In the SEAL Teams, the ranks are elevated as people advance at a quicker rate…particularly now with the war on. There is no such thing as a Seaman in the Teams any longer, and very few 3rd class Petty Officers. The majority are Second and First Class Petty Officers with a much higher percentage of Chief Petty Officers than ever before. A like rise in SCPOs and MCPOs has been seen. Conversely, the Officer Ranks are maintained by law, so they have been fairly stable structure wise…
SO perhaps now I should actually answer the question?
The CPO, SCPO and MCPO have two major rolls, mentoring the Junior Officers and ensuring the enlisted men are carrying out their orders effectively. Over simplified, it is the Officer’s responsibility to make decisions and the CPOs job to make sure those decisions (orders) are carried out. (One of the problems in the Teams is that Officers want to be known as good operators and spend more time on those skills than on learning how to make good decisions) So the mother father thing really doesn’t work for me—the CPOs---are not at all like any mother I would want to meet! The third roll of the CPO is to provide counsel to the Commander. A good CPO will provide feedback to the Commander while or after carrying out order’s precisely. One of the most professional things I ever witnessed was during an operational readiness evaluation my platoon was going through on Vieques Island. We were suppose to jump in, but due to aircraft problems we wound up landing on PR and having to launch from Unit FOUR, which meant we had to drive the zodiacs around Veiques to get to our planned beach landing site (BLS). So we got there about 6 hours late, which meant we didn’t have the tide we wanted and we didn’t have as much darkness ahead of us as we wanted. The surf was pounding hard on the beach and the over the beach (OTB) went poorly, with two boats being flipped onto the beach. An administrative decision had been made to have people on the beach to take the boats away vice caching them, due to high potential for them getting stolen. Anyway, short story is the Platton had lost its focus, our gear was in disarray and I had all these support guys mixed in with my guys trying to secure the boats. My Platoon Chief was a Senior Chief-- the same Senior Chief who had put me through BUDS (See Waller’s book—SCPO was nicked “The Anti-Christ) He comes up to me and says, “Sir, we need to get these boat..” and I cut him off and said “We need to form up and get off this f*cking beach NOW” He looked at me and said, “Aye, aye!” We were off the beach in about 20 seconds. Why was I so impressed—he had something he wanted to say and that he felt was important, but when he saw that I already had made the decision he dropped it and we moved out. (At that point I felt the administrative concern was messing up my operational obligation and felt it necessary to separate the two by moving out—I could have been dinged for leaving the boats, but I think the guy responsible for picking up the boats was thinking the same thing and he did cover my six)