That's right. I knew something didn't sound right about the way I had typed it.
So, what's the difference between "Commander, Starfleet" and "Chief of Operations, Starfleet"?
The first is the most senior admiral in charge of Starfleet, kind of like the Commandant of the Marine Corps, or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the U.S. The chief of operations is a senior administrative post, the officer in charge of assigning starships to patrol corridors, for example. Check out Memory Alpha for more. -- RR
Exactly right. People who haven't dealt with the military miss this pretty often, though, so it's worth clearing up.
I'll use Army/Air Force terminology rather than Navy terminology, but the structure is almost identical. I'm just more familiar with the verbage associated with the Army style than I am with the Navy style.
In the Army, any organization above Platoon level has a staff. (A platoon is made up of several squads, each squad being the smallest real unit of division - typically about a dozen men.) A platoon has an actual commander, though... typically a second lieutenant (the lowest officer rank - equivalent to an ensign in naval terms).
Above the platoon, you have the first element with any form of actual STAFF. This is the company. A company typically consists of three or four platoons plus the staff. Staff consists of a company commander (typically a captain - equivalent to a naval Lieutenant), an XO (typically a first lieutenant - equivalent to a naval Lieutenant Junior Grade), a First Sergeant, a company clerk, and a company supply NCO. Really a very minimal staff.
So far, this isn't very relevant to the topic, I know, but I'm just laying groundwork. See, above the Company level, you have a full staff, and the staff organization is generally the same regardless of what level you're talking about.
Right above the company is the Battalion. A Battalion is typically three or four companies plus a "Headquarters Company." All the staff and support are part of HQ Co.
A BN has a Battalion Commander (typically a lieutenant Colonel... equivalent to a naval Commander), an XO (typically a major... equivalent to a naval Lieutenant Commander), and four key staff elements. (THIS is where I was leading towards all along!)
The four staff elements are:
S1 - Personnel
S2 - Intelligence/Security
S3 - Operations
S4 - Logistics
The S1 is the Personnel Officer, and is typically a Captain. Think of his section as the Human Resources team for a civilian employer... it's very similar. Very crucial stuff, but not particularly high-profile or high-glory. Generally, this is treated as a training position for XO, though, so it's fairly necessary for an officer to hold this position at one time or another if they want to be a commander at some point.
The S2 is the intelligence officer.
This is the job I held through most of my military career, in several different organizations. Unlike the other staff positions, the S2 always should be an Intelligence Corps officer, not a "line officer" (ie, in an Infantry division, all the rest of the staff officers would probably be infantry corps officers, but this one would be an intelligence corps officer). The job of the S2 is two-fold... first, to oversee all security matters (both the mundane stuff... patrols, etc... and securing and controlled dissemination of classified or sensitive information). And second, to be the expert on the enemy... capabilities, equipment, tactics, personalities, etc... and to use that to project enemy activities based upon a very limited amount of REAL information. (Basically, it's like having 5% of the pieces of a puzzle and trying to figure out what the whole puzzle might look like if finished!) Depending on the size of the organization, I had as few as four direct reports or as many as 17 under me.
The S3 is the Operations Officer. He's responsible for planning operations, writing orders, providing taskings to subordinate units, etc. He's typically someone who's already been an XO and is now in training to become a commander himself. As a result, this guy is typically the most senior staff officer (often outranking the XO, though technically "lower" in the chain of command).
The S2 and S3 are inherently "in conflict" in a certain sense, as the S2 is basically tasked to see the battlefield from the enemy's point of view... and is as a result required to be very critical of the S3's plans at every turn.
The S4 is the Logistics officer. My first job, out of the Officer Basic Course, was "assistant S4" my division's Intelligence Battalion... and since the actual S4 left immediately after that to go to medical school, I ended up doing his job for about eight months (a second lieutenant in a captain's slot, effectively). So I'm quite familiar with this one as well.
Basically, this is the group responsible for "beans and bullets," but also many other things. Anything you can define as "logistics" falls to the S4. That's transportation, maintenance, supply, and all that other "non-glorious" stuff except for the personnel issues.
So, basically the S1 and S4 are the "background" staff positions and the S2 and S3 are the "high-profile" positions. All four answer directly to the Commander. His job is not to have to worry about any of those matters... his job is just to tell everyone what the goal is, to make the big decisions. The XO basically oversees the day-to-day operations of the staff and ensures that what the Commander says actually gets DONE.
At the same time, you have a parallel structure... the "non-commissioned officers"... who are directed DOWNWARDS... that is, their job is to make sure that the men and women who do the actual WORK are functioning as intended... and have no real involvement (well, none "officially" in any case) with the planning/decision-making/policy-making matters. The officers decide, the NCOs implement, the soldiers do.
Why did I go through all of this? Simple... during ST-TMP, Kirk was Starfleet's S3... the Operations Officer. Not Starfleet's COMMANDER.
But it was a position which would have eventually led, had he chosen to follow it through, to him becoming Commander, Starfleet.
He basically blew his shot at that career path with TMP. (Not that he really wanted that, I'm sure.) But from that point forward, his career was on a "winding down" path rather than on an ascent as it had been previously. He went from being the youngest officer ever given command of a class-one ship-of-the-line, to almost certainly being the youngest ever Chief of Operations, and on the fast track to being Commander, Starfleet... and after that he never saw another promotion, and actually ended up being DEMOTED. I'm sure that if he wasn't as popular as he was with the public, he'd have been cashiered out. So, they basically put him into "PR-related" jobs from that point on (ST-II, ST-VI, ST-G).
