Does having a non-officer in the "Chief of Operations" position make sense?

According to Kira, there's thirty or forty thousand Starfleet personnel on DS9.

Spoiler

I would very much like to just post that and move on, but to avoid any heated replies I'll mention that she was clearly lying at the time.

 

Sounds about right. And a group of 10 technicians per shift being supervised by a senior Petty Officer/Specialist who then reported to Chief O'Brien in his "management" capacity.

Probably because four shifts (6.5 hrs per shift) isn't much better than three shifts (8.67 hrs per shift), though at least the latter allows for whole minutes.

Yes.

Actually, I sometimes wonder if Tuvok isn't the Operations Manager/Head of Department for Operations and Kim (like Paris) is "senior staff" mostly by virtue of being "Alpha Shift" rather than truly being Senior Officers, which would account for Ayala outranking him "on paper" as he's probably in charge of Operations for either Beta or Gamma Shift.

 

If Operations on such a small ship is a training bra of ship's departments, then maybe Kim should have stepped aside for Ayala, especially with Kim's daunting optimism, he really thought that they would be home by Christmas.

 

Honestly, I suspect that that would have been what happened if Ayala had been Starfleet rather than Maquis.

 

DS9 can get more crew, Voyager can't.

A 4 shift rotation on DS9, means an extra 80 people living on the station, not that some people have to work two shifts a day to cope with the stopgap.

 

Well, not easily and not Starfleet crew, but IMO they could have inducted more DQ natives onto the crew.

The required increase necessarily depends on the number of crew before the increase, but as a principle I'd agree that that's the best option to account for the difference regardless.

Your second point is certainly true in the medium to long term, but might be the case in the short term (as in the first day or two of Jellico's tenure as CO, NCC 1701-D).

 

If there were really only 50 starfleet people under Sisko at the beginning, I'd have to wonder why they weren't sending a Lt. or Lt. Cdr. to be commanding officer.

 

Ordinarily, those might be better positions. However, Sisko probably would need rank in order to work in the transnational, joint environment. The CO would need rank over whomever Bajor sent to represent them on the station. He would need to have some authority in order to interact diplomatically with the provisional government(indeed, it would be better if he were captain). Any Starfleet officers working on Bajor probably fall under his authority as well. Moreover, Sisko had effective authority, at least through thr Bajoran officers, to Bajoran Militia on the station. I don't know if we ever hear the number of Bajorans, but that might make the commander rank appropriate.

 

O'Brien has surely proven over and over again that he is well qualified to be Chief Engineer of DS9. Maybe the real question here is why O'Brien wasn't given a commission or at least offered a path toward commission. I could also see him given some kind of battlefield promotion at some point during the war.

 

"Full dress uniform, fine table linens, a different fork for every course? Thanks but no thanks. That's why I stayed an enlisted man. They don't expect me to show up for these formal dinners." - Miles Edward O'Brien.

 

What if the length of the shift stayed the same, still three shifts per 24/26 hour period, but if there were four shifts, that would mean there's two days a week where you have no work.

For a few months, Voyager had 400 Klingons freeloading across the delta quadrant. After the first month surely Tuvok would have at least picked the good Klingons to double his security team to manage the usual drunk rapey Klingons?

Isn't it weird that none of those Klingons asked to stay on Voyager?

Sisko's three jobs in order of importance, before they found the Wormhole.

1. Die. His corpse means the Federation can send a fleet to Cardassia and send them to the stone age.
2. Induct Bajor into the Federation.
3. Renovate a busted up alien space station, that serves no purpose since the mines dried up.

 

I wonder if some of the "early installment weirdness" where O'Brien is referred to as "lieutenant" and wears two pips on his uniform might be explained by the fact that maybe he got a battlefield commission during the Cardassian border war, especially after Setlik III and for serving as the primary tactical officer, and for whatever reason chose to revert to an enlisted rank rather than do further training or some other necessary requirements to keep it.

It could also explain why Starfleet is content with a Staff NCO being a department head, since he has previous experience being a "Starfleet Officer," and O'Brien could be getting waivers to be eligible for these positions.

Another aspect of this... If there's no pay differential (since there's no money) or substantive differences when it comes to privileges of housing and other benefits between being an officer and enlisted, then if you're more interested in spending time being home with your wife and child, or having time to pursue other interests, maybe an enlisted role in Starfleet offers the ability to be there exploring the universe but without the hassles of management.

Although, it probably also means you're in the primary pool for people in the line of fire as one of the "redshirts" that get it first during away missions to the mysterious planet with weird shit.

 

The only time he was "referred to" as 'Lieutenant' was a slip of the tongue by Frakes that wasn't picked up (probably because Lieutenant Worf was in the scene even if he wasn't who was actually being referred to), and the 'evidence' that he was wearing lieutenant's pip was a wardrobe error is basically confirmed by him being identified as a Chief Petty Officer while wearing that uniform in both script and dialogue. There are several confirmed examples of wardrobe screwing up in this way -- Tuvok in early s1, arguably Chakotay for the entire series, Data as a LTJG in at least one episode -- so it's not without precedent.

Honestly, the basic problem with the above is that that rank and role would likely be a field commission which has been established elsewhere to be a temporary promotion/commission limited to the assignment in which it was conferred (cf Wesley still going to Academy after being commissioned as an ensign), so once O'Brien stepped away from the Tactical Officer role and/or the Rutledge that he would have automatically lost the rank.