The Navy’s Chief Warrant Officer 5 coat rank insignia consists of a single blue bar set on a silver background. These metal insignia are worn centered on the shoulder straps of the black windbreaker jacket and single- and double-breasted all-weather coats, oriented so that the long axis faces fore and aft and the edge of the insignia is 3/4-inch from the shoulder strap’s squared end. (Note: single-breasted all-weather coats will no longer be authorized for wear after 1 October 2020).
Warrant Officers have been a part of the Navy’s command and rank structure since Congress authorized the construction of 13 frigates and specified two types of Officers, Commissioned and Warrant, to man them. A glance at the list of the Warrant Officers Congress named—Surgeons, Chaplains, Gunners, Carpenters, etc.—reveals an array of specialists, and as the decades went by Warrant Officers became recognized as the experts in particular fields.
With the explosion of new technologies following World War II, the need to retain Warrant Officers and their expertise led to the establishment of higher grades; instead of simply Warrant Officers and Chief Warrant Officers, the Navy established a single Warrant Officer (W-1) grade and three grades of CWO (W-2 through W-4). It wasn’t until the passage of Public Law 102-190, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1992, that Congress established the grade of CWO, W-5, but the Navy waited more than a decade before it finally established the grade in October 2002. Of the first 222 candidates selected to compete for the new grade of CWO5, just 17 were chosen.