WW2 (David Simmons can surely tell us more).
The Navy had WOs almost from the start, for technical-services fields just as they do to this day. The Army only actually started using the title in the 20s when they melded together a whole lot of turn-of-the-century-legacy specialist functions that did not quite fit the normal rank structure such as coast-watchers ant the like (and BTW, the skippers of the Army ships can also be CWOs )
The exact-parallel Pay Grades scale is of course an andministrative decision. Specially with the enlisted grades, in the 50s the preexisting historically-developed rank scales were sort of shoehorned to fit the pay scale equivalency. Master Sergeant in the land services had been the 7th grade. When grades E8 and E9 were created, the Army and Marines bumped it up to E8 by inserting an additional lower grade (second rank of Army buck private, Marine Lance Corporal); meanwhile, USAF kept the old AAF sequence with Staff Sgt. at E5, Tech Sgt. at E6 and Master Sgt. at E7
This site gives some details on the start of theArmy’s Flight Officers program. I call it a program because I can’t think of anything else although I’ve got some other names for it and would use them if pressed.
The site refers only to the handling of existing non-coms who entered pilot training but the program was later extended to all Aviation Cadets. By the time I entered (spring 1943) Cadets were rated on a scale of 1 to 7, 1 being best, at each phase of training; College training, Pre-Flight, Primary, Basic and Advanced flight training. An overall rating was formed from those individual scores and a certain percentage (and I don’t know what the cut-off was) of those with high numbers became Flight Officers rather than 2[sup]nd[/sup] Lieutenants.
I was, for a short time, a Basic Pilot Instructor and was a first-hand witness as to how the program was mishandled in the Western Flying Training Command. The assumption was made that with an honest rating the numbers 1 to 7 would be distributed normally. So, the Western Command mandated that there would be so many 1’s, so many 2’s etc., etc in the entire Command. These numbers were then broken down for the indivudual flight training centers who further broke them down for the individual training squadrons.
Our squadron had to furnish one 7. The Squadron Commander, a Captain, called me in and said my Cadet X should be our 7. I protested that he seemed to be about like all of the others but the Captain insisted. He said, "I knew this guy in Chicago, he was a fuckup then and he’s a fuckup now. He’s our 7. “Captain …” I started to say but he cut me of with, “Lieutenant, he’s our 7. You’re dismissed.”
Up until then I had thought maybe the Army would be a good place to stay. But the incident killed that thought stone dead. I really didn’t want to have much to do with an organization where an asshole like that could screw somebody who was without recourse.
This interesting piece from the U.S. Navy Historical Center website, Why is the Colonel Called “Kernal”? The Origin of the Ranks and Rank Insignia Now Used by the United States Armed Forces, will answer many of your questions.