With regard to specialist ranks, there is a split in authority between Corporals and Specialists Fourth Grade. The Corporal is a non-commissioned officer and a Specialist isn’t. Disobedience of or disrespect of or assaulting a Corporal is a big deal. Doing so to, of or on a Specialist is a lesser deal. For instance when you blow off a SP4 it is at worse a general disobedience, not disobedience of a superior officer or non-commissioned office. The NCO offense gets you 45 days in the stockade, reduction to PV1 and maybe a Bad Conduct Discharge. The SP4 gets you two weeks confinement to the company area and loss of half your pay for two weeks on an Article 15 from the company commander. It’s all sorts of fun when a SP4 (or in the old days a SP5) is wearing NCO stripes on a temporary appointment, an Acting Jack. The guy still ain’t an NCO.
The old specialist system was a nifty way to give long service soldiers a kick up in pay and privileges without filling NCO slots that are limited by tables of organization and equipment. Many mess sergeants and administrative people in finance, personnel, legal and medical services were high number specialists. I knew any number of SP5s, SP6s and at least one SP7 in the legal offices I served in.
It has always been my understanding that an officer cannot be reduced in rank by a court-marital or nonjudicial punishment.
However, the article appears to imply that a reduction in rank can be effected by a separate “administrative action,” which admittedly may be a distinction without a difference.
In addition to mere time in service, there are also three paygrades (O-1E, O-2E, and O-3E), in which commissioned officers with prior enlisted experience (at least 4 years’ worth) can potentially be paid more than commissioned officers without prior enlisted time. (Commissioned officers with no prior enlisted service would be in the normal officer paygrades of O-1, O-2, and O-3.)
Actually, though, you don’t see any difference in the current paycharts for the rate of basic pay (between O-3 and O-3E, for example) until you get beyond 14 years of service, and very few officers without prior enlisted service would ever still be an O-3 with this much time in service.
Much of the work in the world is done by low ranking people both in and out of the military. While more and more of the business world’s work is done by machines, we still need many privates to shoot enemy privates.
So what did Scotty do? Did he mainly verify the beams were in good working order and put the robots to work if not? I don’t remember anybody turning wrenches or swabbing the deck. I don’t remember anybody doing much enlisted men typically do. So why not all officers?
The original series did have Yeomen, which seemed to sort of be catch-all enlisted personnel, perhaps the only enlisted rank in the highly egalitarian Starfleet. We stopped seeing them after STVI chronologically though.
The main reason I didn’t think the lack of enlisted men made sense is that it meant that everyone went to the academy. Would you really want to have someone trained in astrometrics cleaning floors?
I’d actually say the only real set rank was admiral. Every admiral seemed to have a desk job. As pointed out, there were captains who did not captain ships, and commanders who did.