# What's the advantage of having commissioned vs. noncommissioned officers? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 5, 2021, 9:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-advantage-of-having-commissioned-vs-noncommissioned-officers/929746 "2021-01-05T21:29:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 21
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2021, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-advantage-of-having-commissioned-vs-noncommissioned-officers/929746/21 "2021-01-06T14:47:04Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > Right, but - by this analogy, why can’t all doctors be former nurses, now promoted? (militarily speaking) Mostly a matter of education. The working career is intended to be just 20 years long because you don’t want a military full of graybeards like myself. Look to civilian medicine. There are certainly plenty of 30 yo nurses with 4 or 6 years of education and 6 or 4 years of practical experience who have the moxie to become MDs. But not the desire to interrupt their life and their income for the 10 or 12 years of being a full-time student / trainee they’d need to become a fully practicing post-residency MD. A secondary matter is the fundamental difference between managing and doing. There are people who want to do and have no interest or aptitude in managing. There are also people who want to manage and have no interest or aptitude in doing. Putting either kind of person in the other role is a recipe for disaster. Returning briefly to the MD/nurse example … There are many nurses who chafe at the over-supervision and under-autonomy of their skilled position, yet are profoundly uninterested in becoming MDs even if the process were easier. Because the nature of the work is very different. See also further below my answers to these next quoted posts. > [@MichaelEmouse](#): > > … > What would be the civilian equivalent of a US warrant officer? As said by @DrDeth, warrants are intended to be the high-skill technician roles that aren’t in the management pyramid. > [@MichaelEmouse](#): > > … > Could E-7 also be considered a chief of staff? If not, what would be the military equivalent of a chief of staff at various levels? As I said at the beginning of my post, the terms manager, superintendent, foreman, and worker, are generic terms from the industrial side of commerce. In more office-y environments you’ll have "team lead"s, not foremen. But they do the same work. I don’t know that the term “Chief of staff” is all that well-defined. But to the degree it represents an assistant to the manager in formal charge of a hunk of the pyramid whose tasks are mostly about interfacing to the actual doers, not the supporters, it certainly fits. Returning to the big picture: The military has a couple of problems the civilians lack. A big one is that they cannot hire into the middle of their pyramid. They hire only entry-level people and everybody moves up from that entry level. By having officers, WOs, and enlisted (which includes NCOs), they essentially break the big monolithic pyramid into 3 smaller stacked pyramids. That provides a way to hire new young people as junior officers but into the upper-middle of the complete pyramid. The other big one is that rank = paycheck and paycheck = rank. By and large you can look at someone’s collar or sleeve and know their monthly pay to within a few dollars. Imagine if that was true where you work. Would that it were so! The problem is that different skills command vastly different wages on the outside. Which means there is a problem paying enough for high-demand skills. There are things like extra pay for doctors, lawyers, pilots, and now some IT types. But the overarching system is tied to rank = paycheck = rank. WOs can be thought of as a way to solve some of that, by carving out a layer for well-paid journeymen. But it’s still stuck at a wage level that corresponds to well-paid journeymen in industry, not in fancy office work like IT or research. This thread from 2016 has lots of useful information on point: > [@The Atlantic: U.S. military personnel practices causing brain drain](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-atlantic-u-s-military-personnel-practices-causing-brain-drain/768503): > > In a lot of threads about the military on these forums, it has been mentioned that the U.S. military has an “up-or-out” policy for officers. That is, each successive higher rank has fewer slots and an officer who fails to get promoted when that promotion time is due has to leave the service. In this article in The Atlantic, the authors propose that the military’s personnel practices are, in fact, forcing out the very officers that they need to keep: I know very little about how the milita… My substantive post is #28 in that thread. Be sure to read @spifflog’s contributions as well. He was then a senior Pentagon officer involved in deciding exactly these sorts of policy issues. Here’s another post of mine from the middle of another 2016 thread on a related topic. > [@Are all military pilots officers (non-NCO)?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-all-military-pilots-officers-non-nco/751917/67): > > OK, him: either he or the green 2LT better better put their coffee down when they pass or there’ll be trouble. Just guessing here. And another from 2014: > [@Hierarchy on military officers' alma mater](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/hierarchy-on-military-officers-alma-mater/701618/3): > > Former USAF officer & fighter pilot. … But I only made Captain (O-3) during my 8-ish year career and I came from ROTC. So I don’t have personal experience of the high ranks. Here’s my take FWIW … \*Right now \*the Generals in charge are mostly former fighter types. It’s called the “Fighter Mafia.” But in the 1950s-1970s it was mostly the bomber guys who were in charge; being a fighter pilot was not the route to 4-star Generalship. Over the 1980s the fighter guys slowly took over. I suspect th… And directly about education versus the layers from 2015: > [@Education and military officers](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/education-and-military-officers/725115): > > While reading about officer training schools (the ones that train enlisted military to be officers), it surprised me that they require candidates to have bachelor’s degrees. So it got me wondering: –Why? Doesn’t that exclude a lot of high quality potential officers? –When did this requirement start? –Is there any way enlisted men without college education could become officers? --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-the-advantage-of-having-commissioned-vs-noncommissioned-officers/929746)._