For roughly the first forty years of its existence, the Warrant Officer Corps suffered from something of an identity crisis. The reason was simple: Warrant Officers were appointed to military specialties that may or may not have been correlated to the branch of service in which they had been trained as enlisted Soldiers—and while serving in a specialty in a given branch they wore their own, distinct “Eagle Rising” branch insignia. By the end of World War II, Warrant Officers were serving in more than three dozen occupational specialties—a number that grew by about half to reach roughly 60 specialties in 1951.
More CWO 4 Rank Insignia Pre-2004 Warrant Officer Branch ItemsStill, there was confusion in the Army as to precisely what Warrant Officers were. In 1957, the Army published the first-ever definition of a Warrant Officer: “The Warrant Officer is a highly skilled technician who is provided to fill those positions above the enlisted level which are too specialized in scope to permit effective development and continued utilization of broadly trained, branch qualified commissioned officers.”
Over the years, the image of Warrant Officer as technical expert has been solidified. At the same time, however, the Army has increasingly recognized the valuable leadership duties that Chief Warrant Officers can handle, and this was part of the reason that the Army pushed for a change in the way its Warrant Officers were appointed. With the passage of the Defense Authorization Act of 1986, the Army’s Chief Warrant Officers were commissioned, mirroring the system in other branches of the Armed Forces, giving them the same status as any commissioned officer. Warrant Officers (WO), however, are still appointed by the Secretary of the Army and are commissioned only upon promotion to CW2.