Air Force officials are considering bringing back warrant officers and may start creating a training program this year, reversing a decision from 65 years ago when the service ended that grade, according to a planning document obtained by Military.com.
The three-page planning order says that “great power competition” – Defense Department lingo for escalating defense spending and resources against adversaries such as China – is underscoring the need to resurrect warrant officers, the corps of highly technical service members who are above the enlisted ranks but below the commissioned officer ranks.
“The service must examine new ways to develop and retain a highly capable, technologically capable corps of air-minded warfighters,” the document says. “To fully leverage the technical depth and breadth of talent of our airmen and cultivate the strategic advantage USAF technicians have historically provided, we will make the necessary preparations to re-establish a WO [warrant officer] corps and deliver foundational training for designated WO-1 candidates.”
So, what are the pros, the cons of this decision, in your humble opinion? I’d like to hear from someone who served in the USAF currently or recently.
Has the service changed so much that the “super NCO” ranks of Senior Master Sergeant and Chief Master Sergeant no longer provide the technical expertise. After all, it was those super NCO ranks which killed of the Air Force’s Warrant Officers and Chief Warrant Officers in the first place.
I’m also curious if the US Space Force will have these new ranks.
By the way, although they’re called Chief Warrant Officers, they are commissioned. It’s just another fun bit of silly language usage by the US military.
If you need more junior officers, then recruit more of them and don’t promote as many. I don’t see the point of commissioning junior officers that can’t be promoted. Why hamstring potential talent?
I guess that’s what I’m getting at here. The services which currently have Warrants and Chief Warrants don’t consider it hamstringing talent; they’re correctly recognizing the talents certan individuals have. That’s also, I believe, why the US Navy brought back Warrant Officer (W-1) for just one field, Cyber Warrant Officer. The thing is, though, the Air Force abandoned the warrant/chief warrant ranks after the introduction of Senior Master Sergeant and Chief Master Sergeant ranks. Those, apparently in Air Force officialdom’s view, were now the appropriate level of recognnition for the skill set and skill level formerly rewarded/recognized with the warrant/chief warrant ranks.
The thinking behind having warrant officers is the warrants are technical experts in their field, while the O-1 and above commissioned officers are more focused on management of personnel.
They’re not really junior officers, nor are they commissioned. (A commissioned officer receives their legal authority via a commission from the commander-in-chief.) Instead they are more akin to very senior enlisted personnel, but as technical specialists instead of being personnel managers/leaders.
Warrant officers have a different legal authority (a warrant instead of a commission, naturally) and are not typically in the chain of command. They typically come from the upper ranks of enlisted personnel and are specialists in some technical field.
Exactly.
It’s sort of the same thing in companies where they have a management track and a technical track. Not everyone wants to be CEO or a general/admiral.
There are five ranks for warrant officers in the United States. That seems to show some promotion. The Navy and Marine Corps also have a group of commissioned officers known as Limited Duty Officers. It wasn’t until 1985 that LDOs could advance to O6, the current rank cap for the Navy LDO. Another thing is officer promotions tend to be spaced out over more time than enlisted promotions.
ETA: @robby nailed it two posts up while I was typing.
The problem in all the services is that wages and rank = supervisor level are totally connected. And they’re connected to seniority as well. There are carve-outs for doctors & such, but by and large the only way to increase your wage is to wait a bunch of years and be promoted away from doing the job into supervising others doing the job.
Big picture, the services all want a way to hire large numbers of people as alrady-educated skilled workers in a difficult field who want to stay a worker for most or all of their career, and get raises while doing so. Without needing to be promoted multiple times into an ever shrinking pool of supervisors at each level.
Officering is all about commanding units. Not about working. Enlisted is all about working, but comes with lowish pay for the first decade or more and still has the “must supervise to advance” feature.
They are. At least now. In fact all USAF, USN, and USMC pilots (fighter or not) are officers. During and shortly after WWII the Navy had enlisted pilots and I think maybe USAAC / USAAF did too. But that was ~70 years ago.
They are an example of an exception that proves the rule.
The US Army takes a different tack. A small percentage of their helo and fixed-wing pilots are officers. That’s the career track to command aviation units, and oh by the way do some flying. Whereas the vast bulk of the Army’s pilots are … warrant officers. Who are meant to be career technicians working at the task of flying aircraft while not having much, if any, supervisory role doing so.
And as warrants, their starting wage is a bunch higher than enlisted starting wages and their end wages are pretty decent. With the compressed 4 or 5 ranks, they can achieve the rank that equals best pay fairly early. And all free from the pyramid effect of “must have a group of somebodies to supervise in order to get a pay raise.”
Everyone graduates from the same school, so starts out equally (semi-)skilled and (in-)experienced as newbies.
Over time the warrants being purely dedicated pilots means they fly more often, and especially as the officer increases in rank, they fly less and less.
The same effect occurs amongst the officer pilots of e.g. USAF. The Lieutenants are still learning, the Captains kick serious ass, while the Majors and above are getting progressively rustier, but also gaining wisdom.
For comparison, when I flew USAF fighters & flew about 15-20 hours a month while doing office work the rest of the time. As an airline pilot with no job responsibilities except flying, I was getting about 80 hours a month doing a much simpler set of tasks. I got to be a hell of a lot better at airlining than I ever got at fightering. Just for time spent on-task.
Then why not make them all officers? The ones who also show talent for command can get promoted, while the ones who just want to fly can stop at Major. I don’t see the point of having some helicopter pilots who are eligible for command and other helicopter pilots - flying the same helicopters! - who aren’t. It seems a waste of potential commanders.
Right. As it stands, at least in the Army, the W1 enters with a straight warrant from the Secretary of the service after passing WO Candidate school. Upon time for promotion to grade W2, then they obtain both a warrant and a commission to CWO2.
The notion of the WO in the US system was that you needed these professional specialists who would not be commissioned officers climbing the management ladder, but you did want to give them a status above the enlisted troops to hold and keep them, so you created a category of officer that could be created and promoted by an administrative warrant from the Department (simpler, quicker).
I believe it was originally a naval thing, for hiring certain specialties that had nothing to do with actually sailing and fighting the ship. With time, though, it evolved across services into the current concept of highly-qualified technical specialist who is not interested in becoming a business manager by the time they’re barely halfway to a pension.
In 1958ish the US services went from 7 enlisted grades to 9, partly because post-WW2/Korea there was a logjam of promotion opportunities in the various enlisted tiers that resulted in (a) loss of retention of experienced personnel and (b) the temptation to use the Warrant grades as a relief valve for people who had maxed out as enlistees, which was not the idea. The still-recently spun off Air Force at the time, said to themselves “great, we can now have more promotion slots for our experienced enlistees, no more need for these”. The other services were more comfortable with having WOs around so they just made adjustments (I believe, could be wrong, the law expanded the number of WO grades from 2 to 4 around the same time).
What you seem to have missed is that the US military is up or out, and that is because Congress has passed laws to make it so for commissioned officers specifically. Congress also tells the military how many commissioned officers it can have.
While it is possible to stick around to 20 years without getting promoted again once you hit Major (or Lieutenant Commander), doing that also leads to a bottleneck of officers: if your plan is to take all the Warrant Officers (and specifically *Chief Warrant Officers) the US Navy has and instead make them O-1 to O-4, you would have a glut of O-1 to O-4 and it would have to take a lot longer than it currently does to promote to O-4, because vacancies wouldn’t be opening up.
Also, while you might think that one must be a technical expert in order to effectively lead technical experts, whether you are right or wrong, the US military clearly disagrees with you. Again, doesn’t mean you’re wrong (as the US military frequently is), it just means that what you are advocating for is huge structural changes to the military that would almost certainly require congressional legislation to make a reality. It’s not something that can be easily tweaked by a simple change in philosophy by a handful of senior military officers.
*While the US Navy only very recently reintroduced WO-1 and did so for cyber only, it has had CWO2 and above for a wide range of specialties for decades.
My experience with warrants was minimal, as the Seabees had very few of them. My impression was that it was a lonely existence for them, being neither fish nor fowl: looked down on by commissioned officers, but unable to mingle with enlisted personnel who they had more in common with. That said, the best company commander I ever had was a warrant officer. He fiercely defended his men and would go directly to the Captain with a problem, the only admonition being “You’d better be right about this!” It was a refreshing change from the usual Ensigns/JGs that we were usually stuck with. Even worse, if there was a surplus of officers, you could end up with one as a platoon commander.