Military world-building for creators. Part 1a: The rank structures

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Hi there. This week I’m going to delve into a topic which might be old hat to many of you, so apologies in advance. I’m going to talk about military rank structures as part of military culture. In particular, I’m going to outline the differences between [commissioned] officers and enlisted ranks.

I had originally intended this post as an answer to a reader’s question, but the answer led me down a bit of a rabbit hole of explanation, so I’m going to leave off the question until next week and focus this week on the “explainer” part.

And I do think we need an explainer for the different rank structures in the military, because Hollywood gets it wrong so often. This is a companion piece to my other military world-building articles, which have included:

• Setting the scene | Military world-building for creators. Part 1: C4
• But WHY did you do it? | World-building for creators Part 2: Behaviour
• How the sausage is made | Military world building: how special operations happen

Again, this might not be new if you’re serving or have served or come from the culture. But it might be new if your knowledge of military ranks and culture is limited to TV and film depictions, many of which misunderstand and misrepresent the important relationship between officers and enlisted men¹.

I’ll start with a well-worn internet joke that will not be new to anyone who’s served, but touches on some of the points I’ll be making below:

If you don’t know what “NCO” means, then don’t worry. I’m going to start off by defining what the two-tier military rank system actually means. Then I’ll talk about the historical origin of this system, before discussing the modern justification and use case for it. I’ll talk about how some modern developments are blurring the lines between the tiers, but conclude with how differences persist.

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Most militaries have a two-tier rank structure

The military hierarchy is not a pyramid. You could be forgiven for thinking it is, because that’s how it’s often presented in popular commentary or in films and TV, but it’s not true.

In fact, most militaries use a double pyramid structure. The first pyramid comprises the enlisted men (and women), a.k.a. private soldiers² and non-commissioned officers (NCOs). The second pyramid is the commissioned officers. Confusingly, when we say “officer,” we are usually talking about commissioned officers and not talking about NCOs, even though the word “officer” is in their job title. Are you confused yet?

Here’s what the system looks like, grossly simplified:

You’ll notice some nuances in the above pyramid:

• The enlisted pyramid is much bigger, with about four to five times as many people in it as the officer pyramid.
• The officer pyramid has a peak, but the enlisted one is flat. Most militaries have one officer who is senior to all others. With some notable exceptions (e.g. US military), the enlisted ranks top out at a level that is senior but not limited to a single person (e.g. there are many Sergeants-Major).
• The pyramids overlap. This is nuanced. On the one hand, the most senior and grizzled Regimental Sergeant Major will call the freshest, pimply-faced Second Lieutenant “Sir” or “Ma’am,” but on the other hand, the RSM is close to par with a Lieutenant Colonel in terms of organisational seniority.
• The pyramids are mostly exclusive… but not entirely so. There is a small but important flow of people and experience from the enlisted ranks (left) to the commissioned ranks (right). I’ll discuss this more below.

How are these two tiers of military person generated? Usually through a segregated system of military training and education, with some crossover, like that depicted above:

The above graphic was re-used from my military world-building post. As I mentioned in that post, there are plenty of media representations which just don’t get the distinction between officers and enlisted ranks, whether it’s in the simple visual cues:

Poor Lydia Bennett in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice seems similarly confused, mistaking ranks of militiamen for officers:

To be fair, they all look dashing. The real Lydia would have known very well who the commissioned officers (i.e. the eligible suitors) in that parade would be. To be fair to the film, her subsequent seduction by Wickham shows that she can make this distinction, more’s the pity.

This plotline in Pride and Prejudice is important for our discussion, because the military two-tier system is rooted in how militaries evolved into their present-day forms. This is what we’ll discuss in the next section. Before we get into that, however, it’s worth making an obvious but often overlooked point.

Military structures reflect the social structures of the civilian society they are drawn from. The always entertaining Bret Devereaux has written an article about this just a week ago on his A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog (highly recommended). To massively simplify his thesis, it’s that people who hold power in the civilian world tend to hold power in the military. And if not the exact same people, then the families, friends, acquaintances of these people. The same types of people, in other words.

This has obvious historical validity. Is it still true today? We might put a pin in it and come back to this point. But in the meantime, let’s focus a little bit on the historical.

The officer/enlisted divide is partly historical…

You won’t be surprised to hear that the distinction between officers and enlisted in the military comes from older class-based distinctions. We could go right back to the feudal system of knights and peasants if we wanted, but there are subtle differences and I want to limit the depth of this deep dive. Read ACOUP’s Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders if you want to learn more about ancient and medieval military systems.

As we mentioned above, the elite in civilian society become or assume the role of the leaders in military society. Why is this? Two main reasons:

• Only the rich have the time and resources to learn military skills like horsemanship and purchase good weapons and armour for them and their followers.
• The rich have natural followers in peacetime (tenants, employees, servants etc.) who translate naturally into followers in wartime.

This system³ creates a class of “natural” leaders in the military. You could reinforce this divide through a system of purchase for commissions (officerships), as existed in the British Army until 1871. This is exactly what it sounds like: the only qualification you needed to become an army officer was the requisite funds. To get promoted, you just needed to invest in the additional cost of the next rank up:

Rank	Infantry	Cavalry	Life Guards	Foot Guards
Cornet/Ensign	£450 (£44k)	£840 (£81k)	£1,260 (£122k)	£1,200 (£116k)
Lieutenant	£700 (£68k)	£1,190 (£115k)	£1,785 (£173k)	£2,050 (£198k)
Captain	£1,800 (£174k)	£3,225 (£312k)	£3,500 (£339k)	£4,800 (£465k)
Major	£3,200 (£310k)	£4,575 (£443k)	£5,350 (£518k)	£8,300 (£803k)
Lieutenant Colonel	£4,500 (£436k)	£6,175 (£598k)	£7,250 (£702k)	£9,000 (£871k)

The table above was taken from the Wikipedia article, based on prices in 1837 and their 2025 equivalents. It’s worth noting that the real cost would have been more than is implied by the inflation-adjusted cost in brackets. People, especially poorer people, were much less wealthy and capital investments like these commissions would have been out of reach for all bar the wealthiest in society.

What if you can’t afford to buy a commission, but you want to be a soldier and serve your country? Or as would be more likely, what if you have no other choice but soldiery? Then you can enlist. If you’re a competent soldier and capable leader, then you can expect to advance through the ranks as a professional NCO.

Bizarre as it was (and it led to some truly incompetent generals), the pay-to-be-an-officer system had one big advantage, as explained by Cecil Woodham-Smith in her brilliant book The Reason Why, which is about the failures of the Crimean War (of which more below). She describes how a system of purchase ensured that the military was led by people with a vested interest in the stability of society and the power of those at the top.

The downsides to this “enthusiastic amateur” model are obvious, however, and were so even at the time. Despite the system, some officers of ability managed to gain positions of influence. The conflict between the amateur ideal and the professional ability is illustrated (tongue in cheek) in the excellent The Charge of the Light Brigade, during the pivotal scene when Lew Nolan carries the fateful orders to the Cavalry Division from the hilltop HQ:

The exact quote from General Raglan (portrayed in the film and in much of the historical accounts as the most useless and incompetent of a bad bunch of British generals) is:

That young man [Captain] Nolan. I don’t really like him. He rides too well. Knows a lot. He has no heart. It’ll be a sad day when England has her armies officered by men who know too well what they are doing. It smacks of murder.

The enthusiastic amateur model worked when all an officer needed to do was look good in his uniform and say “tally-ho” when he’s charging the enemy guns (I can say this; I was a cavalry officer). The quote at the headline of this article “Don’t call me sir, I work for a living,” is something that every soldier has heard from an NCO when they accidentally called them “sir.” It’s usually understood as a jibe at the officers’ expense (who does the real work around here? I do! Etc.), but I think it comes from a bygone age when officers were amateurs who actually didn’t do any “work” to speak of.

The advent of mechanised killing and large-scale manoeuvre warfare changed this forever, which is what we’ll talk about in the next section.

…and partly pragmatic

Even when purchasing commissions was at its height, people understood that it carried the risk of producing a certain type of officer. Commissions in the Royal Engineers and Royal Artillery, for example, were not purchased outright but were linked to completing courses in the relevant military schools. Likewise for officers in the Royal Navy.

In summary, then, it was always clear that leadership for certain military roles required technical knowledge as well as “being a good chap.”

As warfare became more mechanised, the technical requirement increased. At the same time, larger and faster-moving armies demanded more of staff officers. Rather than simply carrying messages for a general or holding his telescope while he put his feet up, the modern staff officer needed to plan operational and logistical movements over large distances in short timeframes. In short, he needed to become a professional military manager.

Nowadays, the distinction between officers and enlisted is best summed up in a quote I once overheard:

I’ll do the talking, and you’ll do the doing.

Militaries are organisations whose purpose is to inflict violence at scale. They hold the legitimate monopoly, in fact, on the use of violence by the state. The modern officer is the manager and director of that violence, as distinct from the private and NCO who is the executor of that violence.

Is this a firm distinction? No way. At a tactical level, there’s little difference between a Lieutenant and a Sergeant or Corporal. Although they do similar jobs on the battlefield, their roles and trajectories in the organisation are quite different:

• The junior officer is undergoing an apprenticeship in leadership which will better enable him/her to lead “teams of teams” (as a commander) and/or manage military operations (as a staff officer) in the future.
• The NCO is building their professional experience of leading troops directly as well as deepening their technical knowledge of particular weapons systems or tactics to become a subject matter expert.

Even these distinct roles are blurred, however, as the pathway from NCO to junior officer becomes something that more and more militaries are using. Let’s discuss that next.

The barriers between tiers are falling away as society changes

Whereas promotion was previously attained upon reaching some objective criterion like age, weight, redness of face, or length of moustache, it’s become more merit based. This is probably a good thing for all concerned, despite the points I raised in the previous section.

The military has implemented certain practices it’s seen on civvy street when it comes to making promotions. Performance actually matters now. Ticking more boxes / having a more diverse career means you have a better file for the promotion board. Interviews give you a chance to “sell” yourself as the best possible prospect for higher rank.

By the same token, recent years (at least in the Irish military) have seen a much greater flow of promotions from the enlisted to the commissioned ranks. These happen at multiple levels, e.g.:

• From Private or junior NCO into officer training, i.e. starting at the bottom of the second pyramid;
• From junior NCO into junior officer after a separate officer training course;
• From senior NCO to captain after a separate officer training course and thenceforth quickly to senior officer.

This is, in one sense, just a natural consequence of society becoming more meritocratic. Just as in the past, governments today want their militaries controlled by those with the greatest stake in the status quo. Whereas previously that meant restricting officership to the wealthiest, today that means making it a viable career path for the middle and upwardly-mobile working classes.

Will the difference between officers and enlisted ranks gradually fade away and disappear altogether?

Star Trek: The Next Generation is as extreme example of this, and maybe this is an intentional commentary on social structures in the late 2300s. Chief O’Brien is a senior enlisted man, but wears the same uniform and insignia as any of the senior officers on the bridge:

Does Star Trek point the way toward the future of military rank structures, where the boundaries between enlisted and commissioned ranks are irrelevant? Let’s discuss that in the next and final section.

Conclusion: Differences between officers and enlisted persist

The much-vaunted egalitarian society has only gone so far. Educational opportunities are still unevenly spread, and this results in a skewed representation in the officer corps toward the middle classes.

Despite the abolition of the commission purchase system 150+ years ago, there are still (anecdotally at least) British Army regiments whose social expectations of its officers necessitates a secondary source of income. This might just be vile republican slander which I’ve internalised, however, so please correct me in the comments if I’m wrong.

For all its unwieldiness and traditional elitism, the military structure results in the mixing of people from all walks of life who may never otherwise have worked together. That’s one of its great benefits. After leaving the military I joined a multinational professional services company. They were big on diversity in hiring, and had colleagues representing a wide range of nationalities, races, genders, and sexual orientations. There was a monoculture of background, however. Everyone came from the same schools, the same universities, and went to the same ski resorts every year on their holidays.

Compare that with the military, where I had the great privilege to serve with people from all sorts of backgrounds and learn a great deal from them.

Will the officer and enlisted divide persist? On the one hand, I think so. National leaders will always need a cadre of professional military managers to translate their directives into action. Moreover, they need someone to hold the legal can for exercising lethal force on behalf of the state. Wherever there are situations where blame is possible, then there will be an officer to take that blame.

On the other hand, I’ve often thought that our present organisational structure for military operations is not fit for modern-day technology. This is something I’d like to return to in a later post. In short, I’m talking about the ~3x rule of units and sub-units. A battalion has three manoeuvre companies. A company has three platoons. A platoon has three sections, and so on.

Modern command and control technology is world apart from the days of a general sitting on a hill with a telescope and an aide on horseback, but we’re using similar organisational structures. Most officers today are middle managers, working on the staffs of battalions, brigades, and divisions. A flatter structure would be easier to command and control in an agile way, but it would gut the requirement for officers.

So perhaps that’s the future: the same divide, but more NCOs in technical roles and fewer officers generating less paperwork and a more agile battle rhythm.

That’s all for this week, but what do you think? Please let me know in the comments below. Also remember to subscribe if you haven’t already. Thanks again for reading and see you next week.

Cover picture: The Honour Guard | Serbian Armed Forces

1. And women, of course, as I’ve discussed on these pages before. ↩︎
2. As usual, I have a strong Army/land bias here. You can replace “soldier” with “sailor” or “airman,” and “private” with “seaman” or “airman” as appropriate. ↩︎
3. I’m massively simplifying things by calling this a “system,” when I’m really talking about 18-19th century British practice. Suffice to say it’s a hell of a lot more complicated and fluid than my wavetop description here. ↩︎