Talk:Captain (United States O-6)

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Untitled

For discussion of the merger proposal go to Talk:Captain (naval)#Merger proposal--Petebutt (talk) 07:23, 8 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This:

"In the submarine community, a captain will typically command a ballistic-missile submarine (SSBN), or a squadron of attack submarines (SSN)."

is not true. A CAPT will be the commander of squadrons of both SSN and SSBN. SSBNs used to be commanded by captains, but the job has since reverted to CDRs. I don't know if there's a written justification for it but the Navy seems to only be putting captains in command of submarines of particular importance or novelty, like with the converted SSGNs. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.131.20.139 (talk) 03:57, 17 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Crew size

Regarding the line "Navy captains with sea commands in the surface warfare officer community generally command ships of cruiser size or larger.", is there written down somewhere a specifically-defined number of sailors that a command requires to be headed by a captain (or commander, or lieutenant commander, etc.) or is it more loose and arbitrary? – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 13:58, 14 June 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is very loose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 1ll6a6a (talk • contribs) 12:06, 29 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move 30 November 2022

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: No consensus to move. (non-admin closure) Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 18:55, 10 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Captain (United States O-6) → ?
Captain (United States O-3) → ?

– Whislt the current titles satify WP:PRECISION, they fail WP:JARGON (and WP:NCDAB implicitly). Disambiguation parentheticals should not require knowledge of inside baseball/technical minutiae. Possibilities for titles include Captain (U.S. maritime forces)/Captain (U.S. ground and air forces), Captain (U.S. naval forces)/Captain (U.S. ground and air forces), Captain (U.S. maritime forces rank)/Captain (U.S. ground and air forces rank) &c. NB that the Captain (United States) covers all uses in the U.S.; here are redirects to the naval article and the land forces article fyi. — AjaxSmack 17:19, 30 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That wouldn't work as the Marine Corps uses an O–3 Captain rank and is considered a Maritime/Naval Service. In addition, the new name for O–3 captain ignores that it is also used by the Space Force. Possibly Captain (U.S. Navy/Coast Guard) or Captain (U.S. Army/Marines/Air Force/Space Force) but that does get long quick. The other option is renaming the O–3 article to simply Captain (United States) as the default and the 0–6 article to Captain (United States Navy/Coast Guard) (or some derivation). Garuda28 (talk) 18:13, 30 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

How about something along the lines of Captain (United States company officer) and Captain (United States senior officer)? This would follow what is stated in Junior officer and Senior officer#United States. Ljleppan (talk) 12:31, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've notified WP:MILHIST of this discussion here to elicit additional responses. -Ljleppan (talk) 13:09, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment. The UK articles use Captain (Royal Navy) and Captain (British Army and Royal Marines). I appreciate that this is more complicated with US articles because there are more than two services involved for each, but it avoids the jargon. Captain (United States junior officer) and Captain (United States senior officer) may work. There could also be an argument for having a separate article for each service instead of grouping them all together and tying ourselves in knots trying to come up with a suitable disambiguator. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:43, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. None of the alternatives are satisfactory. We can't use the typical (maritime/naval) disambiguator because the Marine Corps uses the O-3 tradition despite being considered a "sea service". Listing each and every single branch in the title is way too wordy (and no one has yet even brought up The USMS or other auxiliaries). Picking one over the other as being "the default" is very misleading. Using "company officer" vs "senior officer" is still using "inside baseball/technical minutiae" to disambiguate. And using relative terms like "junior officer" and "senior officer" are even more vague than using numerals (i.e. lay readers would conflate "senior" with Generals/Admirals). In short having the main article at Captain (United States) and then these two as further detail articles is the best compromise in my current view. Next best would be to remerge the two articles back into Captain (United States), which might be doable if we absolutely must conform it 100% to Wikipedia standards. Gecko G (talk) 19:12, 1 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
- You make points most of which I don't disagree with. The current titles are definitely the most precise. However, using pay grades as disambiguators in a general reference work is extraordinarily abstruse. I'd fathom that nearly anyone who knows that one set of captains are O-3s and the other set are O-6s has little need for these articles anyway. For the rest of Wikipedia's general readership, you could just as easily put some random string of letters as a disambiguator—it would be just as helpful getting readers to the right place. (Even "two stripes" and "four stripes" would be more natural.) WP:PRECISION is important, but not more than WP:AUDIENCE, WP:TECHNICAL and WP:JARGON.

I disagree that titles like Captain (U.S. Navy)/Captain (U.S. ground and air forces) are "very" misleading. They are definitely incomplete, but disambiguators are not intended to be exhaustive definitions, and "cheap" redirects can lead those seeking captains of the auxiliaries &c. to the right place.

I didn't originally like the idea of merging the three US captain articles, but if the differences cannot be expressed concisely and clearly in a title, maybe it's a sign that the topics themselves are best dealt with together in one place. — AjaxSmack 18:46, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

My comment about picking a "default" being "very" misleading was in reference to picking either the O-3 or O-6 as the default over the other, not referencing picking one branch which uses one over the others that use the same.

The # stripes idea doesn't work for the O-3 version (and might get confused with Sergeant anyhow). Gecko G (talk) 22:14, 3 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.