Introduction

As with most militaries, we created the rank structure for GDS based on Enlisted/Officer.
For those who have never served in a military force before I’ll give a brief overview of how this all works, and how it’s laid out from an organizational perspective. Bear in mind that these examples will be presented in the most ideal way possible for the purpose of ensuring the subject’s clarity. There are further intricacies with how this all works in real world settings, but we’re going to set that aside for now and focus on the core concepts.

A military is, most commonly, organized into two different types of rank types:

• Enlisted: These are personnel who signed an enlistment to join the military for a set number of years. In GDS, there are no set number of years for an enlistment.

o Enlisted make up the majority of a military force and are paid less than officers.

• Officers: These are personnel who possess a degree that have been commissioned by the military force to act as that force’s leaders for a set number of years. These personnel graduate from either a conventional university, or a military academy. Again, in GDS there is no set number of years that this commission will last for.

o Officers are far fewer in number than enlisted are and have a higher income than enlisted.

There are other ranks, such as Warrant Officers, but we’ll focus on these first two for now.
For the enlisted, the rank is commonly abbreviated as “E-X” with a number denoting their paygrade.
In GDS, the first enlisted rank title is Defender.
This rank has the first enlisted paygrade, therefore the rank (not the title) is E-1.
Enlisted, paygrade 1.

Moving up the enlisted ranks is a Sentinel, an E-2.
Enlisted, paygrade 2.

This process is the same for Officers, with a Galer 2 ^nd Class (title) being O-1 (rank).
Officer, paygrade 1.

A greater paygrade = a proven greater skillset. As a personnel’s demonstration of skill, role expertise, expansion of responsibilities, and evidence of leadership increase, so too does their pay.

Now you may ask, why separate them into two different types of rank?
This is due to each type of personnel (enlisted, officer) having purview over different areas within a military force. The enlisted for the most part are the core of a military force; they are the boots on the ground and the ones who make it happen.
The officers are the leaders of a force and direct the enlisted on when and where to take action, with their concern being that of the overall big picture rather than the minute details.

Enlisted focus on the direct tasks at hand, executing them to the fullest of their capabilities without needing to worry anything except their target, their orders, and their efforts.
Officers plan and direct those efforts, placing the enlisted at the right place, at the right time, with the right tools and people to accomplish the objective.

Both support one another in the force’s efforts. Without enlisted, there is no force to speak of. Without officers, that force will struggle to be directed in the most efficient manner. There is an argument to be made that smaller forces don’t require officers, but that assumes a force of 20-50 personnel.
That isn’t tangible in a force of 800,000. A squadron leader cannot focus on his squadron of 10-20 men while also coordinating a feint of 7000 other men on the other side of the operational theater as he ensures bullets, beds and food safely arrive on time. Likewise, a force commander cannot maintain logistics and direct 50,000 men to effectively counter an enemy’s advance while dodging hand grenades.

Where this meets in the middle are the NCOs, non-commissioned officers.
NCOs are the true backbone of a military force, as they direct, coordinate and execute the efforts of the smaller elements that make up a military force. Further up in the ranks you have SNCOs, senior non-commissioned officers, that direct the efforts of the NCOs below them.

Starting at the ground level of a basic military and moving upwards, the organization will look similar to this:

Junior enlisted are led by NCOs.
NCOs are led by SNCOs and junior officers.
SNCOs and junior officers are led by senior officers.
Senior officers are led by force commanders.
Force commanders are directed by the nation’s government.

In our experience it's a valid and tried organizational system, but the problem is that in most modern militaries it quickly degrades into a tangle of nepotism, incompetence and bloat.
Often, if focusing on the issues from the rank structure, the end result after a number of years is this:

• Senior enlisted personnel become unaccountable and ineffective at their roles as leaders. Rather, a sort of racket appears whereby other senior enlisted bend the rules and regulations to suit their friends, or get out of trouble.
• This is partly due to the fact that the process for prosecution and correctional actions becomes more convoluted, difficult and lengthy in scenarios involving senior enlisted.
• Complaints or injunctions against these senior enlisted personnel are nearly impossible, as there is no avenue for lower enlisted to file them.
• The "open door" policy of reporting these issues up the chain is often never as the name would suggest.

• Senior officers likewise become unaccountable and ineffective at their roles as leaders. The same situation occurs where rackets and collusion see to it that regulations are ignored or twisted.
• As before with senior enlisted, the process in modern militaries to prosecute and issue correctional actions on senior officers and general officers is a massive resource sink. Often, the justice system of said military realizes the effort to prosecute them would be so tremendous in cost and time that instead, they're simply docked in pay and sent to a backwater posting till retirement.

• Apathy sets in at the highest levels of command, where now that the enlisted/officer has secured their position, all effort goes out the window. Rather they begin to simply coast until retirement, as the process of removing them is, like always, tremendous and takes a large amount of time to do.

• Lower enlisted and junior officers lack the ability to hold their leadership accountable for mistakes, lack of progress, lack of direction, or orders that lead to massive wastes of time, resources or even lives.

• To ensure retention and numbers, which factors into the performance reviews of senior personnel, standards are lowered and programs are enacted to prevent the removal of force members at all levels. As such, it becomes an arduous task to remove dead weight, unfit personnel, or issue punitive actions.

• Officers and senior enlisted are separated from the affairs and concerns of E-4s and below, NCOs and junior officers.
• This ends up extending into leadership not placing emphasis or effort on fixing the quality of life for the majority of their forces. Leadership is extensively sheltered and shielded from these realities, and instead have the white glove treatment wherever they go, often at the expense of both time and effort from their subordinates.

This list could be extensively longer, however the main point is this; within a majority of modern militaries leadership becomes sufficiently infected with unaccountability, apathy, aimlessness and incompetence.

We can discuss the causes of this for weeks on end, one of which is a distinct lack of an enemy or foe to point a military force's efforts towards. As we’ve seen, modern militaries in peacetime tend to degrade due to only focusing towards a frankly spectral and unquantifiable 'readiness' objective. In the end, this affects those further down the rank structure.

To avoid this, GDS maintains a rank structure in which all levels are held accountable, and one in which only those who merit the rank are allowed to keep it. Here, rank is earned and maintained.
Another difference is that our ranks are also related to skill and expertise, meaning that while an O-5 can be in charge of 5000+ legionnaires, they can just as likely be found leading a team of four within a highly specialized capacity due to the need for their experience.

While there are benefits to this structuring, there are also downsides as with all things. Although the structure is still fairly straightforward from a high-level perspective, the intricacies of individual interactions can get rather out of hand if you aren't used to them. This goes away with experience, but to highlight a handful of such intricacies:

• The Arbiter/CEO of GDS shares the level of authority with the other Arbiter/vice-commander.
• Both Arbiters may be overruled in certain situations and matters by legionnaires as low as an E-3. This mostly relates to Medical Legion roles such as Combat Surgeons, nurses and War Physicians.
• Chaplains have the authority to overrule anyone, at any time. As officers they can issue orders as anyone else at their rank can, but it primarily concerns automatically vetoing an order they believe is not in a legionnaire's best interest, or may be harmful to their mental wellbeing.
• Squadron commanders may band together to ignore the orders of an officer if they believe it to be incorrect, harmful to their subordinates, a waste of their squadron's time or simply issued in ignorance. We would urge them to use the diplomatic approach first, yet barring that, they may do what they believe best for the legionnaires under their command and present us with their case at a later time.

With all of these examples, and other instances, there will be a review after the fact to determine whether the override was justified. That said, in the moment that the override is put into action it remains resolute and is to be adhered to.

The following, however, is one of the most controversial ones:

• Members of a squadron (whether enlisted or officers) may dispose of their commander should they find them to be lacking in leadership, direction, or have lost faith in their ability to safely lead them.
• This can take the form of paperwork, restructuring of the squadron with a new commander, or even shooting their commander in the field if they are putting the squadron in danger due to their actions.

To date we have never had an occurrence of the above, as inept commanders are quickly removed, replaced, corrected or demoted after failing to meet the standards we hold our leaders to. Though we have certainly had plenty of legionnaires drunkenly shooting at each other all the time.

Let’s turn our attention towards GDS ranks and what echelons they inhabit.
Within GDS, our enlisted ranks go from E-1 to E-9.
Our officer ranks go from O-1 to O-7.
The areas that each of these ranks oversees, and their responsibilities, are vastly different than that of a conventional military. As GDS is comprised of nine different legions, they all have their own operational requirements and standards that cannot be unified into a single entity.

At the time of this writing, our basic structure is as follows:

All of this is completely ignoring the aforementioned intricacies when it comes to interactions between legionnaires depending on their role or job.

Our organizational units are laid out as follows, starting with the smallest organizational unit:

To give an example of how this organizational system works we’ll look at this from my perspective, as the commander of a legion.
I am the Primary Officer of the Administrative Legion, and work alongside the Chief Master Warden of the Administrative Legion. We cannot command over 92,000 legionnaires by ourselves, so we need to break the number down into something more manageable.
My direct reports are four Revenants (O-5s), each of whom command a war host alongside a Chief Master Warden (E-9). They don’t directly command 23,000+ legionnaires, they command their two direct reports.
Each one of those Revenants who lead a war host have two Nocturnists (O-4) that report directly to them, and both of them command their own battle host alongside a Master Warden (E-8).
This hierarchal structure then continues downwards until reaching the squadron level.

When I issue an order to one of my direct reports, they then take it from there and the order works its way down the chain of command until reaching the people who make the action happen. At each stage of this chain, the order goes from a high level decision to more technical and precise actions.
For example, if I issue an order to expedite all PCS reimbursements at Hammershell fortress, this is the high level state of that order.
By the time this order goes down the chain and reaches the force at Hammershell that’s in charge of PCS reimbursements, it will have gone from a high level order to a precise set of actions for individual teams to begin working on.

The danger comes in that as a primary officer, I am directly affecting the lives of 92,000+ people with each order I give. What starts as only a high-level order for me becomes arduous and dangerous work for others. While not as common within the Administrative Legion, the consequences and repercussions of these orders must be considered and vetted before giving them.
Take for example FrW Riveria, who leads over 92,000 Vanguards that are responsible for conducting our warfare operations. If FrW Riveria gives the wrong order, or an order that’s ignorant of important details, that can affect hundreds upon thousands of people, perhaps fatally so.
Taking it further, this is why information must always be vetted before being presented to someone like Arbiter Iza. If she were to make the wrong decision, or give the wrong order, we’re now dealing with a consequence that can affect over 800,000 people.

The chain of command exists to help ensure this doesn’t happen.
Information is vetted going up, and then orders are vetted going down.
If I give an order that may be harmful, or done out of ignorance, I trust the Chief Master Warden of the Administrative Legion and my direct reports to bring it to my attention for correction. If information from a legionnaire is not accurate, I trust their NCO or officer to verify it before passing it along to their commander.

Between officers and enlisted, we find that one has a grounded idea of how operations should be, and one has a high-level idea of how operations should be. Yes, an officer can submit a plan that will theoretically produce the best outcome if going by history and literature, but the NCOs are the ones who can fill in the parameters that an officer is otherwise unaware of. Both of these people need to cooperate, and so we keep them on a level playing field. Neither can move forward unless it's unanimous, and gridlock tends to be dealt with by other officers and NCOs rather quickly.
If Officer A and SNCO B are refusing to budge on a subject, it usually ends in a "pillow case full of soap bars" situation where suddenly they're working together the very next morning.

The level of effort and time it took to cultivate this environment is nothing short of monumental. To summarize, this consisted of years’ worth of cultural shifts and countless stress-filled days spent learning from our mistakes.
At the end of the day, a regulation is just a scrap of paper with words printed on it.
Enlisted, officers, legionnaires; they all need to wantto work together and to understand how to work together.

You can't out-regulate cultural problems, it's an issue that needs to be nailed down and dealt with from the very start of an organization.
At this stage, I am optimistic in saying that we have made great strides towards accomplishing that.

-FrW Hansuke Ito