At least from the 20th century on, I also think it is fair to say that higher ranking individuals have been “more commonly” in direct combat as part of their ordinary duties in the USAF / USAAF and USN, essentially due to the nature of those services. All military pilots are officers, and this has created a bit of a different norm in the rank structure–in WWII it wasn’t unusual for LTC (O-5) to be piloting bombers which is intrinsically a combat mission. The Navy basically has always exposed among its highest-ranking people to direct combat since there is typically some rank of Admiral on the flagship of a fleet. In WWII that was often a Rear Admiral. In WWI’s most famous naval battle–The Battle of Jutland, a full British Admiral (John Jellicoe) on the HMS Iron Duke was in direct combat with the German High Seas Fleet–whose commander Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer was on his flagship SMS Friedrich der Grosse, Jellicoe’s ship engaged in direct fire with SMS Koenig during the battle.
Aha! I found something.
HyperWar: Army Battle Casualties and Nonbattle Deaths in WW II [Battle Casualties] (ibiblio.org)
It looks like the real divisions are between lieutenants and captains, and then again between captains and majors, and between lieutenant colonels and majors.
Most US Army helicopters these days are piloted by warrant officers, not commissioned officers, aren’t they?
Still officers, just with a different source that they derive their authority from.
The Army makes very heavy use of Warrant Officers in aviation and technical fields, but they are never referred to or considered anything other than officers in the military. They have their own Officer Candidate School, and are considered to outrank all enlisted ranks. They just are not commissioned, which has a specific legal foundation, and they are outranked by the lowest ranked commissioned officer, but they are still officers yes.
Note also that in the Army all ranks of Sergeant and above are considered non-commissioned officers, warrants out rank all NCOs. The big thing too that distinguishes warrant officers and NCOs and makes warrants even more akin to commissioned officers is the specific OCS for warrant officers, and the fact they generally tie into highly specialized fields. NCOs can and often are just regular enlisted soldiers who have worked up their steady rank progression. Becoming a Warrant Officer isn’t something where you get enlisted and just get promoted into it, if you’re going from enlistment to WO you still have to attend the WO OCS, and similar to commissioned officers you can be direct inducted into the Army through WO OCS if you’re going into certain fields, particularly the aviation and technical fields.
One common way to understand how the Army at least uses them is they fill job roles that can’t be easily filled through the normal Army recruitment process of enlisted men, and that often involve special skills that need to be trained/acquired, but who may not overlap with the type of person who is interested in a career as a commissioned officer.
Which you’d also have to normalize for relative numbers in each tier — per each colonel you’ve a whole load of lieutenants to begin with.
It reflects what was mentioned earlier about immediacy — in the combat arms, lieutenants are right there in the line, captains slightly back, not as easy a shot, majors and LTCs back at batallion command… But there is a other factor there: experience. Lieutenants fresh from Academy/ROTC or “90 day wonders” recruited directly into OCS, well… they’re green. They have not finished the How Not To Die course.
….
BTW re: Warrant Officers. Nowadays, the classic “Warrant” applies to Army and Marine WO1s any more. When someone makes WO2 it comes with a commission.
Maybe a hijack, but suppose a general officer decides to go all Patton and lead on the front lines, could any 2, 3, or 4 star do such a thing or would it be countermanded, by the President if need be?
[Apocalypse Now!]
Captain Willard:
Who’s the commanding officer here, soldier?
Infantryman:
Ain’t you?
[/Apocalypse Now!]
This is very well put.
In the recent wars, ISTM (although I could very well be wrong) there just hasn’t been that much action where whole battalions were committed to a single engagement, at the intensity of Vietnam or earlier wars.
At D-Day, at least Two generals hit the beach. Roosevelt and Cota.
King Albert of Belgium fought in the front lines. You don’t get much higher ranking than that.
Major General James N. Mattis, liked to get into combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
If you go back about 1000 or so years, kings were expected to fight in the front lines.
Desert Storm. Colonel [don’t ever call him Commander Cody when he’s in ear shot] Cody was qualified with the Apache and regularly took part in training shoots with Hellfire missiles, rockets, and the 30mm gun. When his unit (part of 101st Air Assault) went over the border first to take out radars and communication sites, he was specifically ordered NOT to participate. He supposedly never received the order (that’s the story and he was sticking to it). He was highly respected by his troops.
A lot of the examples here are of officers putting themselves in harm’s way by personal initiative. What’s the highest rank that’s likely to be “ordered” into battle? I’m sticking with my earlier guess at colonels and navy captains in special forces.
Special forces, hell — any Navy Captain in charge of a combatant capital ship.
Sure, but how likely is a capital ship (or any Navy ship) to be engaged in direct combat these days - or even in the last fifty years?
It’s reasonably likely if we go to war with a country that has decent anti-ship missiles. The British lost several ships in the Falklands, and we likely would have as well if we were prosecuting a conflict like that. Surface combatant ships are front line combat in naval warfare. The fact we don’t fight the kind of wars where naval warfare like that breaks out as much IMO doesn’t make them a non-combatant role. If we were doing operations in the Persian Gulf against Iran, it’s very likely they get some lucky hits on some ships, for example.
Speaking of the Falklands, the CO of cruiser Belgrano, sunk by a RN sub, was a full Captain.
Forty years ago. If the last half century is any gauge, a modern USN ship commander is not “likely” to see front-line combat.
If China were to invade Taiwan, for example, then there would be front-line combat by USN ships.
Right I mean it’s entirely about what military we are fighting in a war, it’s not about how many years have passed since X. I assure you there is nothing magical about modern naval ships that makes them non-combatant targets; it’s just we’ve been fighting wars against countries that have no meaningful naval countermeasure. About the closest we’ve seen is some of the tensions from Iran in the 1980s, they did get one of our ships with some of their minelayers when they laid a mine over a part of the Persian Gulf that had just recently been patrolled, when the ship came back through it hit a recently laid mine. Reagan ended up performing a few surgical strikes on Iran as a “punitive measure”, and things didn’t escalate beyond that point.
Iran has invested a lot of time, effort and money into finding ways to potentially “kill” big American ships if it ever came to war, knowing we’d have naval assets in the Persian Gulf. It’s likely their success rate would end up being quite low, but it is unlikely IMO it would be zero.
@TokyoBayer mentions the Taiwan Strait–I see very little realistic possibility if us and PRC go to war there both sides won’t have a number of ships lost to antiship missiles. For the countries that deploy advanced antiship missile systems, I think they have simply gotten too good, too fast, for any Navy to seriously hope its surface ships will be terribly safe during a shoot war.