A group of Navy sailors secretly used Starlink to check sports scores, social media and watch movies. They hid it from rank-and-file.
A U.S. Navy chief who wanted the internet so she and other enlisted officers could scroll social media, check sports scores and watch movies while deployed had an unauthorized Starlink satellite dish installed on a warship and lied to her commanding officer to keep it secret, according to investigators.
Internet access is restricted while a ship is underway to maintain bandwidth for military operations and to protect against cybersecurity threats.
The Navy quietly relieved Grisel Marrero, a command senior chief of the littoral combat ship USS Manchester, in August or September 2023, and released information on parts of the investigation this week.
What this NCO did was not dumb; it was calculated and intentional violations of multiple rules and regulations they (and the others involved) knew very well. Then they tried to cover it up when people started asking questions.
Absolutely no sympathy for them in my book. These are supposed to be the leaders other enlisted look to emulate.
First off, not an officer, a high ranking enlisted(E-8) personal was the culprit.
Typically, anything E-4 or higher is considered a Non-Commisioned Officer.
EDIT further clarification: from my experience in the Canadian Army, what "Officers" means depends on context. Most often (and what [email protected] probably meant) it means just Commissioned Officers. Other times, it's anyone in leadership, including NCOs.
Very uncommon to refer to NCOs or SNCOs as officers in branches of the US military that I have experience with. Interesting about Canada though, I wonder what other countries do
The term officer, alone, as it stands in the headline, is reserved for commissioned officers. No one in the military would assume that headline was referring to an NCO.
Okay, but is the person still an officer? I mean, it is in the name. The way I see it, as a layman, it is kind of hard to ding the author for getting this wrong when they are technically correct and a laymen would consider them an officer, and the only real complaint is that colloquially military members don't refer to them as officers.
The difference between officers and enlisted (even enlisted “officers”) is well understood in the public domain. Just google the term “military officer”. You won’t find a reference to NCOs.
From the AI:
Here are some things to know about military officers:
Pay grades
Officer pay grades range from O-1 to O-10.
Broadly speaking, "officer" means a commissioned officer, a non-commissioned officer (NCO), or a warrant officer. However, absent contextual qualification, the term typically refers only to a force's commissioned officers, the more senior members who derive their authority from a commission from the head of state.
This just takes very little research for anyone writing an article on the subject. No, I don’t expect the laymen to automatically know the difference between an NCO and a commissioned officer, but we are talking about a journalist here. I suppose if you want to lower your standards for journalism, fine.