10 Extinct, Discontinued, and Unlikely Future Ranks in the U.S. Military
David Brown / Oct 13, 2020
Military military ranks
The U.S. military is old and ever evolving, and because of that, ranks change with the times. Some are either no longer used, or used so rarely as to be extinct. Here are a look at discontinued military ranks, what they were, and what replaced them.
The rank of Commodore
Commodore is the most impressive-sounding rank that isn’t actually a rank anymore, and feels like the sort of title held exclusively by rakish, devil-may-care men of the sea. You’ve got a commodore on your boat or at your card table, and he’s going to win a war or win your money. The rank’s history in the United States goes back to the Continental Navy, when it was assigned as a temporary title for captains in charge of more than one ship.
During the Civil War, it was made a formal rank and stayed that way until 1899. The rank appeared again during World War II—a preemptive strike by the Navy to prevent a surplus of admirals when the war invariably ended. Again, the rank was discontinued and faded from use, only to be resurrected one final time in the 1980s as the Navy’s one-star rank. Eventually, O-7 was restored as “rear admiral lower half,†and again, commodore was made an honorary title for senior captains in major command assignments.
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