United States
The ranks of ensign and cornet were abolished in the U.S. Army in 1800.
In the U.S. Navy, the rank of "ensign" superseded "passed midshipman" in 1862. Ensign is the junior commissioned officer rank in the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard, the NOAA Commissioned Corps, and the PHS Commissioned Corps. This rank is also used in the U.S. Maritime Service and the U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps. Ensign ranks below lieutenant junior grade, and it is equivalent to a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force.
Depending upon the warfare community, an ensign may go directly to a warship after being commissioned to serve as a division officer, or he or she may serve up one to two years of specialty training before reporting to a combat unit (e.g. flight school, weapons systems school, navigator school, submarine school, amphibious warfare school, radar school).
Ensigns who become division officers are responsible for leading a group of petty officers and enlisted men in one of the ship's divisions (for example, engineering, navigation, communications, sensors or weapons) while at the same time receiving on-the-job training in leadership, naval systems, programs, and policies from higher-ranking officers and from enlisted men and women.
Navy and Coast Guard ensigns wear collar insignia of a single gold bar and because of this share the nickname "butterbars" with Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps second lieutenants, who wear the same insignia.
Within the U.S. Public Health Service, those wearing the rank of ensign are part of a commissioned officer student training, and extern program (COSTEP), either junior, for those with more than a year remaining of education in a commissionable degree (JRCOSTEP), or senior, for those within one year of graduating with a commissionable degree (SRCOSTEP). Some officers may hold a permanent rank of ensign based on their experience and education, but than can hold the temporary rank of lieutenant, junior grade.
Read more about this topic: Ensign (rank)
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)