Readers of historical fiction or nonfiction are not always familiar with military life and customs. 

So here is a short primer. If you already know this stuff, check back next Tuesday, when we’ll be up to something completely different.

If you are still here, fasten your seat belt.

Military Organizations

An army—American or foreign, present or past—breaks down into smaller units. Speaking in a general way, these are:

Squad: Four to twelve soldiers.

Platoon: Thirty to forty.

Company: A hundred or more, usually.

Regiment: Roughly a thousand.

Brigade: Two to five thousand.

Division: Ten to forty-five thousand.

Corps: Twenty to eighty thousand.

(Note: The plural of corps is corps, and the -ps is silent in both cases, so it’s pronounced core. Also, the word “corps” sometimes denotes not the large unit between a division and an army, but rather the whole group of people dedicated to a certain function, as in the Marine Corps, the Signal Corps, or the Medical Corps. The only way to avoid confusion is to consider the context.)

Army: Fifty thousand up to half a million men.

The Army—that is, a nation’s whole army: May comprise several smaller armies, operating in different regions.

The actual numbers vary a lot, depending on nation, historical period, organizational doctrines, recruiting and retention success, and attrition during war operations.

Each unit contains a few of the next smaller-sized unit. Thus, a company may be four platoons plus a handful of command and staff personnel; a regiment may be ten companies plus command and staff. In some armies, at some times, there have also been battalions of several companies within a regiment—but that’s a pettifogging detail. Also, in the American Civil War Confederate regiments were about half the size of Union regiments—in other words five hundred troops rather than a thousand. 

The point, for purposes of reading fiction: Squads and platoons engage in small firefights. It takes regiments, brigades, and divisions to fight a large battle. And if you have officers discussing the movements and operations of whole corps and armies, they are probably in a major command headquarters or a national capitol, pushing markers around on a map or sand table, far removed from actual fighting. 

Pulling Rank

Rank indicates both authority and status within the military. Rank is a complex topic, partly because there are two separate, overlapping, simultaneously operating systems of rank.

A simple way to put it is that the large body of enlisted men is commanded by commissioned officers but overseen, guided, and led by noncommissioned officers who are themselves drawn from the body of enlisted soldiers.

Commissioned officers and their insignia of rank, from bottom up, are:

Second Lieutenant (gold bar)

First Lieutenant (silver bar)

Captain (two silver bars)

Major (gold oak leaf)

Lieutenant Colonel (silver oak leaf)

Colonel (silver eagle)

Brigadier General (one silver star)

Major General (two stars)

Lieutenant General (three stars)

General (four stars)

General of the Army (five stars)

Oy vay! What a mess. 

Perhaps you noticed that three different levels of rank are designated “lieutenant.” But they are not the same. A lieutenant is the lowest form of life among commissioned officers, but a lieutenant general is one of the lords of the army. A lieutenant colonel in somewhere in between. 

If you must simplify the title of a lieutenant colonel, call him “colonel” rather than “lieutenant.” The same goes double for a lieutenant general.

Two different ranks have “major” in their titles. 

You may address any of the general officers as “general,” but don’t call any of them “lieutenant” or “major.” You will be demoting them, at least in speech. They will not appreciate it.

A major outranks a lieutenant; but a major general is beneath a lieutenant general. 

That’s the army for you.

The main thing is that higher ranks command larger units than lower ranks. A lieutenant might command a platoon; a colonel might command a regiment; a major general might command a division, and so forth. Over the history of warfare, there have been many exceptions to these rules of thumb, but higher rank normally denotes greater power. 

So if you read a work in which a general commands only a company of troops, all I can say is there has been terrible attrition in his ranks. On the other hand, if a captain commands a division, all the higher-ranking officers must have endured mass slaughter. Such extreme disjunctions of rank and authority seldom if ever occur.

So, Who Runs the Army?

That’s easy: The noncoms run the army. Everybody knows it and all acknowledge it. 

Noncommissioned officers are drawn from the privates and work their way up. The lowest level noncom is called a corporal; he may lead a squad. The next level up is called a sergeant—pronounced SAR-jent. The rest of the noncoms are all sergeants, but there are many levels of them. The way you can tell them apart is by the number of chevrons and “rockers” on their sleeves.

Specific nomenclature varies with time and place, but here are the noncommissioned ranks in today’s U.S. Army:

Corporal

Sergeant

Staff Sergeant

Sergeant First Class

Master Sergeant/First Sergeant

Sergeant Major

Command Sergeant Major

A Master Sergeant and First Sergeant in today’s army are the same thing, only with somewhat different job responsibilities. There is a rank called “Command Sergeant Major of the Army,” but it is simply a special case of the Command Sergeant Major, whose job is to be the senior enlisted advisor for a particular (large) unit. 

As with commissioned officers, noncommissioned officers of higher rank have wider responsibilities. A corporal or sergeant may lead a squad—too small a unit to have a commissioned officer in command. At the platoon level, a commissioned officer, a lieutenant, is the commander; but there is also a sergeant, or a staff sergeant, who is the “platoon sergeant.” He advises the platoon commander on decisions to be made, and once those decisions are made, he delegates particular squads, teams, or soldiers to carry them out. Platoon sergeants do a lot of coaching, helping soldiers perform their tasks as ordered. 

In lower-level units—platoons and companies—the unit NCO usually has more experience and practical knowledge than the relatively junior officer in command. Therefore, young lieutenants are advised to be guided, even in combat decisions, by their sergeants. 

In larger units such as brigades and divisions, the commanders do not rely so much on their command sergeants major for advice, but they do lean on them heavily to anticipate, prevent, or iron out problems of discipline, morale, or training among the enlisted troops.

Thus, command of units is generally a cooperative venture of commissioned and noncommissioned leaders. In European armies well into the twentieth century most of the officers were members of the titled aristocracy: dukes, earls, viscounts, barons, and knights. The private soldiers were drawn from the serfs on the aristocrats’ estates, and the more capable and aggressive among them were appointed as corporals and sergeants. Today, in most armies, the class distinction is more along educational lines. Commissioned officers come into the army with college degrees.

The arrangements sketched above for the army generally hold true for the marine corps and the air force as well. The units may be described differently, but the names of the ranks are similar to those of the army. In the U.S. Air Force today, privates and corporals are known as airmen. But they are ruled by lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels, and generals—whose orders are mediated by various kinds of sergeants—just as in the Army.

What About the Squids?

The Navy is a whole different thing. They have their own way of talking.

The principal fighting unit around navies are organized is the ship. The number of sailors depends on the size of the ship. An aircraft carrier is like a brigade or division in the army. A whole fleet of ships may equate to an army corps. A destroyer or other small ship may be something like a company or regiment.

Most naval terminology is unique. Floors are decks, walls are bulkheads, stairs are companionways, and so forth. Likewise, naval ranks are denominated by mostly different terms.

Ensign

Lieutenant Junior Grade

Lieutenant

Lieutenant Commander

Commander

Captain

Rear Admiral Lower Half

Rear Admiral Upper Half

Vice Admiral

Admiral 

Fleet Admiral

The insignia for these ranks are the same as those for the same-level rank in the army—gold or silver bars, oak leaves, eagles, or stars—but the navy also has sleeve insignia that denote the ranks by gold rings around the cuff.

Even where the navy uses the same words as the army, they mean different things. A lieutenant in the U.S. Navy is equal in rank to a captain in the Army; a captain in the Navy is equal to a colonel in the Army.

Noncoms in the Navy are not sergeants but petty officers.

Petty Officer Third Class

Petty Officer Second Class

Petty Officer First Class

Chief Petty Officer

Senior Chief Petty Officer

Master Chief Petty Officer

Fleet/Command Master Chief Petty Officer

Odds and Ends

I have outlined only the generality of military organization and command hierarchy. In reading, you will encounter numerous exceptions in different countries and historical periods. 

The U.S. Naval officer today known as a Rear Admiral Lower Half was once called Commodore. 

At the beginning of the U.S. Civil War, the highest-ranking naval officers were called flag officers, the designation changed back to admiral partway through the war.

In the British Army, what we call lieutenants are known as subalterns. It’s worth noting that, when the British do call their lieutenants lieutenants, they pronounce it LEF-tenant, unlike us colonials, who pronounce it LOO-tenant.

And the British equivalent of a U.S. five-star general (General of the Army) is called a field marshal.

When the United States instituted the five-star rank, partway through the Second World War, one thought was to follow the Brits’ practice and call it field marshall. But our chief general was George C. Marshall, and it was thought that “Field Marshal Marshall” would just sound silly. So they made it General of the Army. Only five men, to date, have worn that rank:

George C. Marshall

Douglas Macarthur

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Henry H. Arnold

Omar Bradley

All were World War II leaders of world stature.

Five-star fleet admirals in the Navy, created about the same time, were:

William Halsey Jr.

William D. Leahy

Ernest King

Chester W. Nimitz

No U.S. officers of any service branch have been appointed to that rank since. 

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Enough soldier and sailor talk for now. Check in next week for something equally riveting.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer