Chief Warrant Officers (CWOs) can be considered specialty officers; in fact, you might even call them “ratings officers” since so many of them are officers of specialties taken directly from ratings, particularly in the past before the Navy realigned the CWO and Limited Duty officer designators to more closely mimic the warfare communities of Unrestricted Line (URL) and Restricted Line Officers. These officers are divided into specialties known as “communities,” but in fact they are really quite broad categories.
URL Officers, for example, can serve in one of five communities: Aviation, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Naval Special Warfare, Submarine Warfare, and Surface Warfare. A CWO (or LDO) in one of the communities has a special four-digit designator that defines his precise, narrow specialty within that community. (The Navy seems to have taken to using the word “enterprise” in place of “community” to describe these categories. In October, 2015 publication
Surface Limited Duty Officer/Chief Warrant Officer Fact Book: An Informal Guide, the phrase “Surface Warfare Enterprise” is used rather than “Surface Warfare Community,” despite the fact that the Naval Personnel Command’s Web site constantly calls them “communities.”)
In the 1951 edition of the U
.S. Navy Uniform Regulations, Line devices for 21 Chief Warrant Officers were described, all directly linked to a rating. For example, the design of the Line device for an Aerographer (Warrant Officer) or Chief Aerographer (Chief Warrant Officer) is identical to the design of the Aerographer’s Mate rating badge.
In the case of the Photographer’s Mate rating, however, Chief Warrant Officers got lucky. While the men working as Petty Officers and even those who made it to Chief, Senior Chief, or Master Chief Petty Officer were given a design that was supposed to be a “graphic solution of a photographic problem.” Today, it looks like an inverted version of the cover of
Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon combined with the wings from the Aerosmith logo. CWOs, on the other hand, were given a design based on a classic camera, instantly conveying what their specialty was all about.
Unfortunately for Sailors who appreciated the sartorial impact of the gold-embossed camera device, the CWO designator for Photographer, 747x, was deemed “no longer applicable” in NAVADMIN 138/01, and eventually it was announced that the CWO Photographer designator would be completely disestablished on January 1, 2009.
Related Items
CWO Photographer Hard Shoulder Boards
CWO Photographer Soft Epaulets
CWO Photographer Collar Device