Most importantly, is that there are a limited (and nowadays, often shrinking) number of billets in the military. If a Captain refuses to promote, then he is not only not advancing himself, but he is standing in the way of a Lieutenant who could be advancing if only there was one more available slot to promote into.
Thank you for so perfectly and succinctly stating why I would never make a good military man. The notion that someone who can find a job they enjoy doing and are good at doing and would happily go on doing that job without promotion is somehow defective is totally insane to me.
You can in France. Even though the wide majority of officers who began their carreer as enlisted personnel or NCOs indeed applied to officer training at some point (there are two possible “points”), there are some grey-haired junior officers. In fact, they’re promoted directly to first lieutenant, not second lieutenant. If I did my maths correctly (minimal age for such a promotion, time in rank for promotion, age and time in service limits, etc…) the highest they can expect to achieve is captain in a command position (company, obviously). Not that bad if you begin as a private and don’t attend any school.
They’re called “rank officers” (meaning officer promoted from an enlisted rank). I’d be curious to know how they’re perceived in the military by comparison with their fellow officers.
Hey, you and me both. I never felt the urge to go on to officer’s course.
I worked with a retired E9 from the Navy. While in the Navy he worked for and got his masters degree. His detailer was always pressuring him to take a commission. He told me hisl normal responce was along the lines of What do you think I am stupid. As a E9 he was chief of the boat No one not even the smart captians gave him any grief. If became an officer it woulod be as a junior officer and everyone gave them shit.
One of my brothers, whose ambition stops at reaching the top NCO rank, summed this up thus “Better being a big fish among the small ones than a small fish among the big ones”
Master Chiefs commanded far more respect then any junior officer. Though on a Carrier we had many Master Chiefs and it was the Command Master Chief that was that important. When I got to the Ranger, The Command Master Chief had actually served in WWII. I found this mind boggling. He went from the Ranger to be the Fleet Master Chief but he missed out making Master Chief of the Navy. I wish I could recall his name. He was an impressive old gent. He served over 45 years at least. His wife retired an E8 apparently at only 30 years of service. He joked that she wasn’t in it for the long haul. 
In a similar vein, when I was at Corry Station, just down the road from Pensacola back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I crossed paths with a Senior Chief (E-8) Several days later I saw him wearing the uniform and rank insignia of an E-1 Seaman. I never could figure out how you annoy the Navy enough to bust you clear down to the basement yet not kick you out entirely (I sure as hell didn’t have the courage to ask him). I could only figure it was so he could stay in a bit longer and get to draw retirement pay, albeit considerably lower than it would have been.
What some of you may not be getting is the competition for promotion. There may be (say) 100 slots open for promotion, and 1000 officers eligible for promotion. If you’re on the board that’s looking at the prospective Majors, for example, who do you choose for the next level of leadership? The ones that are content. or the ones with the extra drive to advance? Dunno about you, but I’ll go for the latter.
But then, you ask, why not keep the content ones in their current slots? 'Cuz there’s about 3000 guys below them, of which a good percentage are not content, and who would be as good in the content man’s slot, and probably better. There’s a lot of people involved, and pretty much nobody’s so good they can’t be replaced.
IIRC Maj. Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Little Round Top, groused in his memoirs that virtually every top officer in the Army of the Potomac who asked for a brevet promotion in the weeks after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was given one. A whole raft of bird colonels became brevet brigadier generals after most of the fighting was done (granted, some of them had been bearing the responsibilities of BGs by then).
“While the MCPON is a non-commissioned officer, the billet is protocol equivalent to a three-star vice admiral.”
Yeah, just a tiny amount of respect. 
Before I started meeting people who were actually in the military, I always assumed that billets/jobs/assignments/postings were one thing and rank was a separate thing. Why are assignments tied to a specific rank, instead of a range of ranks? I should think that the budget people would set the specific number of people needed for assignments and then allow there to be flexibility – based on merit, or seniority, or whatever – regarding exactly how many people there are at each rank level.
You are confusing normal E9s with the one and only Master Chief of the Navy. There are many E9s. All are Master Chiefs. Then there are a few Fleet Master Chiefs (still E9s) and one single Master Chief of the Navy.
“If it makes perfect sense, then it must not be Air Force policy.”
Various billets are tied to various requirements such as rank and skill level (actually, the skill levels more often than not coincide with particular ranks; it just kinda works out that way). They figure “This billet needs someone at X rank level and Y skill level” The skill level, of course, is because they need someone of a certain competency if they are going to, say, run a shop or lead a company.
The rank is a set thing because they are going to have a certain number of people of a certain set of ranks under them. You don’t want a setup where a Captain is going to be running a company where he doesn’t outrank the Platoon commanders under him, because that causes issues of seniority (sometimes disputes really do come down to who’s got the biggest pe- er… paygrade.)
Plus, you know, it confuses us enlisted kids.
But yeah, as has been indicated elsewhere, a LT is not going to get busted down to an NCO paygrade because NCOs have a certain flavor of seniority over Lieutenants, owing to their experience. Woe unto the overly-proud Second Lieutenant who mistakenly thinks he has the ability to pull rank on a Master Sergeant simply by nature of outranking him.
Incidentally, one of the jobs of the NCO is to keep the younger Officers from doing anything too stupid. Never countermanding his authority, but often taking him aside to provide him with some constructive input.
EDIT to add: “An NCO in motion outranks an Officer at rest. A bomb disposal technician waving his arms at a dead sprint outranks everybody.”
Referring back to Star Trek, it seemed like many of the senior jobs – chief engineer, security chief, chief helmsman, chief science officer, first officer, etc. – could be staffed by lieutenants, lieutenant commanders, or commanders. The only set rank was that the captain was a captain, which, I am given to understand, is not true in the U.S. Navy.
This last part is correct. A small ship could be commanded by someone as low ranking as a Lt. Cmdr (O4) and a Carrier is likely to have more than one person ranked as a Captain (O6). I believe at one point we had, The Captain, The XO was a Captain, the Air Boss was a Captain and then the CHENG made Captain but was transferred fairly quick after the promotion. Now the one general practice was to now refer to anyone but the Captain as Captain. Our Marine Detachment (MarDet) was commanded by a Captain which is only an O3 as the Marines use generally the same ranks as the Army. As commander of the MarDet he was referred to as Major instead to avoid the issue of their is only one Captain on the Ship.
BTW: One of our Captains was I believe one of the first Black Admirals when he was promoted. I thought that was pretty cool as everyone seemed to like him.
ETA: I should add that he (Capt. Walter J. Davis) was the Captain of the Ranger when Star Trek IV was filmed on board. I believe he got a thank you in the credits.
Not a ship, but Ben Sisko was a Commander when he took command of DS9. He wasn;t made a Captain till season 2 I think.
And Warf is often put in charge of the Defiant, though he is not the rank of Captain.
And Gene Roddenberry’s idea was that everyone in Star Fleet is an officer. No enlisted men. After his death, this idea was pretty much done away with, because it made no since.
Why? There’s nothing mandatory about the split between officers and non-officers. What if ranks stopped at “Chief Master Sergeant Major, First Class”? There would still be a clear rank system, without the institutional divide between officers and non-officers.
It made no sense because the organization of Starfleet was clearly based on Anglo-American military tradition in every other respect, and the institutional divide between officers and enlisted is a time-tested and proven method for organizing a navy.
There are plenty of other ways in which the Star Trek diverged widely from modern Anglo-American practices. You might disagree with the impact of such a choice, but it makes no sense to say that it “makes no sense.”