Need help from Military People

So Delta Force might be the best option... I can't find any mention of "officers" in the wiki article on them and seem they only recruit enlisted... Does this mean that Delta Force has no Officers? or that they Promoted from inside? Same thing with Marines... Marines have no officers?

It seems the best option is to make "The Captain" a Marine Officer which doesn't exist it seems so I might go with Green Beret for her... and then have the 3 other members be Delta Force

Yes Delta Force has officers.

No there isn't a lot of information published about their Table of Organization and Equipment because it's classified by the Pentagon because it's the primary counter terrorism unit for the Army.

What we do know is that the unit (Delta Force) was created along the lines of the British SAS.


Yes Marines have their own officers. The only thing they don't have is medical personnel. All medical personnel are provided by the US Navy.

Marines do have officers, though they are not their own military branch in civilian leadership structure, attached instead as a department of the Navy.

As you are setting this in the future (I assume), having a female Green Beret might be acceptable, but as of 2012, I believe that women cannot serve in any of the Special Forces. Indeed, they have only just recently opened some direct combat specialties to women.

Someone can, of course, correct me if I am wrong.

No this is not the future... it's the present, or a little bit in the past... I haven't decided whether to move the dates up.

So then she'd be have to be a normal army officer...

Actually, in keeping with the Marine Corp philosophy that every Marine is a combat rifleman, any specialist position that is incompatible with being a combat soldier is provided by the Navy. As I understand it, another thing the Marines do not have are chaplains: they are not infantry soldiers, so they are not Marines: they are always Navy personnel assigned to the Marine force.

I believe the Mobile Infantry that Heinlein invented for Starship Troopers was based in large part on the Marine Corp, both because of its relationship to the Navy corresponding to the Mobile Infantry's relationship with the starship navy, and in particular with the Mobile Infantry's moto of "everyone drops, everyone fights." Its said in the novel that in a hypothetical division of 10,000 Mobile infantry, exactly 10,000 are fighting soldiers. If the job can be done by non-infantrymen, the MI hires civilians to what anyone can do and asks the Navy to do what it cannot do like transport them across the galaxy.

It is I believe unique among western militaries that in the US Marine Corp, the fighter pilots are trained infantry riflemen, the truck drivers are infantry, the cooks are infantry, the mechanics are infantry. They must all remain fit and qualified to be rifleman as a Marine.

I suppose its worth mentioning that actually reading Starship Troopers might be valuable research material for thinking about a hypothetical military force set in a sci-fi environment. The MI are probably one of the core inspirations for all "space marines."

As far as I know, women can now serve in combat areas but they still cannot, to the best of my knowledge, serve as direct combatants. This restricts their ability to participate in any of the special operations command units, but it does not bar them. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (aka the Nightstalkers of Blackhawk Down fame) apparently is allowed to recruit women, but only for non-combat staff positions.

No, I think having thought about it that the best option given everything you've mentioned so far is to make "the captain" a Lt. Commander in the Navy. You want the character to have some specialty which in some ways is related to high technology, and her career path can take her through Naval Air Station Patuxent River, aka Pax River which is is a center of naval weapons system research and development for naval aviation. And there's a historical parallel: Rear Admiral Nora Wingfield Tyson, current commander of Carrier Strike Group Two, served at Pax River before becoming a Rear Admiral, and as far as I know the highest ranking women in the US military that has command of combat forces. Ironically, legally she can't actually *be* a combatant, but she commands one of the largest military strike forces on Earth (but her command is not unjustified given her prior service: she rose through naval aviation which is one of the few career paths available to women which parallel serving in combat units, and eventually served in command roles in naval surface ships including carriers).

I could imagine a woman navy officer rising through the ranks as a combat systems person, both as a systems operator and eventually a commander of a weapons development program of some kind. Say, commander of a missile frigate or cruiser testing a new navy railgun system. Such a person might conceivably have technical skill, but also command skill and was eventually moved up from someone working on combat systems to supervising the development and testing of same.

Its not perfect, but it seems to parallel something similar to what you seem to be aiming for. The critical area you're always going to have to smudge a bit is that no one who is incredibly good at making things work gets promoted to supervising that work and still has time to actually do it. In other words, "Scotty" is extremely rare in real life. Actually, you have to wonder what all the rest of the engineers were doing on Star Trek.

Ya know I think your right about the chaplains. I forgot about them completely.

Hate to burst your bubble but there are Astronaut badges for each branch of the military. A space force command would most likely draw elite personnel from each service.



The Army badge


The Naval/USMC/Coast Guard insignia


Only the Air Force doesn't have a badge/insignia for it's astronaut qualified personnel.

Why Lt. Commander? Also would she be qualified to be in that position. If I remember right as I don't have the chart in front of me and the ranks follow the same time in position... She'd have to be another year or 2 older. I'm not stuck on the age, but I'm more apt to keeper her younger (around 25) than older...

It seems that that doesn't fit as that would seem to lean more towards infiltrating an enemy position in foreign territory and holding it... This team would be more about repelling an enemy and taking an enemy position that is on friendly territory...

So it seems more that the enemy forces would be more akin to what you're talking about while the team I'm trying to make is not.

That's probably a fair assessment.

I should also add the reason I bring up women in combat situations. In story settings there's plenty of room for combat oriented women (such as Black Widow) because PTSD is an oft-maligned condition subject to inappropriate jokes by chickenhawks who think Qatar actually looks like what's depicted in the Transformer movie. Generally speaking it's not very good story material unless the story is about the condition itself. With all that in mind I don't see any reason why a fictional if mostly real world couldn't include women in direct combat roles if they have the training to back it up. Alternatively you could always pull a woman in a refigerator scenario to have one or more of your characters deal with the consequences of seeing a woman die but that my drag the story in a direction you don't want to go in.

A lot of this is not so different from the story concocted about Jessica Lynch by the government and the reality of her situation at the time.

Ultimately a good story is more about the story than getting mired in the details. Anyone who sweats over such minor details for the sake of a "Well, acutally..." point deserves the contempt they inevitibly receive.

It'd be a lot more funny if one were to inverse the joke and create a men in refrigerator moment.

Because that's the rank where I would expect someone to command a naval vessel or conversely an advanced weapon systems project. The rank equivalent to O-3 or an Army captain would be a naval Lt, which can also work.

The typical age of Lt. Commanders is mid 30s, but I've seen examples of younger Lt Commanders. The first place I checked was astronauts: a likely place to find smart and aggressive career people. Bruce McCandless was I believe a navy Lt. Commander at age 29 when he was chosen for the astronaut program in 1966. Given his timeline for college and career, its possible he could have reached that rank a year or two earlier, and I also don't know his date of rank: he could have been an Lt. Commander for a period of time before being selected.

It would be highly exceptional to be an Lt. Commander at age 25 at any time other than wartime. However, your character could be an Lt prior to whatever alien invasion happens. Once that happens, all bets are off on normal rank trajectories. In World War 2, ensigns were sometimes becoming Lt Commanders in less than four years.

Oh I know. As a former squid I've been resisting the urges to poke fun at the Air Farce by saying that they have pilots (I.E. airborne taxi drivers) while the Army, Navy, and Marines have Aviators, or say that Sailors are the highest form of Marine life.

If my recollection is correct the size of the vessel also has some bearing on the rank of the commanding officer. For example vessels the size of a PT Boat that operate in squadrons would have a Lt. Commander in charge of one boat in the squadron while Lt's commanded the other boats.

I do know that we have ships smaller than destroyers in our current Navy, but I can't recall if they operate in squadrons.