Question about B5 Military

[Andrew_Swallow]

Thinking about it Earth's forces were what was left after the Earth- Minbari War. This war was a space war with near total destruction of the spaceships but only minor land battles. Any admiral who joined the fighting would have been killed. The land based general and colonels would have survived. The end result being that most of the living Earthforce senior officers would from the land forces.

[Garibaldi's Hair]

[tongue in cheek mode]

Or maybe it's just that this a fictional story set 250 years into the future and the military operates a subtly different ranking structure to the one that we use now.

[/tongue in cheek mode]

[prometheous]

Not sure the land battles were minor but the minbari war is amass of contradictions for me (see previous thread)

Right, admirals - a brain fart lets not hear any more bout it, even geniuses like JMS have bad days.

I accept that Ryan is outranked by Sheridan but then, at the same time when your a bunch of renegades, who care about rank and besides, Sheridan was in command of a giant immobile space station with hundres of thousands of civilians whereas Ryan commanded a highly mobile very effective dreadnought/carrier...that might explain the slight deference towards him

[grumbler]

All of this does not prevent the fact that before the Minbari war (the time during which Sinclair was at the beginning of his career , and quickly rising through the ranks) , the senior (flag?) officers in the fleet would have been denominated as admirals instead of generals , and that after the massive beating suffered by the Earth military , certain reforms were made to increase the efficiency of Earthforce . One of such reforms could have been the unification of all senior ranks to reduce internal friction , being all flag officers from then on , ranked as generals .
Just my 0.02 Euro

Except that we actually see the leaders of the EA in In the Beginning and they are uniformly (ha! ) generals, with nary an admiral in the bunch.

We never, ever, actually hear of or see an admiral except in the early scripts and memos and web postings. The concept gets dropped as a bad idea. There is no reason to try to explain that rank in canon terms further, IM(ns)HO.

And yes, I know, this is not consistent with earlier postings of mine on the inviolability of JMS statements, but "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

[SLerman]

"Admiral" may also be more of a job (or position, or assignment, whichever term you prefer) than a rank. For example, Garibaldi is almost always referred to as Chief of Security, and only referred to by his rank of Chief Warrant Officer once or twice in the series. An admiral might be the person in charge of the fleet in a certain sector, so you'd have an Earth admiral, a Proxima admiral, maybe a Mars/Io admiral if they aren't combined with Earth itself, etc. Each admiral would have the official rank of General, but would still be called by their job title instead of their rank.

[grumbler]

....but would still be called by their job title instead of their rank.

Except that no one gets called "Admiral" even in circumstances where such titles might be assumed to apply, like Proxima, like Mars, like "the Earth Destroyer Advanced Division..."

I dunno why everyone wants to hang on to a rank when it is clear that JMS has abandoned it.

"'No Admirals:' it's not just a lifestyle choice."