Thanks for the great replies to my question, everyone!
Some of you said that aside from the relationship between enlisted and officers being different between branches, it's also different depending on the jobs you do in said branch. Anyone care to dig deeper on that subject? Are some jobs more "relaxed" than others as far as the relationships between officers and enlisted go?
I'll comment on this. And I'll give a disclaimer that I'll probably piss off some people too. So let's just get that out of the way. Fortunately, this is an academy (Commissioned Officer) forum, so I won't piss off as many as I could in an open forum.
Today; education is a lot more available to enlisted personnel. Such as American Military University and just about any other online university. In my time however, the air force was the only branch that actually had their own accredited college whereby enlisted members got accredited and transferable college credits for their technical school. (CCAF - Community College of the Air Force). Now; the question was "are some JOBS" more relaxed on the officer/enlisted relationship. Well, in the air force, the highly technical enlisted jobs like electronic technicians, telecom techs, etc... had schools that could be close to a year long out of basic training. Add on additional training for more specialized equipment, and it's not uncommon to be in school for 2 years during your first 4-6 year enlistment. Most of these type jobs practically GAVE you an associate's degree with all the technical training you received. Most of these enlisted basically took a semester or two of GER type classes; e.g. english, history, math, etc... and they had their AAS degree.
Add onto this, that a whole lot more of enlisted personnel have college degrees than most people think. Most people would think that officers are college graduates and enlisted are just high school graduates. That's simply not true. And it's even LESS TRUE today with more online and other college availability. But even in my time; 1978-1999, there were a LOT of enlisted with associates, bachelors, and even senior nco's with grad school degrees.
I bring this up, because many of the technical enlisted personnel, had degrees in Electronics, Computers, Engineering, etc... Nothing against the history, art, or english degrees; but many of the officers ALSO had classes and some experience with the higher math, science, and engineering classes. E.g. ALL Academy grads, even those with a history degree; take engineering classes. So; the point is, many of the more technical enlisted careers, tend to have a lot more in common with the officer corp. They both have college backgrounds; both tended to take a lot of the same type classes; both are more educated all around. As such, it seemed that that had closer "Relationships" too. Fortunately, both being as well educated and experienced, they were most times also able to keep the relationship from being a problem.
So I'm not dogging the enlisted security forces individual; the civil engineer; the admin technician; crew chief; etc... But I am saying that I saw first hand, and noticed over an entire career, that the relationship (Even work relationship) between say a Communications Squadron Electronics tech and their Comm officers was at a more familiar level than many other jobs. This also seems to have extended across duty assignments. I spent a lot of time in Tac-Comm which included working with a lot of pilots, intel, specops, etc... And there seemed to be a different relationship. A friend in the navy was an ET (Electronics Technician) and he said he noticed a similarity in the navy. Basically; the more education you had, the more in common you had with others who had an education. Thus, officers. Therefor, the relationships seemed to be different.
But still; those relationships usually never existed within your own chain of command or squadron. Yes, I would call my planning officer (0-2, Lieutenant), L.T. (Yes, the letters L.T); and he'd usually call me Mike. And in a more formal setting, it would be Sgt and Sir. But then, as I said, because we worked together, we wouldn't spend time off duty together. Except for possibly if we were BOTH on the squadron Softball team or bowling team, and we'd have beer together at the game. But most CLOSE friends, who were officers, e.g. pilots, social actions officer, etc... were usually neighbors and such where our social life never mixed with work, because our paths rarely ever passed each others. But again; each branch... each base...... State Side vs Overseas.... etc... all create different and unique situations and scenarios.
