Download - Royal Australian Navy

306 australian maritime issues 2009: spc-a annual
With the expansive middle class as the major source of both Officers and Ratings there
needed to be a different set of criteria for determining where to recruit which. The
foremost of these criteria turned out to be education. Those with advanced schooling
would be train to be Officers and those without would train as Ratings. This educational
bias coupled with the tradition of entitlement fostered an elitist mentality in the Officer
ranks that on the whole was justly deserved. For the most part, Officers were better
educated, more amenable to further instruction and thus able to grasp the methods and
consequences of command far better than their minimally educated NCM counterparts.
Current Status
The 20th century changed everything. In the last century the rate of technological
innovation increased geometrically. Warships went from huge iron-clad monstrosities
pushed around by clumsy steam plants to sleek, fast vessels propelled by the exotic
technologies of gas turbines and fuel cells. The introduction of powered flight gave
the Navy both new weapons to fight with as well as new weapons to defend against.
Missiles, radar and other technologies made it necessary to educate the NCMs of our
navies to levels as high as those required of the Officer ranks.
In the latter half of the century the ‘education gap’ between Officers and NCMs
continued to narrow until it became difficult to notice a difference. The background
education required for a Commissioned Bridge Watchkeeping Officer would sometimes
be less than that required for a NCM Radar Technician. The traditional assumption
that a higher educated individual was somehow innately more fit to command than
one of less formal education led the navy into recruiting larger numbers of Officer
Candidates and weeding out, at great expense, those unfit to command rather than
targeting their efforts on a smaller and possibly more capable segment of the available
pool. This ‘old school’ paradigm has resulted in a navy somewhat healthy in the Officer
ranks and woefully deficient in the technical NCM ranks. Recruiting centres are more
likely to aim a prospective sailor with a university degree into the Officer ranks than
into an NCM technical trade. The increasing role of technology in the modern navy
has also made the navy a more and more expensive institution for individual nations
to maintain. There is little money available for wasting on the ‘old ways’ if newer and
less expensive paradigms can be found.
The Crossroads
So here we stand at a crossroads. In one direction we have the option of going along
as we always have, with the rank structure valiantly attempting to mirror the everchanging
structure of society at large. As we already know, this choice is expensive
and will become harder and harder to accomplish as the rate of change accelerates
and society itself grows more complex and fractures into many different subsets. Our
only other option is to divorce the naval rank structure from the influence of civilian