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Liason outranks Academy Commandant?
captainhunter1
Member Posts: 1,633 Arc User
Why is Starfleet Academy's Commandant only a Commander?
Traditionally people who hold this postion are Captains (navy) or full Colonels (army).
Isn't it a bit embarassing that a lowly Academy Cultural Liason Officer (the Vulcan one) outranks the the person in charge of the whole campus?
Logic dictates their ranks should be swapped (see what I did there :P)
Traditionally people who hold this postion are Captains (navy) or full Colonels (army).
Isn't it a bit embarassing that a lowly Academy Cultural Liason Officer (the Vulcan one) outranks the the person in charge of the whole campus?
Logic dictates their ranks should be swapped (see what I did there :P)
My consolidated list of game improvements for STO:
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
Post edited by captainhunter1 on
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It IS actually possible under certain circumstances... Basically it comes down to "who has operational command in the area".
Like the cadets. Heck, they tell us what to do. And when was the last time one of them saluted us?
just run the lecture hall on ESD, they are jumping over each other to Salute you.
Fleet leader Nova Elite
Fleet Leader House of Nova elite
@ren_larreck
Thought they only saluted you during the promotion mission. Gone to look.
edit: Nope, you;re right. They're still kissing you know what.
Rank does not always denote expertise.
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There fixed it for you.
Added bonus
Start a thread titled, say WTF (or something like that), and claim to play 3 games. Put it in the wrong section of the forums (not like you would know) and......
Bingo!!!!!
win!
Next Question......
Especially since according to TNG (1st season ep, forgive me don't remember the title - the one where that uptight dude is inquiring with every officer on the ship), they wanted to make Picard an Admiral to take the job.
At the most all Quinn should be is a 3 star VA.
you do know I hope that the commander in chief is the president? Even in the UFP... Besides the UFP has so much fleets that one should look at it more like the old european style armies... Think about it, in the old WW1 era armed forces the Germans had multiple armies, and various Field Marshals, a Field Marshal is of equal rank to a Fleet Admiral.
In the Dutch naval structure the five star Admirals rank is just Admiral which is the highest rank just as the UFP, the USA and various other navies have a five star rank, this does not mean however that a person that has got that rank is commander in chief... There is a rather large difference between them.
In the Netherlands for example our Commander in Chief is the Monarch, but the monarch does not carry that title... If we go by a Theme system then a Commander in Chief can be the Commander in Chief of a certan area. If going by the complete armed forces the Commander in Chief is in general the Head of State.
Considering he would be reporting to the federation president as well as planetary/system ones, he or she may have the CinC title.
theres
Comops (commander operations)
Comlog (commander logistics)
Comint (commander Intelligence)
and at least TWO Fleet Admirals (alpha and beta quadrants)
but thats all dated information (start of TNG period) and by now they may have hundreds of them
all report to the Federation council and the president
First of all the OP is correct in that the commanding officer (CO) of a base is almost always an O-6 (Captain or Colonel). Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, is commanded by a Captain, and Fort Hood, the largest army base in the world, is commanded by a Colonel. Note that neither of these bases are 'largest' not by actual square feet, but by numbers of personnel on base.
Which isn't to say that Starfleet Academy's Commandant couldn't be a Commander. In fact, Starfleet could have a tradition of placing anyone from Commander to Rear Admiral in charge of it as a way of rewarding them for superior service and/or preparing them for advancement to higher ranks. While the commandant may do some teaching to the cadets, the commandant's position is mostly an administrative one. Meaning they mostly just do a lot of paperwork.
And there's no reason that the Commandant of Starfleet Academy needs to outrank Vulcan's Cultural Liaison Officer. There could be any number of reasons why that position is filled by an Admiral, not the least of which is out of simple respect to one of the founding members of the Federation. The base's CO is still the base's CO and security will follow the base CO's orders over that of the Vulcan's Cultural Liaison Officer, even if the Vulcan's Cultural Liaison Officer outranks the base CO.
Also, the highest ranking admiral in the U.S. Navy is not called Commander in Chief, he's called 'Chief of Naval Operations.' In Starfleet that position is called 'Chief of Starfleet Operations.' According to Memory Alpha this was confirmed in The Motion Picture. I'm a bit surprised that 'Trekkies' would even have this discussion without at least taking 10 seconds to consult Memory Alpha first.
- Peregrine Falcon
Nice to see you again. However I am pretty sure that the woman who started the meeting at the beginning of Star Trek VI introduced the boss-man with the words: "Ladies and gentlemen, the C-in-C."
Sometimes, if you want to bury the hatchet with a Klingon, it has to be in his skull. - Captain K'Tar of the USS Danu about J'mpok.
*sigh*
Why am I surprised? You'd think I'd be used to it by now.
- Peregrine Falcon
Given how many they just lost in the slaughter the Enterprise arrived late to (saved only by Uhura translating stray transmissions and Kirk realizing the significance), how many senior officers did they have available?
Keep in mind it wouldn't have only been the Enterprise that would have needed a new captain. The replacements for every ship lost would also have needed new captains. The top candidates would have been junior officers on the ships lost. There would likely have been some ships not present, on long range exploration duty or whatever, but given they use cruisers for that, those captains would already have equivalent ships. As for the junior officers on those ships, again, there would be other replacement ships for them to captain too.
Meanwhile Kirk did have actual field experience.
So it isn't so much 'out of thin air' as by default.
As for the OP's issue and some of the other issues raised here, 'rank' defines who makes the final decisions, but all the rank in the world doesn't change what actually needs to be done. Besides, since when does any mission in STO involve any hard and fast orders? The universe can be doomed and you can ignore the call without penalty as long as you choose.
Lol, the Borg can even be attacking near Earth, you fly there at top speed and get told 'we got this, go away.'
I don't see the contradiction. Commander-in-chief could have been a less formal title used publicly for such occasions, with the 'official' title being the actual rank.
A company owner can be an owner, president, and general manager and yet still referred to as the CEO of the company rather than as the president.
IIRC:
1. Pike lived. Pike went to negotiate with Nero, and left Spock in command.
2. Spock and Kirk have memorable blow up on bridge / mutiny scene. Kirk gets abandoned.
3. Kirk transwarp beams back to Enterprise, gets into second fight with Spock. Gets Spock to abdicate command through that fight.
4. Bridge crew starts looking at each other, going "so who's gonna run this ship"?
5. Kirk reminds everyone, and gets it seconded by Sulu, that just before Pike ran off with Nero, Kirk was made second officer. With Pike still on Nero's ship, and Spock cooling his heels in his quarters, Kirk plunks himself in command chair.
6. Kirk orders a 180, rushes Nero's ship, pulls off spectacular rescue of now crippled captain, Spock tells his future ship to listen to him, etc. etc.
7. Command (as seems to be tradition with Kirk's) gives Kirk command of Enterprise over Spock / other command tracked people / Joe frigate captain "in reward of his exemplary maneuvers in blowing Nero up before Earth goes up".
That was contrived as all heck, if you ask me. Thin air, as it was. If I was in charge of a military, for Kirk's actions, especially since Abrams-Kirk is "fresh out of the Academy", I'd give him an instant Department head job or, at most, a small ship to "really check out" his suitability to command, and not just be in the right place at the right time fighting the right people...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
It's insanely beyond reason for anyone to assume that Kirk would have been promoted if it wasn't because abrams completely ignored everything trek or naval...
Theres a reason theres a promotional latter... To gain expirience... All Kirk had was from a simulator (in wich he cheated), but he lacked real expirience AND maturity, even more than the TOS Kirk.
No... the Kirk in that "movie" is bogus...
Of course it is contrived. Spock (the elder) had a hand in contriving it.
You are still completely dismissing the losses Star Fleet took, and the fact that Star Fleet has been at peace a while, so they don't have much in the way of actual veterans (regardless of who may or may not have survived the slaughter).
By the way, if you don't like 'contrived,' why are you singling out this particular bit of Trek? The Enterprise just happens to be the nearest ship when bad things happen... how often? Pretty much every episode? They could tell the tale of how Nero simply wiped out Star Fleet with his much more advanced 'mining vessel' but it is unlikely it would have made for a more entertaining or meaningful story.
I repeat... how many in Star Fleet were more experienced at the time? If there were all these 'experienced personnel' about, why was the Enterprise sent out crewed 99% with Cadets in the first place? If this mirrors TOS, Star Fleet will only have about a dozen heavy cruisers. They don't have a lot of ships. They just lost a large portion of what they did have. There isn't the huge pool of talent handy.
Unless you are suggesting that someone with a desk rank would be the better choice? Put a bureaucrat in charge of a ship?
Edit: And by the time Kirk was put in charge formally, he had more than a simulator worth of experience. Other than any Romulan War veterans (if there were any survivors after Nero's ambush), he also had more actual combat experience than most others, even if it was only brief.
Star Trek and really any fiction writers/creators often play fast and loose with their own canon. Just look at how many times Dr. Watson's injury changed location.
As for canon reasons? Well there really isn't. To be honest I liked the movie, but I didn't like that bit. We can try and retcon it, but I just prefer to be entertained rather than focus on nitpicking a minor contrivance. Since it's in an alternate timeline in which Starfleet was a drastically altered organization, having gone a different way from Prime after the Kelvin incident (I heard this somewhere, can't remember the source), it has little bearing on the rest of canon.
In any case, back to the rank discussion: A quick Wikipedia confirmed something I remember reading in Tom Clancy, who as I understand is always pretty accurate about these things. The U.S. Armed Services have what are called Combatant Commanders, who have regional or functional responsibilities. Before 2002 they were sometimes colloquially known as "Commander in Chief" so an admiral could be Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Command. I guess after 2002, Rumsfeld canned the use, restricting it to refer to the president only.
So maybe Starfleet resurrected the use (given that Star Trek VI was made in the 80s before Rumsfeld's order, and Nick Meyer was well known for drawing on current naval tradition). So maybe the Admiral in Star Trek VI is known as Commander in Chief, Beta Quadrant or "The C&C" even if that isn't his official title. Or some such