Military Ranks

[Celebrim]

There is no single answer to this question. It's like asking, "How are societies organized?" Military ranks tend to follow particular patterns, but then they tend to acquire peculiarities based on the social structure of the society they are drawn from.

For Dwarfs in my campaign world, they are organized according to families and family heads are pretty much required to fill in for the duties of military officer. There is no passing the duties of military officer off to anyone - the whole culture is a military unit. These are the military ranks:

1) High Thane: The leader of the clans.
2) Thane: The head of a clan and all its septs. They swear fealty to the high thane, and act as his generals and advisors. In particular, the younger thanes are expected to act as field commanders, and the older thanes are expected to serve as a general staff and aide de camp to the Thane. When a clan goes to battle, if the Thane is infirmed, his eldest son or else his eldest capable male relative (nephew, brother, etc.) leads the Clan in his name and has the rank of Chief. Thus, "Who is your chief?", will be answered with, "Thane Borion of Clan Proudhammer" or "Chief Borion, son of Thane Borion of Clan Proudhammer" depending on the circumstances. Thanes very widely in effective rank depending on the number of sept in their command. A minor Thane might command 500 male dwarfs. A major Thane might command 6000. If a Clan is very large due to a great many septs, the Thane will need to break his command down into subcommands. More on that later.
3) Chieftain: The heads of the septs. They swear fealty to the thane, and act as his captains and advisors. Rank here is as above, save that the Chieftains son is usually a Carl. Generally, a Chieftain commands between 100-300 male dwarfs.
4) Carl: The head of a family. They swear fealty to the Chieftains. Generally, speaking, a family is about 20-40 male dwarfs, but some families can dwindle so that an entire family might field only 5 male dwarfs. Those that dwindle too much are usually incorporated into a larger family by agreement (generally solemized by marriage), and fight under their banner until such time (if ever) the line is restored. Those that get big, form septs with the permission of the Thane and break into subfamilies.
5) Huscarl: This one gets wierd. The rank is roughly equivalent to 'Knight', but the relationship doesn't have an equivalent in humanity. This is an unmarried dwarf who has pledged himself to the spouse of a dwarf - usually of a noble family. The Huscarl becomes, if the spouse accepts, essentially a platonic spouse in the household. The rank and honor derived thereby therefore depend on the rank of the spouses husband. The Huscarl of the High Thane is a very important dwarf. The Huscarl of a low ranking dwarf is a nobody, and a figure of both romantic ballads and comedic ridicule. Regardless, they are more or less outside the chain of command. It's generally from the Huscarl's that a high ranking dwarf will look to for subcommanders if the host he commands is too great to maintain direct control. For example, a Chieftain with 40 dwarfs in his command might assign leadership of 10 dwarfs to himself directly, another 10 to his eldest son, and 10 to each of his two huscarls.
6) Captain: In dwarf culture, this isn't a permenent rank. This is merely the title given to the 'Dwarf in Charge' or acting commander of a unit. Usually nobody claims to be 'the captain', but if you ask the question, "Who is your captain?", you'll get the name of the Dwarf that that dwarf is looking to for leadership. Since dwarfs tend to be keenly aware of social standing, age, and geneology, it really doesn't matter how many dwarfs die, everyone will know who the Captain is supposed to be and who the burden of command has fallen to.
7) Dwarf: This isn't really a rank. Every male dwarf though is assumed to be a soldier.

Now, there are jobs that involve having authority at all times. The jobs don't really have to do with rank, but obviously you get more honor (and thus rank) the higher the rank of the person that appointed you to the job.

1) Reeve: This is a police officer
2) Auditor: This is a detective
3) Warden: This is gaurd, or more literally "a person whose job it is to watch the door"

So you might get something Warden Captain Bofudas Steelhand of the City of Dwarrowmere, who is also the Huscarl of the Thane (technically, the vassal of the Thane's wife!), and who is also brother of one of the sept Chieftains.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

Just take a look at the Monster Manual.
It's universal that all creatures have the following ranks:
A sergeant leads a group of 10-20 men. I think 20 is kind of too much, so I tend to go with 10. Sergeants are usually 3rd-level characters.
For every 3-10 sergeants there's a captain. Captain is usually a 7th-level character.
Every captain has two lieutenants. Lieutenants are usually 5th-level characters.
A handful of captains are led by a commander or marshal. The actual titles can vary a lot, since there are so few of them. The rank can be very individual.
A handful of commanders are led by general or perhaps just by the king directly. A large kingdom can have a few generals.

This system is very easy since every other creature on the face of the planet is following the same structure, so there is no need to invent a new one. Of course, you can make things difficult for yourself and have a different structure for every race, but this is up to you.

My standard companies are like this:
One hundred 1st-level warriors (2nd-level if true elites such as triarii).
Ten sergeants (Eight 3rd-level warriors, one 3rd-level sorcerer and one 3rd-level cleric).
Two lieutenants (Two 5th-level fighters).
One captain (One 7th-level fighter).
Almost half a dozen experts follow the company, three of them are non-magical healers that take orders from the cleric. Two are scouts (not the class). One is a servant of the captain. Also some commoners carry stuff, feed, maintain and clothe the company.

 

[Tovec]

True for modern, US forces. The British services in the imperial era had Ensigns in the Army as the lowest ranking officer and the Navy had Lieutenants. In the Navy, both ours and the British, Captain is both a rank and a duty post. The commander, regardless of rank, of a ship is always a Captain but a Captain is not always a commander of a ship.

It can be confusing and the advice that @haakon1 and others gave is good. Creating a simple set of ranks with only enough levels for the force size and not paying too much attention to modern military ranks is an excellent approach.

I was more than done with this thread back in Oct but here I go again.

The outline I gave before is exactly what you would find online in virtually all sources. Some countries may have alternates but the lists I gave there are the default used in almost all (especially, but not limited to, western, industrial) countries and in the UN forces. I'll agree they are modern uses and not historical but that isn't what I was giving. I was giving the lists as they currently exist.

In the case of Captain of a ship. That has to do with being the top naval officer on the ship at the time. You could be a seaman, lieutenant, captain, commander or even an admiral [assuming he was the "captain/commander" at the time instead of a captain](also, I'm not an expert so this is just to the best of my knowledge). It is an honourary title and it means captain of the ship. It is not an official rank off the boat. As soon as a more senior officer shows up, that person would become captain. If that "captain" lieutenant were to leave and talk to other naval officers they would refer to him as lieutenant NOT captain, regardless of what his juniors called him while on duty. In that case it is not a rank, it is a title. It means "guy in charge" more than anything. Captains and commanders, in the explanations I have given, refer to RANKS not titles.

Beyond this, I will reiterate that Captain (assuming navy) will be equivalent to a full colonel (in the army), each having a silver eagle insignia indicating rank. Naval Commanders would be equal to (military) Lt. Colonel, each with a silver oak leaf. In this naming convention, it would be strange to ever see a Commander outrank a captain. There are no commanders above captain, there are "commanders of X force" but those are titles and not ranks and usually are given to high ranking admiral/generals.

If you want to use something completely different that is fine. But that is not the typical naming convention and I pointed that out WAAY back. Beyond that if the OP (I think it was) was using commander in place of colonel then that would work out fine too, as Captain in the army is two silver bars. Only in that case would it make sense, for colonels (renamed to commander) to outrank captain. Otherwise, by normal standards, it is incorrect. Honestly I don't care what they end up (or since it has been 6 months, likely, ended up) doing. I just wanted to point that out what the ranks should look like. I don't see why I ever got the pushback I ever got. Look ranks up on wiki or other sites, they are fairly clear.

If you want to talk about NCOs then I can certainly see how much confusion it cause, those are not standardized as much as I would like at all.

 

[Umbran]

I presume the swordsmen were mainly minor nobles, consisting of perhaps 10-12 knights and their squires, but it's possible there were fewer knights and some presumably non-nobles to go with them.

Goodness, no! The bulk of the men-at-arms were typically commoners.

For example consider the battle of Agincourt. Depending which chronicler you read, the French had something like 8000 footmen, 4000 archers and 1500 crossbowman, and maybe 1200 to 1600 mounted troops in the vanguard - and you're sure not to have seen a noble worth the name on foot in that mess!

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Many of the knights had dismounted, believing they were more vulnerable to archers that way.

So they carried shortened lances, poleaxes and what not, leaving swords on hips because they're not very good at chopping through English knight armor, and walked through the mud (difficult terrain) at the archers. It... ended badly.

But it's possible there were lots of commoner foot soldiers, it's just that no one ever seems to talk about them.

 

[Starfox]

I heard that 10% of the french population in 1789 were nobility. Even if this is an exaggeration, the French always had many nobles, so some of those might have been too poor to be mounted knights.

 

[haakon1]

Some countries may have alternates but the lists I gave there are the default used in almost all (especially, but not limited to, western, industrial) countries and in the UN forces. I'll agree they are modern uses and not historical but that isn't what I was giving.

Nod, modern military ranks are as close to universal as just about anything in the globalized world. NATO rank reference codes provide an easy translation for every military that I'm aware of. And often, even the terms in different languages are cognates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_military_ranks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_rank


Why? I've often wondered (honestly) at how it could be that universal. One theory I had is that there's something innate, even evolutionary in origin, in the species that wants units that are more-or-less 10-12 (squad with a sergeant), 100-150 (company with a captain), 1000 (battalion with a Lt. Col., or single-battalion regiment with a colonel), and 10000-15000 (division with a 2-star general). Is it having 10 fingers? Or because hunter-gatherer groups evolved to a scale of about 100-150 people (near minimum for genetic diversity over multiple generations)? Who knows.

More obviously it's the legacy of imperialism. Why would the American, Ugandan, Pakistani, and Singaporean armies all have the same ranks and organization? Duh. All four countries, distant as they are in location and culture, were part of the British Empire and their first generals after independence were former British officers. Add in the French and Spanish have similar ranks, and you get a legacy in probably the majority of the world's countries.

For a fantasy world, you could say Dwarves are completely different (different species!) or you could say, eh, it's all the same. I prefer the latter.

 

[Ryujin]

You tend to fall into patterns of behaviour evidenced by your opponents or conquerors. Legacy of Rome, passed on to the conquered, who then became conquerors/colonizers who travelled the world.