Currently?
Command authority is not at all limited to officers, and is in fact based in law. An NCO has command authority over subordinates by virtue of his/her position. The authority comes from the position, not from a President’s commission. And, while officers can delegate some authorities to NCOs, this is not the source of all NCO command authority. If that were the case, “disobeying a noncommissioned officer” would not be part of UCMJ Art. 91, since disobeying the NCO would always just be indirectly disobeying an officer. This happens to be the case with “General Military Authority”. If a PFC tells a PVT, or even a SPC, to fix his/her uniform or go shave, or button his/her pockets, or remove his/her hands from their pockets, etc., failure to obey that PFC would be chargeable under Article 92 for failure to obey a Regulation, not for failure to obey a PFC. If all NCO authority came from officers, then disobeying an NCO would work the same way.
Thinking about it further, my current position is a perfect example of this. My rater and senior rater (boss and boss’s boss) are both civilians. I am an NCO with other NCOs of identical rank under me. By virtue of my position, it is their legal duty to do things I tell them, and to do it the way I tell them, provided it is related to the accomplishment of the mission. The authority is limited, but it exists. And it exists even with no officers within the organization.
I am well aware of what Article 91 says. It does not define an NCO nor does it grant an NCO any sort of authority. It presumes that authority already exists.
Can you or Monty point me to a law, UCMJ or civilian that explicitly says NCOs have command authority intrinsic to their rank that is not positional based on their duties?
I can point you to several publications that go into great detail about the history of NCOs and where they get their authority from. Not a single one references in the slightest any law other than Art. 91.
Here is a book from the Joint Cheifs of Staff
Pdf warning
“Through the direction of the Office of the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, this book was written by a team of enlisted leaders representing the U.S.
Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard with the participation and support of
the National Defense University”
Nowhere in this book was I able to find a single sentence referencing a law that establishes the authority of an NCO. It does go into great detail about how NCOs got their authority, but there are no laws that I can find. Every single publication I have ever seen explicitly states that an NCO’s command authority is delegated, positional, dependant upon duties, derived from the officers above etc.
Please, point me to the law that grants an NCO or PO command authority
Eta Bear Nenno, you just said it yourself, “by virtue of my postion, it is their legal duty to do things I tell them”
It doesn’t matter if your rater and senior rater are civilians, somewhere there is an officer in your chain of command from whence your authority is derived. Remove you from that job and those other NCOs do not have to do what you tell them even if you remain in that unit.
Do I do what my 1SG tells me? Damn right, same with my platoon sergeant and squad leader. That SFC in charge if 2nd Platoon? Probably not. Depends on the circumstances. That 2nd Lieutenant who is the platoon leader for 2nd Platoon, probably yes unless I’m busy with another task at the moment.
Yes. That’s exactly what I said. What is so hard to understand about that? An NCO can derive legal authority solely from their position. That is what Monty and I have said. You have disagreed and stated that the authority has to come from an officer, and that all NCO authority is in fact derived from an officer in that NCO’s chain of command. That isn’t true. That is one source of an NCO’s authority, but not all of it. A lot of it is derived from the position. But, it’s not exactly just the position. An NCO in a team leader position has legal authority that a SPC serving in the same position does not have. If your argument was correct, then this would not be the case. Can you explain why the legal charges are different when a PFC disobeys his SGT team leader, than when a PFC disobeys his SPC team leader? If the authority comes from the officer, then it shouldn’t be different. If the authority comes solely from the position, then it shouldn’t be different because they’re both in the same position.
The truth is that being a noncommissioned officer allows you to derive certain authorities by virtue of your position. PFCs, PVTs and SPCs cannot do this. Why do you think that is?
You have not addressed what I said about Article 91. And now that I’ve pointed that out to you, your response is, “any law other than Art. 91”. If NCO authority was similar to general military authority, then it would not be illegal to disobey an NCO. Disobedience to an NCO would just be charged under Article 92, since it was the officer’s order that was being “disobeyed”, and the NCO was just the messenger. That is not how NCO authority works. But, that is how general military authority works. There is no law for disobeying someone who uses general military authority to correct something you are doing. If you disobey, then you will be charged for violating the regulation or order that you were in violation of in the first place. You won’t be charged with disobeying that PFC’s general military authority. However, if your NCO is the one who corrects your violation, and you refuse, then you can be charged under both articles: for disobeying the NCO and for violating the regulation in the first place. Explain how that is possible if an NCO has no legal authority beyond what an officer delegates to him? Did no one teach you about the Charge of the NCO? The part where it says, “I understand that Soldiers of lesser rank are required to obey my lawful orders.” But you’re saying NCOs can’t give lawful orders, they can only wield the authority of their supervising officer? That’s just incorrect.
So you admit that they have it, then? “Positional” is different than “delegated”. Those are two different ways that an NCO gains his/her authority. While an officer can delegate authority to an NCO, that is not the only source of an NCO’s authority. An officer is not required. The NCO’s authority ultimately comes from the Secretary of the Army. The officer’s authority comes from the Commander in Chief.
I am retired, but the law does not differ.
I have to say, during my entire service I never once wondered about the legal basis of my orders. I followed orders because we had a job to do, and they were in charge. That’s how the system works.
However, when I questioned why the President’s picture should be hung in military establishments (it struck me as rather 3rd world), I was told that it was because he was top of the command chain.
Isn’t the President’s picture usually hung in all government buildings? When all’s said and done, the military are just federal employees.
That’s exactly it- the officers have the legal authority to command lower ranking members of the military, while NCOs derive it from the officers.
You’d think that maybe in extremis, an NCO or lesser ranking officer could take command and keep the ship/company/etc… fighting, but you’re incorrect.
William Sitgreaves Cox - Wikipedia
Basically the captain of the ship was incapacitated, and enough other officers had also been killed or incapacitated that when the captain was wounded, this guy was the commanding officer of the ship, and he had gone down with the captain. He was subsequently court-martialed and convicted for dereliction of duty for not being on the deck and commanding the ship.
That’s the difference between having that command authority and not- if one of the CPOs on the ship was out of place like that, they might have punished him in some fashion, but it would have been a Captain’s mast sort of deal, not something that would have got him discharged in disgrace.
Of course they have it, that was never the question. The question was where does the authority come from? In this case, positional and delegated are synonymous. The 1SG has positional authority, it is delegated to him as the CO’s representative/ agent etc. The 1SG is responsible for the finer details discipline and training of the soldiers or sailors under him in the CO’s stead, allowing the CO to focus on “the larger picture”. Take that E8 out of that picture and he no longer has that authority as he is no longer the CO’s representative in those matters. He’s just another very senior soldier.
If you study what’s out there, you’d realize that “NCO” is a thing that exists by tradition, need, and regulation, is barely recognized, without definition, in the UCMJ. There were a couple of acts passed by congress(I can’t seem to find them now) in the early 20th century establishing various pay grade systems (the second one replaced the first with the pay grade system in use today) but those are related to pay, not rank or authority.
However, I believe that the drill sergeants explicitly do not want to be addressed as “sir,” because “I work for a living.”
Do they actually say that? Because it sounds like they’re teaching the trainees to disrespect officers.
In the US military, in the Army, unlike in the Marines, you are to address your Drill Sergeants as exactly that: Drill Sergeant and God have mercy if you forget the “Drill”. The policy in the Army is to learn from Day One to use the standard forms of address rather than use “Sir” for training NCOs. Countering the presumption spread by Hollywood thanks to the Marines’ superior publicity/media placement machine becomes something of a task for them (*)
“I work for a living” is a commonly conveyed caricature, but not one I heard that often IRL – a way of signifying that the NCOs are higher-ranking workers rather than management.
(* anecdote: at one point an officer walked up to us trainees. Someone shouted “ten-hut!” Drill Sgt. with faux indignation proclaimed: “What, do we have Marines here? Who the hell here lives in a tin hut??”)
Right, but it also seems to imply that officers - who ARE referred to as “sir” - don’t work for a living, which halfway to calling them lazy bums. That seems very disrespectful, and also, in my experience, highly inaccurate.
I don’t know exactly what it means in a military context - but in a non-military context, what it usually means is that what those other people do all day isn’t really work , at least not in the same way that the speaker works. You wouldn’t hear an accountant say it to a manager - but you might hear a plumber say it to his brother in law the accountant.
IME “I’m not a Sir; I work for a living” is a wry comment NCO’s might share among themselves. Or use in a joking way at a junior enlisted person who just made a conversational goof and absent-mindedly called a Sergeant “Sir”.
You’re not going to hear boot camp instructors, regardless of service or job title, saying something like that to recruits in training.
There is a saying in the military. “In any encounter, the senior never thinks of his relative position. And the junior never forgets it.”
That is sound logic. As a junior officer my job was to accommodate myself to the demands of my superiors and to express my wants and needs to my subordinates in a way they could succeed. If everyone plays the game as the proverb says, everything runs smoothly and all the overbearing moronic incompetent “because I said so” BS that passes for “management” in civilian life simply doesn’t happen.
It’s generally only folks with purely civilian experience who recoil in horror at the strict hierarchy inherent in the military.
Because, IMO, they’re assuming taking terrible civilian management and overlaying untrammeled statutory authority on top of the psychopathy. When the military reality is generally instead of, not in addition to, the incompetence and psychopathy. Both personal psychopathy and institutional psychopathy.
Well, in the misty, ancient days of yore, mid 1990s, when I was in BCT(Basic Combat Training) for the US Army, we were very explicity trained to never address anyone but officers and folks in civilian clothes that were unknown to us as Sir or Ma’am. Everyone else was to be address as Private or Corporal or Specialist or Sergeant or First Sergeant, (Top in some less formal situations if the 1SG didn’t object) or Sergeant Major, and as was said, make damn sure you don’t forget the title Drill when addressing a Drill Sergeant. Marines seem to be different based on the documentary videos I’ve seen, but I can’t speak with any authority on them, or any of the other branches.
Took me damn near six weeks to stop calling my 1SG, Drill Sergeant at least once a day, when I got to my first duty station
I’m gonna bet you weren’t alone in making that little goof. 