O’Brien is a “chief,” Jonas and Cutler hold the rank of “Crewman,” and I think those are the only enlisted personnel who have lines and appear in more than one episode. Starfleet seems ridiculously officer heavy.
Is the enlisted/officer distinction different in Starfleet from traditional armed forces? And where are all the warrant officers?
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It’s only seems officer heavy because the main characters are ranked officers. You rarely see the hundreds of grunts.
Enterprise D has a complement of 1000+ personnel, yet it seems like we only see like 50 of them the entire series.
It would be nice if the next Trek series does something to address this.
Lower Decks kind of talk about this, but they are still officers I think. I haven’t watched it in a bit
lower deckers aren’t officers, they’re absolutely the kind of thing we don’t see in the trek shows.
The main crew of Lower Decks are officers. Ensign (arguably Cadet) is the lowest ranking officer in Starfleet. All the characters we follow in LD start as an Ensign in the first season.
As for the cadet thing, if you go to Starfleet Academy you are given the rank of Cadet and basically everyone goes to Starfleet Academy.
Everything points towards Starfleet being basically a organization of Officers with no grunts.
The main crew of Lower Decks are officers. Ensign (arguably Cadet)
Correct. Cadet is what you’d become instantly when you go to Starfleet Academy, but an ensign is what you’d come out of there as. So you have to earn the rank of ensign, but you just get the rank of cadet without testing. (Well entrance exams aside.)
Everything points towards Starfleet being basically a organization of Officers with no grunts.
Weeeelll, yes and no.
Have you watched the new show from the “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” creators, called “Masters of the Air”?
In that, you don’t see many people below the rank of a lieutenant, because everyone of a light crew would be an officer.
Like you say, if you go through Starfleet Academy, you’ll become a cadet, meaning an officer in training.
When I was doing my conscription, aside from the conscripts, there wasn’t really that many non-commissioned officers, because at that point, pretty much everyone who worked for the military had to have gone through cadet training and thus would be an officer.
And I was in the army, not the navy or the airforce, where it would be even less likely to see non-commissioned ranks.
I looked up O’Brien’s back story, and it says he served as a tactical officer on the USS Rutledge during the Cardassian War. I think that would explain him being having an enlisted rank; he enlisted, and through battlefield conditions was promoted to serve as the tactical officer, and given a promotion. But you need to go through Starfleet Academy to be an officer, so he has a non-commissioned officer’s rank.
Much like it would go in real life.
Then after the war he probably wasn’t required to go to the Academy, even if it was offered to him. Seems like the type who wouldn’t see the need to go, even if had offered some benefits or possible advancement in ranks.
An NCO through and through, O’Brien, just like me.
So I assume there’s the rare person who joins Starfleet without going through the academy, on merit or something, and gets an enlisted rank.
Although all this reasoning of their system does make it seem weird Picard so easily makes Wesley an “acting ensign”.
I remember mariner having a throwaway line in an LD episode about the Tech Services Academy being a way to join without having to go through the academy (the one where they’re stuck in the recruitment booth). Perhaps that would be the NCO route?
Sounds about right. Like a way for that to be a thing, but being way less common to go through that way, and probably most people who graduate from there perhaps go to certain planets / institutions that we’ve not seen much of.
There used to be two different levels of “schools” in the Finnish military as well, iirc, and the other one was a bit shorter and easier and often meant more as supporting training for the non-commissioned officers who stayed to work at the military after their conscription. You could only stay for a few years or so before you had to go to the Army Academy (Maasotakoulu), or apply to become a cadet in the The Finnish National Defence University (Maanpuolustuskorkeakoulu).
The latter being far more common.
You’re describing Lower Decks in a few ways
Yeah like a big all staff meeting in the loading dock aha
Or just making the hallways seem fuller with different background characters rather than the same characters roaming the mostly empty hallways.
The Galaxy class really is that big though. The Severance levels of isolation in the hallways would actually be reasonable for its size.
I saw a video once that said, for the size of the Enterprise ships, the onboard populations are actually really small. Presumably the various departments and quarters are distributed throughout the ship and it’s just very sparsely populated. Doesn’t make much logistic sense to me, but if they had everyone centrally located with the usual crew size, much of the ship would have been empty.
Edit: video
The Enterprise-D could probably accommodate about 3-5,000 people if pressed to. It had a ton of space for cargo, evacuations, ferrying and/or hosting diplomatic conferences… TNG often makes passing references to these missions, but they often happen off-screen.
Which does make sense too, since the federation seems to like their ships to be prepared for just about everything, including massive evacuations.
Yeah, look for the crewmen in man dresses in the early seasons of TNG. Can almost guarantee they are enlisted.
It absolutely is confusing.
Roddenberry gave conflicting direction on this. By the time TNG rolled out, his position was that most of the crew were officers.
But it was a long and confusing evolution. After intervention by the network after the TOS pilot, turned Janice Rand’s yeoman role, which is one of the most senior NCO roles on a naval ship, into what seemed to be a personal secretary. NBC was no more ready for a senior NCO who was a woman than they had been to have a female first officer Number One.
Discovery makes things murkier by mixing in ‘Chiefs’ as a title for department heads but never actually saying who is chief medical officer or chief engineer.
Lower Decks seems to have ensigns being hazed with junior enlisted tasks. However, Prodigy has introduced warrant officers as another career pathway outside the Academy.
Janice Rand’s yeoman role, which is one of the most senior NCO roles on a naval ship, into what seemed to be a personal secretary.
A yeoman is a person who does administrative and clerical work in the modern Navy. They run the gamut from E-4 to E-9. That’s low enlisted rank to the highest. Rand could be an E-9 Master Chief Petty Officer Yeoman for all we know. That would make her the appropriate rank to be the captain’s administrative assistant.
Master Chief Yeoman Rand?
Edit: disclaimer, I used ai to generate this., also I apparently have fat thumbs today.
Just to say the way the role is presented kn television doesn’t highlight the sensitive roles such as being the senior NCO responsible for oversight of enlisted personnel performance evaluations or communications with command.
It would be very senior AO role on a capital ship, but she mainly comes by to get the captain to sign stuff.
Strictly speaking, O’Brien is a “Senior Chief Petty Officer” in rank, and a “transporter chief” in role. Those two happen to both include the word “chief”, but they’re no more related than “Lieutenant Commander” and “chief engineering officer” are for La Forge. I believe “chief”, on its own, is referring to any of the ranks of NCO with chief in the title, [master | senior] chief petty officer.
Starfleet seems ridiculously officer heavy
Indeed it does. Whether this is actually true, or just an artifact of the fact that we tend to primarily watch the actions of those in command, I’m not sure. But if it is the in-universe reality, that’s probably a consequence of the post-scarcity society and the abundance of time and education people have in order to become officers.
And where are all the warrant officers?
I’m gonna be honest, I’ve tried numerous times, but have never managed to really understand what WOs are. I have this vague sense that their rank sits somewhere between that of NCOs and of commissioned officers, and that they’re involved in more unusual or specialised tasks, but I don’t think they normally sit in a regular chain of command, and I’m not really sure how it works.
It’s hard to show the intricate workings of hundreds of crewmen. It’s just not practical or in the budget. Crewmen pop up every now and then if you pay attention.
Someone said Master and Commander can be seen as similar to Star Trek, and it certainly has the same ship command structure. The crewmen play a larger role and they really cover the dynamic. Very much worth a watch with or without connection to Star Trek.
