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The Warrant Officer Ranks: Adding Flexibility to Military Personnel Management February 2002

Warrant officers and limited duty officers make up only about 1.4 percent of active-duty personnel (see Table 2). Even in the Army, the service with the heaviest concentration of warrant officers, technician warrant officers account for only about 1.3 percent of personnel; another 1.1 percent are aviators. The Navy has the longest tradition of warrant officer service, yet barely 0.5 percent of Navy personnel are warrant officers. Limited duty officers, however, account for another 1.0 percent of Navy personnel.⁽¹⁾
 

This chapter looks at what the small number of warrant officers and limited duty officers do in the services that employ them. In general, the services view personnel in both groups as senior technical experts, although Army warrant officer aviators do not appear to fit that definition well. Excluding those aviators, warrant officers tend to be concentrated in engineering and maintenance specialties, particularly in the Navy.
 

ROLES

The three services that employ warrant officers define their roles in essentially identical terms (see Box 1). Warrant officers are technical specialists serving in positions that require the authority of an officer. Their assignments are repetitive in nature rather than offering the broadening experiences required as preparation for higher command. Except for Army aviators and a few others, warrant officers' jobs are closely related to the occupational specialties they held as enlisted personnel; each warrant specialty is "fed" by a limited number of enlisted specialties. Compared with the occupational specialties of commissioned officers, those of warrant officers are more narrowly defined (and more numerous).
 

Limited duty officers in the Navy and the Marine Corps fill roles that, to an outsider, can seem strikingly similar to those of warrant officers. The differences in the formal definitions of warrant officers and LDOs are subtle, focusing on the degree of authority and responsibility as well as the breadth of expertise required (see Box 1). The occupational specialties of warrant officers and LDOs show considerable overlap; almost every Navy warrant officer specialty has a corresponding LDO specialty and vice versa, and most Marine Corps LDO specialties can also be held by warrant officers. Marine Corps LDOs must first serve as warrant officers, but the Navy--although it accepts warrant officer applicants--draws most of its limited duty officers directly from the enlisted ranks.

When the Navy reexamined its senior noncommissioned officer (NCO), warrant officer, and LDO programs in 1990, it produced what is probably the clearest statement of the differences among the groups (see Box 2). (Depending on the service, the term "noncommissioned officer" can refer to personnel in grades E-4 and above or E-5 and above.) The Navy's statement emphasizes the supervisory, leadership, and training roles of senior NCOs within an enlisted rating (occupational specialty). At the highest grade, the NCO's role may extend to matters stretching across "the full Navy rating spectrum." The warrant officer is a technical leader and specialist who "directs technical operations." LDOs fill "leadership and management" positions and, as they reach the higher ranks, become "more the 'officer' and less the 'technician.'" Army descriptions of occupational duties tend to convey distinctions similar to the Navy's, with senior NCOs as supervisors and warrant officers as technical managers.
 

Notwithstanding the Navy's seemingly clear distinctions, a telling indication of how subtle the difference is between a warrant officer and a senior noncommissioned officer comes from the services' differing responses to the introduction of the two most senior enlisted pay grades--E-8 and E-9--in 1958. The Air Force elected to discontinue its warrant officer program, recently noting that the decision "cut out an additional management layer and a separate personnel management system, and created increased promotion opportunity for the senior enlisted."⁽²⁾ The Navy initially decided to eliminate warrant officers as well, and to expand its LDO program. Four years later, however, the Navy reinstated the warrant officer program, a decision that may have reflected, in part, the Navy's long tradition of warrant officer service, which dates from that service's earliest years. The Army had completed a review of its warrant officer program in 1957 and apparently did not consider eliminating that program in response to the introduction of the new pay grades.

The most obvious difference among senior enlisted personnel, warrant officers, LDOs, and commissioned officers other than LDOs lies in their pay. Although the pay scales overlap considerably, warrant officers' pay generally falls between that of senior noncommissioned officers and commissioned officers--usually closer to the former. Limited duty officers receive the same benefits as other commissioned officers, but because they previously served at least four years in the enlisted ranks, their basic pay through grade O-3 is somewhat higher than that of other officers in those grades. (The pay grades O-1E through O-3E apply to such personnel.) New warrant officers typically earn about 17 percent to 20 percent more in basic pay than they did as enlisted personnel, and new LDOs in the Navy--serving in the lowest officer grade (ensign)--earn another 2 to 7 percentage points more. Those raises, however, leave the pay of both groups about 40 percent below that of commissioned officers with the same amount of military service who entered directly from civilian life. (Chapter IV discusses warrant officer and LDO selection practices and pay profiles more fully.)
 

OCCUPATIONS

Warrant officers and limited duty officers are drawn most heavily from equipment repair specialties in the enlisted ranks; thus, in comparison with commissioned officers, they tend to be heavily concentrated in engineering and maintenance occupations (see Table 3). More than half of all warrant officers and LDOs, excluding the Army's aviators, are found in such occupations, whereas less than 20 percent of commissioned officers serve in engineering and maintenance specialties in any of the three services. The Marine Corps also relies heavily on warrant officers in administrative positions; its largest single warrant officer occupation is personnel officer. In the Army, intelligence is another area in which warrant officers are heavily represented. Notably underrepresented in the warrant officer ranks are tactical operations officers--ground, air, and naval arms--except, of course, for the Army's aviators. That underrepresentation is consistent with the role of technical expert that all three services define for warrant officers.
 

The enlisted occupational specialties that contribute disproportionate numbers of personnel to the technician warrant officer ranks are generally in the areas of electrical/mechanical equipment repair, electronic equipment repair, and, except in the Marine Corps, communications and intelligence (see Table 4).⁽³⁾ Personnel in the basic war-fighting specialties--infantry, gun crews, and seamanship--generally do not qualify directly for warrant officer or LDO service. The Army draws a few warrant officers from among personnel in health care specialties, but the eligible specialties are medical equipment repairer and veterinary food inspection specialist.
 

1. This paper does not examine the Coast Guard, which is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation. About 4.1 percent of Coast Guard personnel are warrant officers.

2. Air Force response to a Congressional Budget Office request for information provided by the Office of Budget & Appropriations Liaison on November 9, 2000.

3. Direct comparisons of enlisted and officer (including warrant officer) occupations are not possible because the Department of Defense groups those occupations differently. The comparisons here group the occupations of warrant officers and limited duty officers according to the occupational categories of the enlisted specialties that feed into them.

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