Navy Terminology

And I always thought the Army had the most confusing ranks. :)

He left off ROTC. Probably about half of all officers come from ROTC programs (or at least they did during the Cold War).

*Sigh*

A bit of gloss on this.

First, the NAVY does not use the terms "non-commissioned officer", ""non-com", or "NCO". Those are traditional army terms (and whether the Air Force adopted them upon its creation as a separate service in 1947, I do not know. The Marines do not use them either, as far as I can can remember).

Rather, the Navy uses its traditional term, "petty officer", which it inherited from the Royal Navy (British, that is) in consequence of our having once been part of the British Empire. By the same token the US Navy adopted many of the traditions as well as common procedures for various things from the Royal Navy of that time. ("Petty officer" in turn was adopted by the Royal Navy from the French, who used the term "petite" officer, i.e., "small", "little", or "minor" officer.)

Traditionally, petty officers were enlisted people who had some specialized training to work in a particular field at a kind of task much equivalent to the idea of a trade in civilian life on land, rather merely being just general seamen. The naval term for such a "trade" was and is "rating." Petty officers worked for "warrant officers" who were their ships' most senior experts in those particular ratings, and considering the needs of a combat sailing vessel the warrant officers had titles like Gunner, Carpenter (the ships being made of wood), Boatswain, Sailmaker, Quartermaster (which does not mean what it does in the army), etc. The petty officers thus had titles like gunner's mate, carpenter's mate, boatswain's mate, etc. You can probably think of them as journeyman tradesmen working for a master tradesman, while the rest of the crew (and as distinguished from the commissioned officers) are not tradesmen at all, but seagoing general laborers. As a matter of common practice, petty officers were and still are referred to as "petty officers." Only a comparatively few men were needed to carry out the specialized tasks of the various petty officer ratings, so most men were simply seamen, either "Ordinary", or if they were especially expert at seamanship, "Able-Bodied". (There were also terms for newbies, like "Landsman.") New petty officers were typically drawn from the ranks of the more trainable-looking seamen. It was a ship's captain who decided who his petty officers would be.

Basically, warrant officers were called that because they were so appointed in writing on a piece of paper called a warrant. Under naval protocol they were called "Mister" and "sir" by petty officers and seaman alike and wore uniforms similar to commissioned officers. As a matter of common practice, they were and still are referred to as "warrant officers" (just as in the other armed services), and rate a salute, as though they are commissioned officers. Warrant officers could be appointed by the captain of a ship, originally, if memory serves. Certainly, they were beneath Royal consideration.

On the other hand, commissioned officers were so called because they were "commissioned" by the King, and had a document colloquially referred to as a commission to reflect that fact, which was signed by or on behalf of the King by an appropriate government official. In the United States, of course, there was no king, so instead a law was eventually passed by Congress giving the president the power to commission officers, and the commissioning document today is typically signed by the Secretary of the Navy on the president's behalf. As a matter of common practice, they were and still are referred to as simply, "officers", just as in the other armed services.

The function of the commissioned officer was not to be a technical expert, but to be a combat leader, a kind of soldier at sea, under whom the more seamanly warrant officers and others would serve as sort of glorified nautical chauffeurs. As a practical matter, however, in addition to being fighting leaders the Royal Navy officers became expert in shiphandling, navigation, and piloting, and miscellaneous other aspects of seamanship above the most mundane and technical, much the way a degreed engineer might gain a lot of practical shop-floor knowledge in a manufacturing setting without knowing all the most nitty-gritty details, for instance, and the American Navy inherited this role for its commissioned officers, too.

As the US Navy progressed through history toward modern times, and its vessels and weapons systems and so forth became more complex, it needed a multiplicity of new ratings and a more complicated organizational system than that of the old sailing vessel. More gradations of rank were also deemed needed, and eventually Congress passed laws to implement the same. Congress was integral to this process because only Congress had the legal authority to establish the pay rates or grades that coincided with levels of rank. Eventually, Congress further determined that it should make these uniform across the services, and so you wind up with the equivalency of pay grades you have today between the services, even though more traditional names for various ranks were retained by the individual services. Under these schemes, petty officers ranked above the lower levels of mere seamen, and had higher pay grades.

As recently as World War Two the Navy continued to recognize the idea of the general purpose, old-fashioned seaman (now supplemented by his steam-age engine/boiler-room counterpart, the fireman) as distinct from the petty officers, even though the much more technical Navy of that day compared with 150 years earlier required a lot more of the crew be trained in a rating than ever before. The Navy after the war had a list of different ratings as long as a boatswain's mate's arm, now including things like electrician's mate, radioman, radarman, sonarman, torpedoman, aerologist's mate, machinist's mate, hospital corpsman, personnelman, signalman, motormachinist's mate, aviation machinist's mate, electronics technician, aviation ordinance technician, fire control technician, and eventually even reactor operator, just to name a few.

Thus, after that war the Navy made a fundamental change to its rank/grade system and eliminated all seaman ranks above pay grade E-3; instead, all Navy enlisted personnel who expected to stay in the Navy and rise past E-3 were expected to train in a rate, so that unless a guy wanted to be an E-3 forever, he had no choice but to train for and become a petty officer. And those guys who might have otherwise remained seamen or firemen forever were expected to become boatswain's mates and boiler technicians, respectively. Thus, while petty officers were originally special sailors who one day could aspire to warrant rank and get to be called "Mister", and so on, in the modern Navy practically everybody becomes a petty officer at some point before they eventually get out of the service, and those which make a full career of it normally finish as some gradation of Chief Petty Officer, rather than ever going all the way to warrant officer. To reflect various levels of skill and authority within the petty officer ranks, the Navy by this time had already evolved a series of petty officer gradations, rising from the lowest at Petty Officer Third Class (pay grade E-4) to the highest at Master Chief Petty Officer (pay grade E-9).

Commissioned officers, in the meantime, have evolved into sort of executive managers. While senior petty officers manage the workforce at the "front-line" level, officers get tasked mostly with the administrative overhead chores (although there is some overlap). Only when you are actually on watch or in combat (or a serious casualty, or a formal drill for these evolutions) are you going to see officers giving enlisted people (nowadays, mostly petty officers) a lot of orders on a direct, real-time, one-on-one basis, i.e., in their traditional sailing ship role; perhaps, after all, the role of the officer has not changed so much in 250 years apart from the greatly increased administrative burdens he has.

One final point: while LEGALLY a very junior commissioned officer outranks a very senior petty officer or even a warrant officer (modern warships in the USN have relatively few warrant officers around in my experience -- you usually find them working ashore in shipyards and similar facilities), as a practical matter, he has his hands full if he thinks he is going to just order around somebody with 20+ years of experience and the knowledge that comes with it as against his college midshipman training, or whatever, in the highly complex world of the modern Navy. Everybody knows this and thus only a moron would attempt it. Even the half-way intelligent new naval officer knows to let the senior enlisted people theoretically under him actually run the things he is theoretically responsible for. Senior petty officers function almost entirely in a supervisory role over what you might think of as the front-line work force and generally know their jobs and want to do them right. If the young officer shows them the respect their years of experience, their efforts at work every day, and their dedication to doing a good job merit, and handles things in a defacto team approach with them, he should be okay absent a stroke of really bad luck, and within a couple of years he may know enough about the Navy to actually know when he can call a senior enlisted person out and get away with it because he is right and the other is wrong, or at least, on weak ground.