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)
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There’s always an order of merit list if it ever came to that. So if two officers had the same date of rank- the list rank orders every individual. At least in the army. Not sure navy
Yes and it’s pretty regular for this. Typically they aren’t in positions that they would need to have conflict of rank, but they also look at how long someone has been at that rank to determine seniority.
All the time. You might have noticed that naval ships are kind of big and require lots of officers.
“Who is in charge” is the ship’s captain. There wouldn’t be a situation where one junior officer is issuing an order to another junior officer.
The captain of the vessel is in-charge.
You can have a thousand lieutenants, but they answer to the captain, not to each other.
In the same way a corporate job will have people of the same rank working side by side, the military will as well. You can have Steve, Manager (Human Resources) and Melissa, Manager (Marketing) and Bob, Manager (customer support). They’re people managers that run their team; that’s basically what a Lt JG is.
Like most corporations, military bases/ships/posts are divided up into various departments. You might have the supply department, the medical department, operations, IT, food, etc. Each of those have senior leadership who oversee other officers, who themselves oversee even more people.
The hierarchy gets wider the further down you go, with individuals of the same rank often being responsible for very specific but different duties. The rank structure is pretty clear to those within it and having people of the same rank is rarely an issue unless one of them has a fragile baby ego.
What do you mean is it possible, there’s only like 6 ranks up to Capt, they supposed to do everything with 6 officers?
Yes, and it’s very common. Each officer would be in charge of the people under him, and responsible to the officers over him in the chain of command. There should be no conflict unless one of them is trying to issue orders outside his own chain of command.
The only rank that there is one of is the senior commanding officer, and their subcommander. For your lower officer roles you’ll have multiples due to shifts. The ranks of those seniors officers on land varies depending on the size of the ship, but when on ship that officer is “Captain”.
As others have said, yes. The bit I’ll add that I haven’t seen is that in addition to raw seniority, who’s in charge is also determined by their job. So it’s pretty normal for Lt. Smith to report to Lt. Jones in the course of their work if Smith has a more senior role. In the most extreme case, the commanding officer of a vessel is the legal Captain, regardless of rank. If an Ensign (lowest commissioned officer rank) is put in charge of a boat, then even a Fleet Admiral (5 stars) is subordinate to them in that instance.
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