Why are militaries divided along officer/enlisted lines?

Factual Questions
21

No.

The Lt knows his place, the CSM knows his. The LT runs his platoon. The CSM is the Battalion Commander’s right hand man. He doesn’t usually deal with officers at all, except his boss and the battalion executive officer (or chief of staff depending on the level of command). The Lt and CSM are not in the same chain of command. In fact the CSM is not in the chain of command at all. Any LT I have ever met will listen very carefully to any “suggestions” made by a Sergeant Major. If he doesn’t he will hear from the battalion commander very quickly.

FTR I never had a Sergeant Major call me sir. It is always Leutenant or LT.

22

Loach is correct–in a literal fashion. Yes, the CSM (an E-9) is usually in an advisory role, same with CMSgts (Chief Master Sergeants). But speaking in general terms of a young officer and an old, experienced NCO, yes it does happen.

Tripler
Okay, now I’m down to 94 cents.

23

In my experience (Army/Armor) the CSM mostly doesn’t deal with platoon level crap. The mentoring usually comes from the platoon sergeant or first sergeant level. The CSM is worried more about battalion level stuff and logistics.

24

As a brand new 2nd Lt, I was (just barely) wise enough to ask for and rely on the advice and expertise of my middle and higher level NCOs. I owe a great deal to those many professional military men for their immensely important help in not only meeting the mission, but teaching me how to be a better officer.

As I advanced in rank, the distinctions in officer/NCO became both greater and less. I moved more in the direction of long term goals and logistics/support, so my direct contact with large numbers of enlisted men lessened…but at the same time, the very senior NCOs that I worked with were very much a partnership, albeit one in which I bore the responsibility. It was much more of a team underneath the observed hierarchy of rank.

To be there is to understand; I haven’t really been able to explain the “brotherhood” to my relatives and friends. Guess you have to experience it.

The folks I remember best from my military service years were many NCOs and just a few officers. Thanks to you all.

25

That’s got nothing to do with the blurring in education… any supervisor who doesn’t listen to his more-experienced underling is an idiot. The supervisor still has to make the decisions, but “input from experienced people” is a variable that shouldn’t be disregarded.

One of my great-grandfather’s officers (they met when the CO was a colonel, he later made general) used to ask his NCOs and lower-rank officers for opinions and ideas, when there was time for it. He used this, among other things, to see who looked like he should be studying for the tests leading to his new promotion. And even though by the time great-grandpa met him the CO was already an experienced officer, sometimes the best idea came from someone relatively junior… most times no, but hey, why discard resources beforehand.

26

There are units where rank distinctions seem to an outsider more or less nonexistant .
First name terms,badges of rank not usually worn,no saluting and officers ,n.c.o.s and other ranks mingling socially.

These outfits work effectively because every single person involved is very highly motivated ,have made great sacrifices to get into the unit and and are aware that if they “take the piss” out of the informality they will be returned to their original unit ,a punishment feared more then any other .

But I dont think it would work in more every day type outfits.

27

So what do warrant officers do?

28

Also officers are not allowed to “fraternize” with the enlisted, because the military doesn’t want the officers to get chummy with men whom thy might have to send to their deaths.

29

NCOs cannot fraternize with lower enlisted either. This isn’t something reserved for the “officer/enlisted” relationship. It’s the “leader/follower” relationships. Even corporations have similar rules and it has absolutely nothing to do with sending people off to die.

30

They are experts in their field rather than generic leaders. A commisioned officer is expected to be able to lead any type of troop regardless of if they are in his branch or not. A warrant is usually a long time NCO who gets accepted to warrant officer school. They are generally not called on for command positions but are in charge of specialized sections. For instance one would be a battalion motor officer or run a personel section or be the movement officer for a large unit. There are a lot fewer branches that warrant officers can belong to. There are no combat arms warrants (infantry, armor, artillery, engineers). Off the top of my head warrants can only be quatermaster (supply), personnel, finance, transportation, intelligence and which ever one I am forgeting. In the army the largest amount of warrants are in aviation but for a whole different reason. Most pilots are warrants which makes sense to me. They can concentrate on flying and not worry about which merit badges they need to get a promotion, like the commisioned officers do.

31

There’s an old saying “familiarity breeds contempt”. When you lead, you always need to find that balance between being a “man of the people” and putting yourself on a pedestal as an example to follow.

32

Very old thread to bump up, but in the Pakistan Army on his second day a new 2nd Lt is told to turn in his pips and go live as an enlisted man (depending on regiment) for up to 6 months, so he can learn. I understand that ours being a British-style regimental system may be different from the States, but here a unit is considered unfit for many reasons, one of the biggest is shortage of NCO’s.

Also the thing about the Sov armys dependance on officers, common in conscript militaries. I heard of some training we did with Iranians back in the earlly 90’s the lack of junior leadership was something many of our guys noted.

33

Prolly for the same reason you wont find many good players becoming coaches.

34

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
I don’t think there was any real attempt to eliminate officer/enlisted divisions in the Red Army after the it was formed from the Red Guard. Despite Trotsky’s efforts to eliminate class barriers, awaken the political consciousness of conscripts, et ceter, the command structure and NCO corps of the Red Army were largely drawn from the Imperial Russian Army. The Red Army was shattered by the bloody purges of the 1930s, with the NCO corps particularly damaged. As a result, the Soviet Army was always top-heavy with officers who often performed the duties that were nominally the responsibilities of NCOs in Western armies.
[/QUOTE]

What you describe happened, but that was later when the system proved unworkable and inefficient. You are forgetting the long Lenin/early Stalin period. The Red Army was completely reformed following the COmmunist takeover. All inherent rank was abolished and officers were defined solely by their roles; that is, if your job determined your rank.

35

Everyone needs to specialize in order to do something well. Enlisted soldiers generally specialize in some concrete task. The best specialists in that task go on to become NCO’s, who manage and mentor others in doing that task. General management is its own task specialization, and this is what officers specialize in. It’s necessary to have rank ladders that accomodate both career paths. Management by necessity has to outrank the task specialists.

In addition to this, there’s other sundry concerns that have already been mentioned, such as fraternizing with men you might need to order into serious physical hazard, the implicit class distinction of the more educated vs. the less educated, those being groomed for much higher levels of responsibility, etc. But overall I see it as the need for separating career and rank paths between management specialists and task specialists.

36

[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Although there is no such explicit caste system in the United States, officers are almost exclusively drawn from the military academies and Reserve Officer Training Corps, whereas the modern British Army and Royal Navy make a concerted effort to commission from the ranks.

Stranger
[/QUOTE]

You shouldn’t forget Officer Candidate School, it’s one way some enlisted men move up. It also used to not be unheard of for people to get “battlefield commissions.” I’m not aware of any battlefield commission in my entire time in the U.S. Army and I don’t think it was done at all during Vietnam, either. Now, if someone wants to make a jump from enlisted to officer OCS is the typical path (going to college and joining ROTC would work, too.)

OCS of course also accepts college graduates with no military experience whatsoever.

37

[QUOTE=Shamozzle]
With the blurring of the line between officers and enlisted persons, is it common for conflict to arise between say a bright, young officer and a sergeant major who’s seen it all?
[/QUOTE]

This conflict is everywhere in military dramas. I don’t know how realistic it is – I was a technical officer who had very little command authority and almost no interaction with enlisted personnel. Nonetheless, two examples spring to mind:

At the beginning of Aliens notice that it’s the (very green) Lt. Gorman giving orders from the command center, but the troops are crawling through the tunnels and dying as a result of his idiocy. When things go south, the senior enlisted members save the mission from being a total wipe. Later, Ripley’s suggestion to “nuke the site from orbit” is shouted down by the corporate minder… but then she points out that it’s a military mission and that command should fall to Corporal (!) Hicks. He echoes her suggestion, recognizing that experience gets more than one vote.

In A Few Good Men there is plenty of officer/enlisted tension too. LT Kaffee (in this case LT is an O-3) is a JAG who’s never seen the inside of a courtroom, and he is put in charge of the defense of two enlisted Marine riflemen who have screwed up bad during an operational tour. LT Kaffee leads the legal team. He isn’t as bound to the rank structure as the Marines are: in the JAG system, anyone with a law degree is at least an O-3 (making Kaffee a small fry). By contrast, his clients have been trained to act as though an O-3 has been sent by God Himself to instruct Marines, and that God Himself is an O-6. The Marines are forced to respect his rank but barely conceal their contempt for Kaffee’s leadership – it’s one of the best distillations of the officer/enlisted divide I’ve seen on film.

38

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
There are some specialist jobs that are always officers…pilots, doctors, lawyers and suchlike. Judging from reruns of MASH, even nurses are/were officers, which seems odd to me, since the arbitrary nurse/doctor divide seems so similar to the enlisted/officer divide.
[/QUOTE]

Nurses are definitely officers. (My wife was a Navy nurse.)

Nurse Corps officers have college degrees (including master’s degrees in some cases), and lead the corpsmen, who do most of the actual work. (Corpsmen are akin to medical techs.)

The doctors generally don’t get involved in the whole leadership thing, except at the highest levels (i.e. unit commanders). Generally most of the leadership in a medical unit is made up of Nurse Corps officers and Medical Service Corps officers.

This is seen even outside of the military. The nurses, etc. make up the middle management, while much of the day-to-day work is done by medical techs.

FWIW, my wife bemoans this whole state of affairs. She thinks that nurses should be doing actual patient care, not just managing.

39

This is a very interesting question. I think this relates to some thoughts about heirarchy and management that I had.

People talk about ‘leaders’ as if there’s one kind. In fact, there are two. There is one kind of leader who is cool, who is confident, strong, popular, whom everybody wants to follow and who knows how to bust balls to get things done. There is another kind who is smart, and probably got that way by being a bit nerdy, etc. and who doesn’t inspire people to follow him, and who may be a bit weak and not good at commanding people what to do.

So, ideally, you’d get both types of ‘leaders’ to cooperate. I dunno if it’s as true now, but before you’d have the peasant-blood NCOs who were real men, who’d lead their troops to battle. And then you’d have snobby, dweeby nobles who made the decisions.

Now what I think is there shouldn’t be a heirarchical line. I think the two types should team up at every level, maybe have every commanding position actually be a partner job. This is especially relevant in corporations, or especially with engineers and programmers, where the nerds are even nerdier and team leads and management have to be both very smart and very good motivators

40

[QUOTE=Alex_Dubinsky]

People talk about ‘leaders’ as if there’s one kind. In fact, there are two. There is one kind of leader who is cool, who is confident, strong, popular, whom everybody wants to follow and who knows how to bust balls to get things done. There is another kind who is smart, and probably got that way by being a bit nerdy, etc. and who doesn’t inspire people to follow him, and who may be a bit weak and not good at commanding people what to do.
[/QUOTE]

Ever worked with anyone who graduated from the service academies, particularly the Naval Academy? On the whole, those expletive unprintables are SMART, commanding, direct and clear in their speech and deed. They will bust your balls, they are cool, they are confident, and to paraphrase a submarine officer friend of mine, they can walk through their vessel blindfolded naming and describing the purpose and function of any item they lay hands on. They are the ideal of what an officer should be: to the extent that military custom allows them to be “one of the guys” they blend in. To the extent that they must appear superhuman and worthy of absolute trust, they deliver. In your proposed partnering arrangement, where would you put such an officer, and who would you pair them with?

Your partnering idea may be relevant to corporations – and in engineering organizations you do see this frequently in the twin positions of “systems engineer” or “chief scientist” and the “program manager”. The PM controls money and schedule, and ensures that the big picture comes together. The SE or CS concerns himself with the technical details to make sure that when time and money run out, the thing which is delivered does what it must. Nominally the PM is in charge and the SE is on his staff… but woe unto one of the PM’s lower-level managers who disregards the SE’s suggestions. So, partnering in the corporate world? Sure. But the OP is specifically about the military.

In a military setting it is imperative that the authority and responsibility of command reside in a single individual. To that end, the ideal officer possesses both of your (supposedly fractionated) traits in sufficient measure to do his job, and his ideal NCO possesses his or her own strengths that complement the officer’s personality.

The “first shirt” (first sergeant or personnel sergeant) has such a complementary role with the commanding officer that the two jobs are often explained as “mother and father”. The idea is that the Shirt is allowed to have an emotional investment and commitment to the unit’s men, but the CO must appear fair and just at all times, and is limited in what he may do to correct a wayward soldier. The Shirt’s justice may be harder or softer than the rules permit in accordance with his judgment, but the CO, when faced with facts, may be required by law to mete out a specific punishment. It cuts both ways. For some infractions, the Shirt can, at his discretion, assign you a far greater share of the unpleasant duties in a unit and slow-roll the paperwork on your punishment. If questioned, the Shirt will say “Oh, Pvt. So-and-so needs to work on his attention to detail; I’m making him a better soldier, sir,” and by the time the paperwork gets to the CO, he can say “Oh, it’s taken care of, sir.” Sometimes you might prefer to just have the CO yell at you and get docked a week’s pay. As long as it’s handled at that level, the CO never needs to hear about it. But if it comes up between the CO and the Shirt, and they disagree, then excuse the metaphor’s patriarchal bias, please: the CO (as the “father”) always always always has the last word, and that’s the difference between a commissioned officer and an NCO.

I’ve met officers who possessed all of the traits you list, and I’ve met officers who possessed almost no redeeming qualities. I’ve met NCOs all over the spectrum. I think your “two types” theory needs some work.