I would guess that a battalion commander is probably the position you’re looking for. They command 300-1,000 people and are generally Lt. Colonels. While they won’t be in squads engaging in combat intentionally they will typically be in the field and carrying out the HQ orders at a field level. It wouldn’t be unusual for them to be under fire in a withdrawal situation.
Jumpin’ Jim (a major general at the time) fractured two discs parachuting into the Netherlands in 1944.
I think the attention to a “front line” is distracting.
If you ask about the highest rank officer likely to engage in a firefight, you can’t disregard the possibility of a near-rear command post coming under attack that starts with infiltration or other method of defeating or bypassing perimeter defenses (“get inside the wire”).
So, probably, battalion command staff. Captains, Majors, LtCols. I doubt a division CP would be so vulnerable unless there’s a lot of infiltration activity in advance.
This is generally correct. It can also depend on the size of the unit. A squad on patrol would likely have an NCO in charge. A platoon-sized unit might have a senior NCO or junior officer in charge, and a company would likely have a lieutenant or captain or possibly even a major in charge. Part of the picture also depends on staffing levels. At the company level, the officer in charge would not likely be in the shit unless the situation was dire, as he/she has way too much to do keeping everyone on the same page.
I spent 23 years in the Navy Seabees and never saw an officer above the rank of LT (O-3) in charge of a company. The battalion commander was usually an O-5, while at the brigade level, the CO was likely an O-6. But a lot of that is because the 'Bees are not heavily staffed with officers.
I think your answer will be in the realm of commando teams. In Apocalypse Now! it’s noted that in the special forces, you can’t be promoted any higher than Colonel (that would be a Navy captain in the SEALs). Until recent times, these kinds of teams were often out of communication with higher authority, so they had to be led by officers of greater rank than would be found among other frontline troops.
Teddy Roosevelt Jr. was a brigadier general
He landed on the beach during D-Day, only to die of a heart attack a short time later.
I Googled the OP’s question word for word and got this:
"I’m assuming you mean pulling triggers on a relatively regular basis. That would be a Captain. More specifically, a Company Commander. They are in charge of deploying their platoons, thus they are on the front.
Now, higher ranking officers, particularly those in command also spend time toward the front, but they spend more time in tactical operations centers than on the line. They also position themselves in areas where they can best see the battlefield. So, the will likely find themselves in harms way, but not as up front and personal or as frequently."
If I recall correctly General Roosevelt (President Teddy Roosevelt’s son) participated in the D Day landings, insisting he go in with the troops.
I know the OP meant front-line ground combat, but when I saw the thread title, I thought of the First Battle of Guadalcanal. The USN task force had 2 Rear admirals present. In the first few minutes of a very confused battle, the American flagship, San Francisco, mistakenly targeted Atlanta at point blank range, killing Rear Admiral Scott. Minutes later, San Francisco was hit by Japanese gunfire, killing Admiral Callaghan.
That’s why Captains and below are considered “company officers” historically, and Majors up to Colonels are considered “field officers”, and anyone above that is a “general officer”.
Company officers command the troops at the company level and lower- very directly. Field grade officers tend to command higher formations- battalions, regiments and/or brigades.
Put another way, a lieutenant is commanding a platoon of maybe 40 infantrymen, and a captain is commanding a company of 3 or so platoons. Majors and lieutenant colonels command battalions, which are made up of several companies. Colonels command brigades and regiments which are composed of several battalions. So while a lieutenant or captain might end up being exposed to enemy fire as a result of being close to the action by the nature of the job, a major or higher probably won’t be, because of the nature of their jobs.
If you’ve seen “Band of Brothers”, it does a fairly good job of showing this as you watch Winters get promoted from platoon commander, to company commander, to battalion executive officer over the course of the series- you see a lot of him and the men together in the beginning, but by the last 3-4 episodes, he’s less prominent, because he’s not part of Easy Company anymore- he’s at a level higher.
That would have been our ideal structure as well, had there been enough officers to go around. It was common for us to see a Chief as a platoon commander, and a LTJG (army LT) or LT (army Captain) as a company commander. At one point my company commander was a Warrant Officer. In our corner of the Navy, you learned to take on responsibility above your paygrade early on.
In 1950, during the early portion of the Korean War, legendary Marine bad-ass Chesty Puller was in command of the 1st Marine Regiment, and participated in the Battle of Inchon, including participating in the landing with his regiment, for which he was awarded the Silver Star (a medal for valor in combat). Later that year, he also participated in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, for which he received a Distinguished Service Cross and a Navy Cross (both awards for heroism in combat).
I’m not 100% certain of his rank at that time, but his Wikipedia entry says that he was promoted to Brigadier General a few months later, suggesting that he was a Colonel during those battles.
Of course, that was 70 years ago, and has been pointed out, may be something that wouldn’t happen today.
Why did you have so few officers?
In WWII Brig. General ‘Nuts’ McCauliffe parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, and also landed by glider in the Netherlands with the 101st Airborne during Operation Market Garden. He got his name because he was trapped with his men at Bastogne, and when the Germans called for their surrender he replied, “Nuts!”
The guy who’s army saved him, Gen George Patton, also,had a habit of traveling with his men into combat (esp the 3rd Army, as I recall), but didn’t actually fight on the front lines.
Most naval officers go to the fleet navy where promotions are better and the mission is more critical. The CEC (Civil Engineering Corps) is much more lightly staffed, and often so was the enlisted contingent. While the official battalion strength was supposed to be around 700-800 people, it was usually much smaller (at least in peacetime). But it wasn’t as though there weren’t enough of them; it’s just that as a senior enlisted person, you were expected to take up any slack, and often a senior NCO would end up being in charge of a group where you might expect to find an officer in charge.
Interesting - I didn’t realize that naval offices had so much discretion regarding their own service. I assumed they just went wherever they were assigned
Is this why one of my US Navy EOD colleagues (now an O-6) ‘bounced’ between billets? He was an EODMU commander that had Command time as a Skipper on a minesweeper. I got the feeling he commanded EOD units for shore duty, but got his ‘float’ time too. He was a “Line Officer,” not an LDO, and I’m not sure of the difference.
For me, in the Air Force, EOD was (and still is) considered a special qualification. Formally, my AFSC was: 32E3H, Civil Engineer, EOD Qualified. This means there was no dedicated AFSC (aka “MOS”) for EOD Officers in the Air Force (there is an AFSC for EOD Enlisted: 3E8XX), requiring me to bounce between kickass EOD operations and “run-of-the-mill” Engineering as I went along my career. I didn’t care to go from BIPs to contractual program management, so I’m glad I retired when I did.
Tripler
I try to avoid being boring.
Well. . .they do go where assigned (“needs of the Navy”), but there are critical specialties such as nuclear warfare that can be applied for. CEC is not a critical specialty, but it is its own niche specialty. I worked for one officer who had tanked out of Naval Aviation school and ended up in the CEC cadre. At present there are only about 1300 CEC officers worldwide.
An LDO is a Limited Duty Officer (although they are referred to by regular line officers as "Loud, Dumb and Obnoxious). The LDO program allows senior enlisted people to move up into the officer ranks. The vetting is pretty rigorous. Per Wiki:
A limited duty officer ( LDO ) is an officer in the United States Navy or United States Marine Corps who was selected for commissioning based on skill and expertise. They are the primary manpower source for technically specific billets not best suited for traditional Unrestricted Line, Restricted Line, or Staff Corps career path officers.
I once asked a Master Chief (E-9) why he didn’t apply for LDO. He looked at me like I was crazy and said “Why would I give up my pay, authority and seniority to be a junior officer?” Good point.
Although the Mel Gibson movie mentioned in the OP did take some liberties with reality it did a pretty good job of portraying Hal Moore. Read the book if you want a clearer picture.
What it shows is pretty accurate. In a battalion mission the battalion commander (LTC) would be close enough that he could easily be involved in the fighting if things turned bad. It happened to Moore. As shown in Band of Brothers despite being 100 feet from the front Winters never fired his weapon after being promoted to the battalion.
When I was in a tank unit the battalion commander had a tank and crew. In the order of battle he was supposed to hang back and not be directly in the fight but pretty damn close. The XO also had his own track but might be in the M577 track.
When I was in attack helicopter units the battalion commander and XO were both qualified and current pilots but during battalion missions they would be in separate command and control blackhawks a short distance from where the line companies were engaged.
In each instance the battalion commander is far enough away that he’s not expected to routinely engage in combat but close enough to move forward and get eyes on the situation when needed. Usually not much more than one terrain feature back from the front. Far enough away that a grunt thinks he’s in the rear but close enough that a civilian would consider it on the front line.
I’ve thought a lot about this in terms of historically and to the OP’s specific phrasing of “today”, I retired in the early 2000s but I think at least the majority of the structural stuff remains the same. I think the fairest “not looking for atypical situations” answer is Captain (O-3) in the Army and Marines. Anyone up to Brigadier General (O-7) could still end up in combat in situations that would be atypical but not “newsworthy.” Anything above that would, in modern combat, likely be some sort of terrorist attack or something like that, which I think is a whole debate about whether that’s quite the same thing as “on the front lines.” If you want to include that sort of thing there’s no real limit, terrorist blew up part of the Pentagon on 9/11/01 and that building houses people as high in the rank structure as you can expect to find.
I was out before Iraq / Afghanistan, but I distinctly remember at least a couple news article from the early days of the Iraq occupation where O-7s got in slightly hairy situations. I tried to find some of them but haven’t been able to thus far, my memory was that some guys of that rank were regularly traveling around occupied areas to meet with local Iraqi leaders as part of government building operations, and this occasionally put them in a situation where their convoys were in action with insurgent forces.
In WWII there’s a number of people in the O-7 rank who are documented to have fought in direct actions during D-Day. Stephen Ambrose’s book Citizen Soldiers details a few of them (the book covers the Western European theater from D+1 until V-E day. Note that Stephen Ambrose (who was a “pop Historian”) suffered reputational hit near the end of his life due to poorly cited / footnoted work (aka plagiarized) and some factual inaccuracies, but I think the accounts referenced are still fairly well documented.