Can there possibly be two officers of the same rank serving on the same vessel? And if so who is in charge? (I.e two lieutenant junior grade officers on the same ship)
In: Other
There’s a general order of precedence. It can vary slightly from service to service, but it typically goes:
Assignment > Rank > Date of Rank > Date of Commission (for officers) > Date of entry into service
The most important assignment is “command.” If you’re the Captain of the ship, or the Colonel commanding a Regiment, you’re in charge. But “Assignment” can also mean other roles. For example, if you’re a staff officer, and another officer from a different section comes into yours, they don’t get to run your staff section even if they outrank you. This can extend to temporary assignments, too: if you’re put in charge of a formation for group physical fitness, you could be a junior enlisted and still be “in charge” of officers for that specific action. There’s also authority extended through other means: the chief enlisted of any command directly reports to the commander, and has a lot of authority delegated (often informally) by that commander, no matter how many other officers there may be.
In practical terms, it’s rare for the issue to extend even as far as Date of Rank, let alone beyond. For any important roles, there will be a formal accession plan to delegate/transfer authority, to ensure an orderly transition if the person in charge is unable to exercise their authority for any reason. In the active components, promotions are usually done by a sequence number, which spaces them out through the year, while in reserve components, it’s more common for people to be promoted in one big batch (especially officers). And in practical terms, if you’re doing the “dick-measuring contest” of comparing dates of rank or beyond, you’ve likely got bigger problems.
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