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In the U.S. Navy, the rank of "ensign" superseded "passed midshipman" in 1862.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 recognition of Russia on November 16, 1933, started forces which were to have considerable influence in the attempt to collectivize the United States.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control—’indoctrination’ we might say—exercised through the mass media.”
—Noam Chomsky (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)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)