June 26, 2007

Well, the Aussies are in Charge Now...

Commadore Peter Lockwood of The Royal Australian Navy has taken command of the coalition forces in the Northern Persian Gulf.

This may or may not be related to this story.

It seems that the Iranians first tried to capture the Aussies....but the Aussies were downright non congenial.

 As a rather annoying aside: We don't even have Commodores any more! The hallowed and historic designation was replaced in the late 80's with the awe in spiring title of "Rear Admiral Lower Half"....How gimp is that?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:29 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1 It has been off and on an official rank since the Navy's been around, but it certainly still exists as a title (in the USN, at least - don't know about the Coasties).  For example, O-6's who command training air wings are called Commodore, as well as random O-6's on a boat (to differentiate them from the Captain of the ship).  I imagine shoes use it a lot more than the aviation community.

Posted by: astro at Tue Jun 26 18:34:17 2007 (q4NkN)

2 In the Coast Guard, it is only used by the Auxiliary.

I didn't know the term was in any use in the Navy. Most navies use it though, particularly those spawned by the UK.

Posted by: Brickmuppet at Tue Jun 26 18:52:34 2007 (V5zw/)

3 Here's a random Commodore for you:

http://www.lemoore.navy.mil/csfwp/commodore.htm

I knew this guy pretty well when he was at the weapons school - he used to fly a good bit with our squadron.  He's now commanding the Strike Fighter Wing Pacific - basically he owns all of the Hornet squadrons on the west coast.  So it's not just limited to boats and training wings.

Posted by: astro at Tue Jun 26 20:36:54 2007 (q4NkN)

4

The big difference is that in Commonwealth military forces, one star is not "flag rank". So in ground or air force an O-7, one-star, officer is called a "Brigadier" and in naval forces a one-star officer is called a "Commodore". Starting with two stars, they're respectively "Major General" and "Rear Admiral", and as such are flag officers.

In the US military, one-star (O-7) is a flag rank. So it's a "Brigadier General" in ground and air forces. It has to be some sort of "admiral" for the navy but there is no traditional rank that fits in, so they came up with "Rear admiral of the lower half". (Traditional ranks were "Rear Admiral", "Vice Admiral", and "Admiral". In WWII when the five-star rank was created, that got called "General of the Army" and "Admiral of the Fleet" respectively. But the five-star rank was retired in the 1950's; we don't use it anymore.)

For a while, that meant that navy O-7's wore two stars anyway. They were differentiated from "rear admiral of the upper half" (O-  by differences in braid -- but others from other services didn't necessarily know that very well and thus there was a lot of confusion, what with army O-7's sometimes saluting navy O-7's by mistake. So now navy O-7's have one star, like they ought to. But they still need to be called "Admiral", to indicate that they're flag officers, which is why the clumsy rank name.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thu Jun 28 21:33:03 2007 (+rSRq)

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